> Base editing can precisely change a single nucleotide base pair...
Absolutely not.
It _cut_ the DNA at three nine precision (not that great given the number of base pairs we have); and things sitch together at much higher error rate.
It is a great technology, but it is not as great as many claim
ape4 22 hours ago [-]
I wonder what the regulations are for this sort of work
kens 21 hours ago [-]
The short answer is the "14-day" rule, which doesn't allow development of the embryo beyond 14 days. The article gives specifics under the heading "Ethical and legal compliance"
bpodgursky 21 hours ago [-]
In the US it's legal-sorta but the NIH can't fund it and the FDA is not allowed to approve treatments based on it. So someone could do it in a research setting but there's not a pathway to market in the US (in practice people will do the first ones in a friendly legal climate like Peru).
bonsai_spool 20 hours ago [-]
> In the US it's legal-sorta but the NIH can't fund it and the FDA is not allowed to approve treatments based on it
What references are you following? Haven't heard this before.
fc417fc802 17 hours ago [-]
I don't have citations to hand but I can attest that this has been the case for a long time now. There are jurisdictions that are more open to various semi-banned (either unfundable, a regulatory morass, or both) topics of research; China is famous for offering lucrative grants to attract foreign researchers of many of these.
Onavo 20 hours ago [-]
> the FDA is not allowed to approve treatments based on it
Unless you live in the Whitehouse.
21 hours ago [-]
MichaelZuo 20 hours ago [-]
Does anyone know why such a fundamental gene would have such different behaviours between mammals?
> In previous mouse studies, loss of NANOG disrupted both the epiblast and the yolk sac - a tissue that supports the developing embryo. In this human embryo study, loss of NANOG primarily affected the epiblast, the future body-forming line of cells.
Magicrafter13 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
CorrectHorseBat 20 hours ago [-]
Testing on early stage embryos is a thing yes. They have no brain, no heartbeat, feel no pain. Yes, they could potentially develop into a human being, but I wouldn't call it a live human yet. I understand your repulsion, but to other people it's no different than testing on sperm, eggs or other human tissues. And as the other guy said, these were discarded embryos from IVF, they would never become humans.
18 hours ago [-]
zmgsabst 19 hours ago [-]
They’re a human, but not a person.
Human is a fact of DNA — of which embryos are unmistakably humans. But we don’t ascribe rights based on humanity, but on personhood, which is why embryos have virtually none.
You come across as dishonest and put people off from your perspective when you won’t admit basic facts — eg, this is experimenting on humans.
I think perhaps your aversion to basic facts is that you don’t feel comfortable being honest:
You support experimenting on living humans.
gpm 17 hours ago [-]
No, that skin I scraped off on the sidewalk is not a human just because it has human DNA (and indeed, the cells in it are still alive, for a time).
Similarly neither are embryos. A human is a collection of trillions of cells arranged in a particular manner, not just any cell (or relatively small set of cells) that has human DNA. Human, as a word, has meaning far beyond that.
I'd agree that personhood is the more important qualification (though, of course, we experiment on people all the time, and rightly so). But a few cells with human DNA does not a human make.
ShinyLeftPad 14 hours ago [-]
There's people with disabilities or conditions whom you could say are not persons (in some cases anymore, in some cases ever) but there's no boolean test to say for sure. Do you think they should be allowed to be experimented on? What exactly makes a person? Is serial murderer a person? What about his victim in a coma or vegetable state?
zmgsabst 13 hours ago [-]
Embryos have their own DNA and constitute the full amount of that cell line — unlike your skin shedding.
They are absolutely a human.
To sibling comment’s point: personhood versus humanity is already the legal distinction - eg, children and invalids are fully human but not fully people, so we don’t grant them full legal rights and instead let others exercise control over them. For children in particular, we grant them more autonomous control of their rights as they mature.
Your path of denying humans their humanity has a dark history, including within medicine.
I don’t support that, even if they’re very tiny and fragile humans early in their development — eg, if we could raise them in artificial wombs, they may have a right to life as a human, despite what anyone else wishes.
Denying their humanity is denying their right to life as a fellow human.
gpm 12 hours ago [-]
> Embryos have their own DNA and constitute the full amount of that cell line — unlike your skin shedding.
This is absolutely not the definition of a human. It denies the humanity of genetic chimera (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_chimera) and organ transplant donors and recipients. It would define a cancer tumor (which will have it's own unique DNA lineage) as a human.
You're twisting yourself in circles trying to create some pseudoscientific definition of a human based on DNA to get to the outcome when you want, when the definition of a human is simply "matter arranged in a human form". DNA is a tiny portion of that matter, and isn't really critical at all. Theoretically you could simultaneously destroy all the DNA in a human and while they'd die in short order they'd remain human and initially pretty much entirely unchanged (hard to say for how long, maybe hours).
We'll never agree on what a human is [1], but this hamfisted attempt to define it in terms of DNA will never even create a consistent definition with the properties you want.
[1] You're plainly motivated by a spirtual or religious belief in a non-falsifiable manner that embryos share some important spiritual/religious characteristic with humans - likely something to do with a "soul". As a result you want to modify the definition of the common english word human to include them to make your beliefs seem inevitable. Meanwhile I don't share that view and will insist on continuing to use the traditional meaning of the word. I'll die on this hill because it's correct, but also because people who share your view frequently go beyond that and attempt to impose their own religious beliefs on other people in the form of laws that deny them their religious freedom, and freedom to control their own bodies. Laws incidentally that wouldn't be justified even if the embryos were full grown human being somehow squashed inside other people. And laws that have been tried, and result in not just loss of freedom but the death of actual living humans. This is the dark history in medicine that is actually worth considering in this conversation.
CorrectHorseBat 11 hours ago [-]
If you prefer the term person to avoid confusion, fine by me. But then also don't use the term "experimenting on humans", because the meaning of that is experimenting on persons against their will.
There is nothing extra magical about conception that makes the creation of a human (or a person if you prefer that), all of the DNA already existed before and nothing that defines a person is yet present.
hparadiz 19 hours ago [-]
Of course I support experimenting on living humans. That's how medical research is done for everything. Eventually no matter how sure you are someone has to be the first.
zmgsabst 13 hours ago [-]
Perfectly reasonable - eg, organ transplants were experimental in humans at one point in time, following success in animals but before widespread success in humans. People died from rejections.
My point is that if you feel that way, be loud and proud about it: having to deny the humanity of embryos suggests you’re avoiding cognitive dissonance or trying to manipulate others.
crypttales 19 hours ago [-]
[dead]
forgetfreeman 20 hours ago [-]
You're in for a real treat when you find out how we got organ transplantation.
zmgsabst 19 hours ago [-]
How so?
A quick search suggests that we tried it a bunch on animals, failed on humans, and of the first three human transplants, you had an adult (20s), toddler (2yr), and adult (50s). All of them were due to medical necessity, as it was a high risk procedure.
Is there something you imagine the poster would be shocked by in that history?
Onavo 20 hours ago [-]
OP probably thinks medicine and biotech magically manifest through divine inspiration.
skullone 19 hours ago [-]
Wait till you find out where food comes from! (I mean, meat, not embryos)
meindnoch 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jdiff 19 hours ago [-]
Even in real pregnancies, it's estimated that as many as three quarters of all fertilized eggs fail to implant in the uterus. If one was of the opinion that life begins at conception, one should certainly be aware of that silent holocaust that has and always will eclipse all others for all of human existence.
ryandrake 18 hours ago [-]
Don't worry, the Fundies are already working on punishing women for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. I'm sure implantation failure is on the list...
crypttales 19 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jtbayly 20 hours ago [-]
Agreed. The buying, selling, and experimenting on humans must stop.
smalltorch 18 hours ago [-]
I think it's more of the fact that they were conceived which will bother most.
A sperm on its own was never going to be a person. A egg on its own was never going to be a person.
A embryo... we cause the sparks to fly here and it's disturbing to think we can poke at the genes when we really have no idea what we are doing. Was a soul created here? Lot of people think yes. So lots of people naturally care about that taking place. Just to poke and prod 1 of billions of base pairs to see what happens does not seem like a good idea or..even a practical way to learn anything.
I would bargain there are a lot more pairs you could mess with that would have the same effect and would prevent the embryo from developing further.
I lean that we most likely are creating souls (however that works...) the moment of conception and we probably should be fooling around with doing this stuff. This article reminded me of this video I saw 10 years ago that shows there is a moment in time where sparks literally fly and it's pretty amazing to see.
So do all sexually reproducing species’ conception create souls? Or is it just a blessed few? What about asexually reproducing species?
smalltorch 17 hours ago [-]
>So do all sexually reproducing species’ conception create souls?
No, what is your opinion?
>Or is it just a blessed few?
Specifically humans.
>What about asexually reproducing species?
They have life that's for sure but I think it's very different than humans.
iknowstuff 14 hours ago [-]
you can't seriously think there is a line in the sand between homo sapiens and heidelbergensis or neanderthals which demarcates "soul" and "no soul". Especially since the latter interbred with humans.
smalltorch 13 hours ago [-]
Are there any species you know of that would be able to interbred with each other? Why would that have been possible?
Sounds like humans to me, perhaps ones who could live longer?
Look, I think we know how these discussions go, I'm not sure they get anywhere. Your pretty sure you know what's going on, I'm pretty sure I know what's going on...
Id hope there would be caution in manipulating the formation of a human when there isn't a great way to test these things without observing the results after they are born without any significant confidence what was manipulated effected the outcome or had a desirable result. There is no world where this real world testing is not reckless.
gherkinnn 10 hours ago [-]
> Are there any species you know of that would be able to interbred with each other?
what if heidelbergensis and other ancestors didn't exist but were written in a books by people you never met and any amount of questioning was frowned upon? do you believe in the relics never seen and take the word upon a class of believers that safeguard the history? sounds like a religion to me.
iknowstuff 12 hours ago [-]
visit a museum
melagonster 11 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, we found that there are not so many differences. Scientists have simply decided not to cross that line.
whatever1 17 hours ago [-]
Embryos have to reset after conception to delete all of the faulty dna inherited from the parents. Babies don’t get born with wrinkles for example. They start clean slate without (most) epigenetic damage that both sperm and egg had.
So the embryo a 10 days after conception is not the same thing as at conception. Did God kill it?
fc417fc802 17 hours ago [-]
Do you have more information or citations related to epigenetic damage in the sperm and egg?
A lot of age related dysfunction is systemic as opposed to genetic. Even for the stuff that's (epi)genetic in nature it's important to bear in mind that each cell has its own independent copy.
whatever1 17 hours ago [-]
There is a nice podcast from the NYtimes daily podcast named: “can we reverse aging?” that covers a lot of this.
(Obviously when we discovered the reset mechanism people started asking why we cannot press the reset button at 70yo)
fc417fc802 17 hours ago [-]
I'm not interested in an arbitrarily open ended reading assignment but rather am asking if you can provide even a vague pointer to evidence of this because it doesn't match my understanding of how these things work.
I know for a fact that epigenetic material isn't magically reset to some prior state in a blanket manner because changes to the epigenome based on the environmental conditions in which the parents are born and raised are heritable by their children. For example widespread famine has been shown to leave changes in the epigenome that remain for at least several generations.
whatever1 17 hours ago [-]
I am not interested in teaching you how to google. I gave you pointers and keywords. Now you have to go read. Good luck.
fc417fc802 17 hours ago [-]
The trouble with that attitude is that it's much cheaper to make false claims that it is to do the research necessary to debunk them. As a result it isn't reasonable in a context such as HN to expect others to do the work of articulating your own position for you. I provided a concrete example (famine) where the existing literature appears to contradict in broad strokes your original claim.
erikerikson 14 hours ago [-]
That's true but demanding full satisfaction can be it's own bad expectation. The respondent spent their time giving you pointers which cost them. Suggesting that because they spent some of their time they are stuck giving you more of their time leads to suppressed sharing. One way to take them is that they were trying to combat you and if their goal was to win in public then they might be beholden. Otherwise they were just trying to share a lead and that was as much as they wanted to engage with what can be an exhausting and motivated line of argument. Especially so in the face of what may have seemed like a demanding response.
pwdisswordfishq 13 hours ago [-]
The Google which no longer searches for what you ask and instead rephrases your query into meaninglessness and returns irrelevant results? That Google?
FuckButtons 16 hours ago [-]
I will never understand this mindset. What exactly do you think primary scientific research is if not collecting data on questions to which you do not know the answer? How are you supposed to get data to said questions without observing the actual events? I suppose you’re sanguine with the idea of letting future generations of children be born with potentially preventable genetic disorders based on your squeamishness?
smalltorch 16 hours ago [-]
Lots of breakthroughs in medicine happen without editing genes? And why do you think Im opposed to the scientific method based on this view point that maybe experimenting on human embryos is not a great way to learn stuff?
For example, what happens when we get to the point where we need to use the scientific method to test if the gene editing was successful and didn't cause negative outcomes for the child's entire existence perhaps? Will they need to live their whole life for us to confirm the cure worked?
ablob 9 hours ago [-]
There is no progress without possible failure in medicine.
Each treatment starts with assumptions and you can only go so far until you start testing on actual people.
Until we understand the mechanisms completely there is no way around that.
Genes are an important part of lifeforms. Of course, you may object to tinkering with them and wait until nature has done the tinkering for you. That will inevitably slow down progress by obtaining information so much slower that countless lives will be miserable due to missing cures and treatments.
This is a zone where there is no clear moral answer.
The only thing I would say with confidence is that gene editing is very likely the key to a plethora of treatments and preventative measures.
> Will they need to live their whole life for us to confirm the cure worked?
People already do that right now without gene editing. A friend of mine is 10 years over the life expectancy of their condition just because their parents decided to have them live their whole life "to confirm the treatment worked".
9 out of 10 people with that condition died by the age of 12 if not within the first year of birth.
I'd wager being part of a medical/scientific program to monitor your condition is the least of your concerns at that point.
halfxing 13 hours ago [-]
> Lots of breakthroughs in medicine happen without editing genes?
Why would the presence of breakthroughs in medicine on other fronts mean that we shouldn't try gene editing?
> what happens when we get to the point where we need to use the scientific method to test if the gene editing was successful and didn't cause negative outcomes for the child's entire existence perhaps?
That is what clinical trials do today for medicine. Are you opposed to those as well? Many have died and many have been saved in the pursuit of better care.
XorNot 9 hours ago [-]
> For example, what happens when we get to the point where we need to use the scientific method to test if the gene editing was successful and didn't cause negative outcomes for the child's entire existence perhaps?
Well that would be an entirely different line of research, which is not this research here, and a large expansion of the question which we could debate and discuss thoroughly on its own merits at such a time as the issue arises.
Aka this is just the slippery slope fallacy of argument.
Refreeze5224 12 hours ago [-]
> I lean that we most likely are creating souls (however that works...)
You might want to flesh this part out a bit more before criticizing scientists tweaking some cell clumps.
Rendered at 17:56:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Absolutely not. It _cut_ the DNA at three nine precision (not that great given the number of base pairs we have); and things sitch together at much higher error rate.
It is a great technology, but it is not as great as many claim
What references are you following? Haven't heard this before.
Unless you live in the Whitehouse.
> In previous mouse studies, loss of NANOG disrupted both the epiblast and the yolk sac - a tissue that supports the developing embryo. In this human embryo study, loss of NANOG primarily affected the epiblast, the future body-forming line of cells.
Human is a fact of DNA — of which embryos are unmistakably humans. But we don’t ascribe rights based on humanity, but on personhood, which is why embryos have virtually none.
You come across as dishonest and put people off from your perspective when you won’t admit basic facts — eg, this is experimenting on humans.
I think perhaps your aversion to basic facts is that you don’t feel comfortable being honest:
You support experimenting on living humans.
Similarly neither are embryos. A human is a collection of trillions of cells arranged in a particular manner, not just any cell (or relatively small set of cells) that has human DNA. Human, as a word, has meaning far beyond that.
I'd agree that personhood is the more important qualification (though, of course, we experiment on people all the time, and rightly so). But a few cells with human DNA does not a human make.
They are absolutely a human.
To sibling comment’s point: personhood versus humanity is already the legal distinction - eg, children and invalids are fully human but not fully people, so we don’t grant them full legal rights and instead let others exercise control over them. For children in particular, we grant them more autonomous control of their rights as they mature.
Your path of denying humans their humanity has a dark history, including within medicine.
I don’t support that, even if they’re very tiny and fragile humans early in their development — eg, if we could raise them in artificial wombs, they may have a right to life as a human, despite what anyone else wishes.
Denying their humanity is denying their right to life as a fellow human.
This is absolutely not the definition of a human. It denies the humanity of genetic chimera (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_chimera) and organ transplant donors and recipients. It would define a cancer tumor (which will have it's own unique DNA lineage) as a human.
You're twisting yourself in circles trying to create some pseudoscientific definition of a human based on DNA to get to the outcome when you want, when the definition of a human is simply "matter arranged in a human form". DNA is a tiny portion of that matter, and isn't really critical at all. Theoretically you could simultaneously destroy all the DNA in a human and while they'd die in short order they'd remain human and initially pretty much entirely unchanged (hard to say for how long, maybe hours).
We'll never agree on what a human is [1], but this hamfisted attempt to define it in terms of DNA will never even create a consistent definition with the properties you want.
[1] You're plainly motivated by a spirtual or religious belief in a non-falsifiable manner that embryos share some important spiritual/religious characteristic with humans - likely something to do with a "soul". As a result you want to modify the definition of the common english word human to include them to make your beliefs seem inevitable. Meanwhile I don't share that view and will insist on continuing to use the traditional meaning of the word. I'll die on this hill because it's correct, but also because people who share your view frequently go beyond that and attempt to impose their own religious beliefs on other people in the form of laws that deny them their religious freedom, and freedom to control their own bodies. Laws incidentally that wouldn't be justified even if the embryos were full grown human being somehow squashed inside other people. And laws that have been tried, and result in not just loss of freedom but the death of actual living humans. This is the dark history in medicine that is actually worth considering in this conversation.
There is nothing extra magical about conception that makes the creation of a human (or a person if you prefer that), all of the DNA already existed before and nothing that defines a person is yet present.
My point is that if you feel that way, be loud and proud about it: having to deny the humanity of embryos suggests you’re avoiding cognitive dissonance or trying to manipulate others.
A quick search suggests that we tried it a bunch on animals, failed on humans, and of the first three human transplants, you had an adult (20s), toddler (2yr), and adult (50s). All of them were due to medical necessity, as it was a high risk procedure.
Is there something you imagine the poster would be shocked by in that history?
A sperm on its own was never going to be a person. A egg on its own was never going to be a person.
A embryo... we cause the sparks to fly here and it's disturbing to think we can poke at the genes when we really have no idea what we are doing. Was a soul created here? Lot of people think yes. So lots of people naturally care about that taking place. Just to poke and prod 1 of billions of base pairs to see what happens does not seem like a good idea or..even a practical way to learn anything.
I would bargain there are a lot more pairs you could mess with that would have the same effect and would prevent the embryo from developing further.
I lean that we most likely are creating souls (however that works...) the moment of conception and we probably should be fooling around with doing this stuff. This article reminded me of this video I saw 10 years ago that shows there is a moment in time where sparks literally fly and it's pretty amazing to see.
https://vimeo.com/163864531
No, what is your opinion?
>Or is it just a blessed few?
Specifically humans.
>What about asexually reproducing species?
They have life that's for sure but I think it's very different than humans.
Sounds like humans to me, perhaps ones who could live longer?
Look, I think we know how these discussions go, I'm not sure they get anywhere. Your pretty sure you know what's going on, I'm pretty sure I know what's going on...
Id hope there would be caution in manipulating the formation of a human when there isn't a great way to test these things without observing the results after they are born without any significant confidence what was manipulated effected the outcome or had a desirable result. There is no world where this real world testing is not reckless.
Yes, it is called hybridisation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_(biology)
So the embryo a 10 days after conception is not the same thing as at conception. Did God kill it?
A lot of age related dysfunction is systemic as opposed to genetic. Even for the stuff that's (epi)genetic in nature it's important to bear in mind that each cell has its own independent copy.
(Obviously when we discovered the reset mechanism people started asking why we cannot press the reset button at 70yo)
I know for a fact that epigenetic material isn't magically reset to some prior state in a blanket manner because changes to the epigenome based on the environmental conditions in which the parents are born and raised are heritable by their children. For example widespread famine has been shown to leave changes in the epigenome that remain for at least several generations.
For example, what happens when we get to the point where we need to use the scientific method to test if the gene editing was successful and didn't cause negative outcomes for the child's entire existence perhaps? Will they need to live their whole life for us to confirm the cure worked?
Genes are an important part of lifeforms. Of course, you may object to tinkering with them and wait until nature has done the tinkering for you. That will inevitably slow down progress by obtaining information so much slower that countless lives will be miserable due to missing cures and treatments. This is a zone where there is no clear moral answer. The only thing I would say with confidence is that gene editing is very likely the key to a plethora of treatments and preventative measures.
> Will they need to live their whole life for us to confirm the cure worked? People already do that right now without gene editing. A friend of mine is 10 years over the life expectancy of their condition just because their parents decided to have them live their whole life "to confirm the treatment worked". 9 out of 10 people with that condition died by the age of 12 if not within the first year of birth. I'd wager being part of a medical/scientific program to monitor your condition is the least of your concerns at that point.
Why would the presence of breakthroughs in medicine on other fronts mean that we shouldn't try gene editing?
> what happens when we get to the point where we need to use the scientific method to test if the gene editing was successful and didn't cause negative outcomes for the child's entire existence perhaps?
That is what clinical trials do today for medicine. Are you opposed to those as well? Many have died and many have been saved in the pursuit of better care.
Well that would be an entirely different line of research, which is not this research here, and a large expansion of the question which we could debate and discuss thoroughly on its own merits at such a time as the issue arises.
Aka this is just the slippery slope fallacy of argument.
You might want to flesh this part out a bit more before criticizing scientists tweaking some cell clumps.