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If a CRISPR change doesn't kill you, it seems to me unlikely to kill your offspring. This may be naive, I don't know to what extent a gene variant would be fine
by cobaltblue 11y ago
If a CRISPR change doesn't kill you, it seems to me unlikely to kill your offspring. This may be naive, I don't know to what extent a gene variant would be fine in an adult but not fine in a child. Most self gene edits would not be random, but would be more along the lines of "in studies x% has variant A;A and y% has variant A;G or G;G. A;A is "better" in some sense I care about, and I have A;G, so I'm going to edit that G to an A." Maybe there are dependent genes that need editing as well that we don't know about because otherwise you're no longer a viable lifeform, but it seems that any cascading effects would come up before you had a child. It's like editing a character in the string constant pool of a program. Maybe it'll be fine, or maybe you need to edit some other part whose logic depended on the original character to match the new character and avoid a crash or misbehavior.
Getting my genes sequenced for $100 revealed I'm a carrier of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay%E2%80%93Sachs_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay%E2%80%93Sachs_disease It would be highly irresponsible of me to breed with another carrier due to the 25% chance of an offspring with the disease, which all but guarantees early death. If one of us parents has the gene edited away, or it is edited away in the womb, this is a good thing.
- adenadel 11y agoI want to clear up a misconception here. Odds are that for $100 you didn't get any sequencing done. More likely they used a genotyping chip to look for (potentially a lot) of specific variants. This is what 23andMe does. The price of sequencing the exome (all of the genes in the genome) is approaching $100 and could be lower than that for really high volume producers, but for now the most common assay at that price point is a chip.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> If a CRISPR change doesn't kill you, it seems to me unlikely to kill your offspring. I don't think that's a justifiable conclusion. > This may be naive, I don't know to what extent a gene variant would be fine in an adult but not fine in a child. There are lots of genes that have wildly varying effects at different developmental stages (and even under different environmental conditions at similar developmental stages.) There are also genes that have different effects in homozygous, heterozygous, and hemizygous arrangements, on which a parent and child might differ.