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15 Worrying Things About the CRISPR Babies Scandal
- aurizon 8y agoWe have to consider a few things. CRISPR is a bacterial immune sysyem against bacterial viruses (phages) and it has evolved to toss a monkey wrench into the phage duplication machinery. It must act fast - too slow and machinery wins the race. This means it must act on rumor - as it were. This may lead to erros when attached to another molecule CAS, which may well want precision. A phage has it's genome well spread out and accessible, but human cells are tightly involved with chromatic - which means finding the needle in the haystack is very slow and hard work - and error prone. So am embryo starts as one cells, divides, 2, 4, 8, 16 in the initial stages - and that is when the genome is accessible to be sieved, during mitosis. So this researcher must wait until the embryoe is in mitosis before adding the gene correcting vector. He also needs to add an excess to make sure it finds the correct place to cut out a gene and spilce in a gene (or gene fraction). He then has to test this cell for correct placement (proof reading), he also has to make sure it has only a single edit, that there are no others scattered here and there. So he must allow this cell to divide a few times. and also keep one or more aside to use for a child if that line meets the quality required. I do not know what his error rate was? Di he make hundreds to find a few? The fact we have twins leads me to feel that there was a process of testing and making up of many multiples, and even possibly hundreds of discarded batches - full of errors etc. I ex[ect this news to filter out. He may not tell us, he may not live to tell - there are rumors...