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Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

(www.nytimes.com)
1163 points jbredeche | 9 comments | 15 May 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.398s | source | bottom
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palisade ◴[16 May 25 05:32 UTC] No.44002113[source]▶
Does this mean when they grow up, their own offspring will also have this defect and require a correction? And, if so, does this mean it is now introducing this defective gene into our gene pool?

I know this is an issue with caesarean section. It is becoming more prevalent because those who require it are surviving, making it more likely to happen in their offspring.

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1. mondaygreens ◴[16 May 25 05:48 UTC] No.44002183[source]▶
How can they pass it on when they don't have the defect any more?
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2. raldi ◴[16 May 25 05:59 UTC] No.44002237[source]▶
The DNA was only edited in the liver. But by the time this baby grows up and starts a family, we'll probably be able to fix that, too.
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3. nahsra ◴[16 May 25 06:01 UTC] No.44002241[source]▶
Gene editing is still pretty crude in terms of delivery.

Just because you can hit some germ-line cells in the liver, for example, doesn’t imply you’ll have good penetration into the reproductive organs.

We can’t zap people and change all their DNA at once, unless we can intervene at the point it’s just a few cells.

4. poilcn ◴[16 May 25 06:03 UTC] No.44002247[source]▶
It only affects some cells, not the whole body.
5. pishpash ◴[16 May 25 07:15 UTC] No.44002584[source]▶
If by "they" you mean their gametes, those were not edited. Only a component of their corporal shell was modified.
6. aucisson_masque ◴[16 May 25 08:37 UTC] No.44003079[source]▶
That's a bold claim. The baby is 9 month old, there are many things that can still go wrong with this experimental treatment.

Hopefully not, but even then no one can say what progress will make science in the next 25 years.

Back in the 50's people thought we would be driving in flying car in 2000.

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7. raldi ◴[16 May 25 13:52 UTC] No.44005544{3}[source]▶
Four years ago highly-upvoted /r/SanFrancisco comments said self-driving taxis were decades away: https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/nbjsij/real_r...
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8. aucisson_masque ◴[16 May 25 22:23 UTC] No.44010293{4}[source]▶
12 upvotes...

You can't compare that to gene-editing treatments, that's two completely different level.

Self driving car were always almost feasible, 20 years ago top gear made cars you could drive with controller like kids do with toy cars. We already had camera and computer, it was just a matter of raw CPU performance and software development..

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9. bdangubic ◴[16 May 25 22:27 UTC] No.44010320{5}[source]▶
we have all the CPU performance we need and all software development we need and self-driving cars are driving around in roughly 0.00785% of world’s cities :)