←back to thread

Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

(www.nytimes.com)
1165 points jbredeche | 2 comments | 15 May 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.499s | source
Show context
tuna-piano ◴[16 May 25 00:31 UTC] No.44000717[source]▶
If someone in the year 2050 was to pick out the most important news article from 2025, I won't be surprised if they choose this one.

For those who don't understand this stuff - we are now capable of editing some of a body's DNA in ways that predictably change their attributes. The baby's liver now has different (and better) DNA than the rest of its body.

We still are struggling in most cases with how to deliver the DNA update instructions into the body. But given the pace of change in this space, I expect massive improvements with this update process over time.

Combined with AI to better understand the genome, this is going to be a crazy century.

Further reading on related topics:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JEhW3HDMKzekDShva/significan...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-mak...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yT22RcWrxZcXyGjsA/how-to-hav...

replies(7): >>44000781 #>>44000909 #>>44001300 #>>44001456 #>>44001603 #>>44002146 #>>44010171 #
fendy3002 ◴[16 May 25 02:26 UTC] No.44001300[source]▶
the usual next questions will be:

- how further can we push this to make the best, most optimized human?

- what are moral implication of this?

- what are the side effects / downsides?

replies(4): >>44002017 #>>44002157 #>>44003761 #>>44005387 #
1. flakeoil ◴[16 May 25 10:40 UTC] No.44003761[source]▶
I also wonder what happens if this kid one day has kids. In this case it was a very rare genetic disease, but if the same was applied to a less rare genetic disease (where it is also more beneficial to have a treatment as more people have use of it) wouldn't the end result be that more and more kids will be born with these diseases?
replies(1): >>44004088 #
2. eimrine ◴[16 May 25 11:31 UTC] No.44004088[source]▶
I hope we can not just heal a disease for one phenotype, but cure it for the whole breed.