This year's Nobel awards seem particularly outstanding. A bright spot in an otherwise dismal year.
It's in their DNA: Nobel Prize in chemistry goes to pioneers of the CRISPR gene-editing tool
Two biochemistry professors who led the groundbreaking development of CRISPR, the controversial "genetic scissors" DNA-editing tool, have been awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry. “There is enormous power in this genetic tool, which affects us all. It has not only revolutionised basic science, but also resulted in innovative …
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Thursday 8th October 2020 16:57 GMT DJ
And electricity will be so cheap it won't be metered!
“What started as a curiosity-driven, fundamental discovery project has now become the breakthrough
strategy used by countless researchers working to help improve the human condition,” Doudna said.
Frightened yet? We should be.
I can't express it any better than Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) did in Jurassic Park:
"The lack of humility before nature being displayed here staggers me..."
and "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
Movies aren't real life, of course, but art does imitate life.
Sadly, it's often when humans tragically tinker with forces they only think they understand, justifying their experimentations with tantalizing
visions of perfect implementations of idealistic concepts.
Thalidomide, anyone? Spoken to anyone from Pripyat lately have you?
Would it be wonderful to eliminate disease? Who could argue against that?
Reverse the aging process? Where do I sign?
Make every man tall, dark, and handsome? Well...
Remove the troublesome habit of of thinking in liberal/conservative/libertarian/etc. ways? Hmm...
How long do you think it will be before CRISPR becomes a weapon?
Dark?
Yes.
As is most of human history when viewed objectively.
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Thursday 8th October 2020 17:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: And electricity will be so cheap it won't be metered!
> Thalidomide, anyone? Spoken to anyone from Pripyat lately have you?
> Would it be wonderful to eliminate disease? Who could argue against that?
> Reverse the aging process? Where do I sign?
> Make every man tall, dark, and handsome? Well...
> Remove the troublesome habit of of thinking in liberal/conservative/libertarian/etc. ways? Hmm...
Apple pies.
Custard.
Random statements, sir?
Do you sir?
Random statements sir. Do you?
Ooh Sir. Do you?
Random statements.
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Thursday 8th October 2020 18:58 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
A plug for a much neglected book The Evolution Man: Or How I Ate My Father
Hard to find, but worth it
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Thursday 8th October 2020 18:49 GMT Muscleguy
Re: And electricity will be so cheap it won't be metered!
Firstly being able to precisely change genes is much better than the methods we used to use routinely especially in plants: radiation and/or chemical mutagens in standard breeding, hoping for hopeful monsters. Most of our modern crop varieties were born that way.
CRISPR doesn’t allow the insertion of new genes, just the modification of existing ones. GM involves inserting genes from other organisms. Which BTW is perfectly natural. You and I both contain a gene we share only with chickens and Anopheles gambiae, the malaria mosquito. I stumbled across it by accident in the lab one day.
I never bothered to publish it since such things are a commonplace in biology. We call it lateral gene transfer. Also it was a protease so almost certainly from a virus.
Better check yourself into a biological containment facility you are a Genetically Modified Organism.
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Thursday 8th October 2020 21:03 GMT doublelayer
Re: And electricity will be so cheap it won't be metered!
"'CRISPR doesn’t allow the insertion of new genes, just the modification of existing ones.' is mildly reassuring."
Too bad it's wrong. By removing an old gene and placing a section of DNA nearby, the new section can come to replace the old section. It relies on the cells' standard repair mechanisms working as expected, so it's a fiddly process to run right, but you can absolutely replace large chunks of DNA with custom chunks. You can call this a modification, which it technically is, but it can be a modification along the lines of "delete these three pages and rewrite them from scratch". Even when a length limit is hit, two treatments could perform rewrites right next to one another to double that limit (and so on). The current technology means doing this to humans would be dangerous, because there's always the chance that the new chunk gets read wrong or doesn't insert properly, but experimentation on flies will improve this dramatically. It's also unlikely that people would often want to completely rewrite a section rather than replace it with something known. I don't think this is a cause for fear, but we can only decide on the ethics if we're honest about the scale of changes that could be performed with the tool.
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Friday 9th October 2020 02:24 GMT Dog Eatdog
"Using CRISPR on humans, meanwhile, is a topic that divides the scientific community. Although it could prevent genetic diseases by cutting away unwanted genetic mutations, the ethics of using embryos for experiments is questionable."
It really doesn't divide the scientific community. The vast majority of scientists think that CRISPR is not yet ready to use on people. And that has a lot more to do with it being a heritable modification (and therefore a permanent change to the genetic pool) than any queasiness over experimenting with embyros (which is something that many scientists do every day with embryonic stem calls).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
