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Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

(www.nytimes.com)
1167 points jbredeche | 1 comments | 15 May 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.229s | source
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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...

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bglazer ◴[16 May 25 00:45 UTC] No.44000781[source]▶
The “How to make superbabies” article demonstrates a couple of fundamental misunderstandings about genetics that make me think the authors don’t know what they’re talking about at a basic level. Zero mention of linkage disequilibrium. Zero mention of epistasis. Unquestioned assumptions of linear genotype-phenotype relationships for IQ. Seriously, the projections in their graphs into “danger zone” made me laugh out loud. This is elementary stuff that theyre missing but the entire essay is so shot through with hubris that I don’t think they’re capable of recognizing that.
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1. tuna-piano ◴[16 May 25 11:17 UTC] No.44003980[source]▶
Thanks for the healthy skepticism.

I still think there's a lot to learn from those articles for most folks uninvolved in this area, even if some of their immediate optimism has additional complications.

I think what I mostly took away is a combination of technologies is likely to dramatically change how we have babies in the future.

1. We'll make sperm/egg from skin cells. This has already been done in mice[1], so it is not science fiction to do it in people.

2. When we're able to do this inexpensively, we could create virtually unlimited embryos. We can then select the embryos that have the most optimal traits. Initially, this may be simple things like not choosing embryos with certain genes that give higher risk of certain diseases.

This may involve selecting traits like intelligence and height (there are already companies that offer this embryo selection capability [2]).

3. Instead of creating a lot of embryos and selecting the best ones, we could instead create just one embryo and edit the DNA of that embryo, which has already been done in humans [3]. Alternatively, we could edit the DNA of the sperm/egg prior to creating the embryo.

The fact that none of this is science fiction is just wild. All of these steps have already been done in animals or people. Buckle up, the future is going to be wild.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/27/1177191...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/18/us-startup-c...

[3] https://www.science.org/content/article/chinese-scientist-wh...