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Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

(www.nytimes.com)
1162 points jbredeche | 2 comments | 15 May 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.432s | 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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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?

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1. xvilka ◴[16 May 25 13:38 UTC] No.44005387[source]▶
There's no "most optimized human". We are already that, perfected in millions of years. What could really happen is the split between multiple sub-species. For example, it makes perfect sense to do the optimization for orbital station dwellers or Mars colonists or underwater dwellers.
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2. mr_toad ◴[16 May 25 14:21 UTC] No.44005863[source]▶
We’re not perfect, we’re just good enough to have survived.

There are lots of hereditary illnesses and conditions that could probably be tweaked with DNA editing, if we can identify the responsible genes. If someone can cure male pattern baldness they’ll be rich.