3 ms·
The difficulty in realizing the promise of genetic engineering to treat disease, or even do the more esoteric things like enhance abilities or create new specie
by marktangotango 11y ago
The difficulty in realizing the promise of genetic engineering to treat disease, or even do the more esoteric things like enhance abilities or create new species has not been altering genomes. The difficulty has been and continues to be the tremendous difficulty in understanding how proteins fold, given a DNA sequence, and on top of that understanding the biochemical reaction pathways and feedback loops. In the 90's early work showed that sime changes could profound and often detrimental effects.
- ejstronge 11y agoPerhaps this is what you mean but I'd add an additional difficulty - we can't predict the organismal impact of many of the genetic manipulations we make. As a result of this, we must perform time-intensive experiments using model organisms like bacteria, flies, mice, etc.
- marktangotango 11y agoYes that's what I was attempting to illustrate, thank you!