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Anonymous
How to (Really) Engineer a Human Baby 2015-11-28 15:52:48 Post No. 7686436
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How to (Really) Engineer a Human Baby 2015-11-28 15:52:48 Post No. 7686436
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>The worry is that changing the DNA of the next generation is unsafe and a slippery slope toward eugenics. Yet many of the scientists attending the Washington meeting won’t be there to ban the technology, but to trade tips about how, exactly, they might be able to do it right.
>One scientist who thinks he knows is Jinsong Li, a biologist at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences. Earlier this year, Li managed to use CRISPR to edit a gene that causes eye cataracts in mice, creating healthy newborn animals with “100 percent” success.
>The way Li’s team did it was to avoid embryos, and instead edit “spermatogonial” stem cells growing in his lab. These are the factory cells that make sperm. By gene editing mouse sperm cells first, and then using corrected sperm to make embryos, Li’s mice came out perfect every time.
Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/543541/how-to-really-engineer-a-human-baby/
So editing embryos is out, editing sperm cells is in. This is the future of human gene editing.
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>>7686436
>So editing embryos is out, editing sperm cells is in. This is the future of human gene editing.
What about defects that are in the egg cells?
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>>7686439
Use a "healthy" mother I guess I don't know desu.
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>>7686439
There is a 50/50 chance that a defective gene from an egg will be passed on, I think. So create embryos until one doesn't have that gene. That doesn't require gene editing, only gene screening.
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>>7686446
But a woman only has a limited number of eggs. And there may be several undesirable alleles. You may never screen an egg of hers that isn't "defective" in some way.
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>>7686451
Maybe sperm could be edited to correct the faults in the egg. Just keep making embryos until one doesn't have any genetic defects. After a bit of googling it looks like maternal genetic defects are not 50/50... there are many factors and it is very complicated.
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>>7686455
>Maybe sperm could be edited to correct the faults in the egg.
Pls be trolling. It would be easier to just modify the embryo.
> After a bit of googling it looks like maternal genetic defects are not 50/50
What did you even google for that?
excluding mitochondrial gene defects which are effectively inherited from the mother 100% of the time.
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>>7686460
>Pls be trolling. It would be easier to just modify the embryo.
It is way to difficult to edit the embryo. editing sperm stem cells is a lot easier, as the article says. it works really well.
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>>7686463
Its easier to edit sperm cells
But you said
> sperm could ... correct the faults in the egg.
That's the part which is retarded
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This should be heavily discouraged for use on humans unless an illness that will severly affect their quality of life is found. It's appropriating a persons natural identity. A person's life is not a plaything.
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>>7686471
whats the difference between sperm producing cells and embryos then?
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>>7686493
Relatively, not very much from a CRISPR/cas9 point of view.
The only major difference I can think of right now is that isolating and editing a sperm producing cell is "easier" because gene editing works about 20% of the time (according to that article).
If you mess up a sperm producing cell, you can dispose of it, no problem
Disposing of an embryo every time you mess up editing will deplete a woman of her egg cells because they are required to form an embryo. Also, because embryos are multicellular it's difficult to target every cell; unlike sperm producing cells where you can culture a single edited cell, you can't do the same for embryos.
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>>7686436
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The end goal for this group is to edit or fix adult genes. Its difficult to edit adult genes because they're mature cells/genes. Also China will do the human trails. Its a country that doesn't' give a fuck about human rights.
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>>7686492
Right, human life needs to be taken seriou-
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