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Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

(www.nytimes.com)
1163 points jbredeche | 1 comments | 15 May 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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MrZander ◴[15 May 25 19:30 UTC] No.43998447[source]▶
> To accomplish that feat, the treatment is wrapped in fatty lipid molecules to protect it from degradation in the blood on its way to the liver, where the edit will be made. Inside the lipids are instructions that command the cells to produce an enzyme that edits the gene. They also carry a molecular GPS — CRISPR — which was altered to crawl along a person’s DNA until it finds the exact DNA letter that needs to be changed.

That is one of the most incredible things I have ever read.

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poyu ◴[15 May 25 19:46 UTC] No.43998602[source]▶
Made it sound like it's a computer, is it Turing complete?
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1. dekhn ◴[15 May 25 20:43 UTC] No.43999148[source]▶
This system isn't really turing complete, but existing biology provides everything required to make a computer which is Turing complete (assuming non-infinite tape size).

True programmatic biology is still very underdeveloped. I have seen logic gates, memory, and state machines all implemented, but I don't think anybody has built somethign with a straightforward instruction set, program counter, addressable RAM, and registers that was useful enough to justify advanced research.