10 ms·

From my laymans POV, DNA is just a shit ton of variables in a very complex code that interact with each other. No single point just does a single thing. They al

• jayalpha 8y ago
  "No single point just does a single thing." Exactly this! And this is why GM foods are more dangerous than you might expect. Even if gene x does only x in organism A, there is no guarantee that gene x does only one thing or the same thing in organism B.
  • smaddox 8y ago
    GM foods are arguably no more dangerous than any massively engineered foods we've been eating for decades/centuries. Direct gene modification is more like using a scalpel rather than a 2x4. Still potentially dangerous, but far more precise.
    • curious_fella2 8y ago
      Can you elaborate?
      • jf- 8y ago
        Selective breeding is the poor man’s genetic engineering.
      • Spooky23 8y ago
        Think about wolves. Over many generations of selective breeding, we have poodles. No engineering required, but obviously a huge change.
        • anigbrowl 8y ago
          Another example would be King Charles Spaniels, which are overbred to have tiny heads and big cute eyes - and are at high risk of seizures from compression of the brain by the skull :-( I have shepherds and there's a big philosophical split between shepherd owners who want 'working line' dogs and those who want 'show dogs' that are significantly more likely to have health problems. Dog breeding is a very poorly regulated market and the outcomes are just as depressing as you would imagine.
          • TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
            I wonder what possess people to want to own dog breeds that are physically deformed by design. What kind of brain injury do you have to have to go out of your way to want to breed these dogs? And why the hell don’t / haven’t animal rights activists, and society in general, vigorously pursue regulation to ban these absurd breeds.
            • anigbrowl 8y ago
              It's easy to breed and sell dogs and hard to regulate/litigate against bad breeders. The US Kennel club prioritizes promoting 'breed standards' over the wellbeing of the animal. My informal observations suggest an overlap between such priorities and the general belief in animals as property/divinely ordained for human use/lacking in consciousness of any kind.
    • Valmar 8y ago
      GM foods are actually more dangerous, due to how GM works. Cross-breeding allows nature to combine things that fit together in all of the right places. And we just don't know how that even happens, or why. We don't understand nature's algorithm for DNA. No even the tip of the iceberg. Sure, nature isn't always correct, but does thing properly 99.999% of the time. And that's good enough. It is utterly incomparable to GM done by humans ~ genes are inserted, but the results are not equivalent to what is done by nature, because we don't understand DNA enough to know where we should be placing the inserted DNA, so that things don't massively fuck up inexplicably somewhere down the line.
      • traverseda 8y ago
        Why do you think cross breeding is safer then GM? Nature doesn't "know better", crossbreeding is just easier, and we only keep the results that work. Known-viable mammal hybrids tend to have poor health, with some obvious exceptions like mules. What you're seeing as "nature knowing what's best" is really just life being able to function with all kinds of random genes all over the place, because the core biochemical pathways are close enough.
        • Spooky23 8y ago
          Personally, I think the monetization of GMO is the problem more than the GM. We have turned seeds into the equivalent of Gillette razors. A farmer buys patented seeds and the complimentary chemical to kill everything else. The problem is that as farming has turned into a big dumb business, centuries of best practices with respect to land management are getting tossed. Farmers near where I grow up (who are left) don’t rotate and are being ground into bankruptcy as larger and larger entities dominate.
      • notheguyouthink 8y ago
        > Cross-breeding allows nature to combine things that fit together in all of the right place I feel like this is putting too much faith in "natural" methodologies. Eg, who's to say a cross breeding solution is less dangerous than a GM solution? If the concern is that it may take 50 years to know the GM is bad, why are we assuming the non-GM is good now? You could say that people have been cross breading for many many generations, but i'm unsure why we'd know that one cross breed being safe means all crossbreeds are safe. I'm not inherently defending GM. I'm attacking the notion that man made tricks like cross breeding are inherently safe.
    • andrei_says_ 8y ago
      Intentionally confusing genetic modification with cross breeding is one of monsanto’s favorite talking points. Genetic engineering is more like changing the byte code in your OS hoping to change its functionality. Without having the source code.
      • koube 8y ago
        This analogy is getting tortured beyond the point of usefulness, because the the other side of this analogy is that cross breeding is mixing files from two different repos together and hoping they still work.
    • dwaltrip 8y ago
      It's more like editing the raw binary of an executable. It's only more precise if you understand the binary representation and the impact of changes. Otherwise it's incredibly imprecise, as you are just randomly flipping switches. In the case of genetics, we have a some understanding, but it is fairly limited. There is real potential for unexpected harm, given how much we don't know and the complexity of the code. Of course, we can do some amazing things with the parts we do understand. Selecting breeding is like using a high level GUI that is decently functional. Like most GUIs, it significantly restricts how you can modify the underlying data. The plus side is that it is harder to put the data in a bad or dangerous state using only the controls offered by the GUI.
      • pskk 8y ago
        I was trying to reason about CRISPR (and other editing methods) and try to get an analogy. It sounds a lot like an efficient hex editor. Sure you can edit parts of the "code" but we don't have any debuggers readily available. We can edit randomly and "run" the code, but as far as I know that's about it.
        • anigbrowl 8y ago
          And it turns out nature really likes operator overloading.
        • saltcured 8y ago
          It's not a perfect analogy, but I think CRISPR is a bit like a regexp-replace edit function being used to hot-patch your live system memory. It has an extremely narrow pattern-recognition buffer, and you are gambling that you found a sufficiently unique signature at your edit point(s) so that it doesn't also corrupt unrelated parts of your system image that happen to match the same pattern.
      • lukeschlather 8y ago
        I don't think it's really accurate to describe selective breeding as restricting how you can modify the underlying data. I'd rather say that the executable itself contains layer upon layer of consistency checks so if you modify it too much it will just refuse to "boot up." In fact selective breeding relies heavily on this mechanism since it can create hundreds or even millions of nonviable organisms for every viable organism. If the consistency checks in the natural genome don't stop you, pretty much by definition whatever you're doing could happen through an unlikely coincidence of selective breeding (especially if you involve a wild virus to take the place of the lab virus.)
    • forgotmypw3 8y ago
      The problem with GM foods is that the overwhelming majority of them are modified for resistance to poison chemicals, which are dangerous and haremful
    • jayalpha 8y ago
      "GM foods are arguably no more dangerous than any massively engineered foods " This may be your opinion. While GM foods are not per see dangerous, the long tail risk is tremendous, exactly because you can not tell what a gene is going to do in another organism. Take my word for it, I have a PhD in that shit. Taleb also advocates the precautionary principle: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.5787.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.5787.pdf
      • snovv_crash 8y ago
        Any change analyzed in a vacuum is risky. The trick is to compare it to the alternative, and see if it is more risky. The alternative to GMO is applying random mutations, and then selecting a strain that has the behavior we want. This has much higher risk than changing only what we need, since many other components could be changed at the same time too, and each of them also have these many interactions. Honestly, Taleb should stick with what he knows: finance. In other fields I trust his opinion about as much as I would any other Wall Street banker.
      • mdtancsa 8y ago
        Speaking Risk, Rob Reid wrote an interesting series of articles, one of which was on global risk that this topic made me think about https://medium.com/s/powertrip/the-50-50-murder-a3832f587bee https://medium.com/s/powertrip/the-50-50-murder-a3832f587bee
      • trevyn 8y ago
        You’re probably right, but could you provide an example of an unexpected consequence of an inserted gene?
    • carboy 8y ago
      Arguably? Yes. Provable? No. Until we know how the system works your ideas are only ideas. In and adult your precise change might have minimal impact, but what if that sequence is checked during embryo development, and if it’s not present “exactly” as expected the embryo aborts? How long do you think it will take to figure out that your “precise” change now prevents humans from reproducing?
  • htk 8y ago
    Even if this hypothesis is correct, I would replace "dangerous" with "unpredictable", because the resulting effects of those interactions would be as likely to cause good as to cause harm.
    • Valmar 8y ago
      Unpredictable, therefore being dangerous and extremely risky? They're often partners in crime, when it comes to subjects not well understood. Especially with something as fragile as DNA.
    • rjf72 8y ago
      Why do you think changes would be as likely to cause good as to cause harm? In complex, yet structured, systems - I think changes without fully understanding what you're doing are vastly more likely to cause harm than good. Software is the obvious example. Change a line of bytecode/assembly to something else. I think the chances of that change being good are extremely close to 0.
      • denerio-a 8y ago
        This guy is 100% right, and this is important, so please stop downvoting him.
      • Nasrudith 8y ago
        But in nature most mutations are neutral, period. It is likely to be more don't cares although actual improvements are unlikely. Good outcomes from random chances are rare but that doesn't mean that bad outcomes must be the dominant component. Just look at Atomic gardening [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening] - a practice which should be /way/ worse if mutations really did produce bad effects most of the time. Instead the effects were either dud seeds or a few useful byproducts as opposed to 'this grapefruit is now rich in cyanide'.
  • Sawamara 8y ago
    No, please, please. Do not do this. You eat your food. The purpose is different. It has been engineered to shit already.
  • albertgoeswoof 8y ago
    Except food doesn’t tend to harm you if it’s DNA is a little different, you digest it, it doesn’t modify your cells directly.
    • code_beers 8y ago
      The DNA doesn’t, no. But what does DNA do? For one thing, it contains instructions for constructing proteins. Proteins which you ingest with the DNA as part of the food. GMO foods have been shown to produce malformed proteins, and some of them appear to have harmful effects when eaten. And that just scratches the surface. https://responsibletechnology.org/gmo-education/health-risks/ https://responsibletechnology.org/gmo-education/health-risks...
      • albertgoeswoof 8y ago
        That genetic modification can, and does, happen naturally, all the time. It’s how evolution works
        • code_beers 8y ago
          That talking point has already been attempted by others. Using one term, genetic modification, for several completely different processes doesn’t hide the truth, it just confuses people. And no, grafting entire sections of bacterial DNA into plant genomes absolutely does not happen in nature. Please read the link, then get back to me with any actual scientifically founded refutations you may have. Citations are throughout the link, but I don’t see any from you!
          • mr_toad 8y ago
            > Using one term, genetic modification, for several completely different processes doesn’t hide the truth, it just confuses people. That’s exactly what the article you linked to does too. The takeaway is that any alteration to the genome of food is bad.
            • 8y ago
• laretluval 8y ago
  The overall generalization lately appears to be that complex traits are encoded in all genes, such that each gene makes a linear contribution to the trait (the "omnigenic" model). https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30629-3 https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30629-3 https://www.quantamagazine.org/omnigenic-model-suggests-that-all-genes-affect-every-complex-trait-20180620/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/omnigenic-model-suggests-that... For such a system to work, there must be great robustness in the way that traits are encoded. The omnigenic model implies graceful degradation, as also observed in neural networks. Only vanishingly rarely is a single neuron/gene critical.
• bumby 8y ago
  Is this similar to the concept of pleiotropy?
• feistypharit 8y ago
  Or the really scary part...if it not noticed for generations. For example, a reduction of IQ each generation or such.
  • zeta0134 8y ago
    You know I originally thought this was an outlandish idea, but I have to remind myself that the processes that govern reproduction are themselves encoded within the DNA... If those processes are affected adversely, it may well take many generations to realize the effects, at which point for those individuals it is far too late to undo the damage.
    • pishpash 8y ago
      Not just for those individuals but it would have spread throughout the gene pool and been impossible to contain.
  • danieltillett 8y ago
    Very droll. Nice elude to dysgenics [0]. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgenics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgenics
    • beginningguava 8y ago
      why would evolution stop at the neck? If intelligence isn't heritable and has nothing to do with genetics, please teach a paramecium how to do quantum physics and I'll give you a million dollars
      • sporkologist 8y ago
        "An Amoeba Just Found an Entirely New Way to Solve a Classic Computing Problem" https://www.sciencealert.com/an-amoeba-has-solved-an-exponentially-complex-problem-in-linear-time https://www.sciencealert.com/an-amoeba-has-solved-an-exponen... It's not quantum physics, so I'll settle for $100k
• projectileboy 8y ago
  Exactly, exactly, exactly. The hubris of people thinking that they understand “this gene has this discrete effect” is astounding to me.
  • projectileboy 8y ago
    For the downvoters, you might find this interesting: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ ...and now extrapolate to biological systems evolving over a much longer period.
• akira2501 8y ago
  > From my laymans POV It's just so much more complicated than that. There is an additional huge array of variables like introns[1] and exons[2]. There's also the fact that not all base pairs encode even for genes, there's things like tRNA[3] and ribosomes[4] and the super amazing ribozymes[5]. Even after all that you have specific DNA binding factors[6] that along with the insane machinery[7] of our DNA regulate which base pairs are even exposed or copied into proteins or other cellular products. Our genetic code is far more complex than just being "genetic codes." And we're still uncovering more layers of complexity and self-reference[8] the closer we are capable of looking. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intron [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exon [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_RNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_RNA [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribozyme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribozyme [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA-binding_protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA-binding_protein [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_gene_expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_gene_expression [8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world
  • anigbrowl 8y ago
    C may let you shoot yourself in the foot, C++ may let you blow your whole leg off, but only CRISPR will let you turn it back into a tentacle.
    • goatlover 8y ago
      So maybe The Thing was an alien CRISPR experiment gone wrong.
      • ethbro 8y ago
        You just described the plot of Prometheus too.
    • starbeast 8y ago
      How wide is the set of potential tentacles?
• chiefalchemist 8y ago
  That's not only a layperson's POV. There was an article in The Atlantic (approx a year+ ago) - which I've looked for an cannot find (sorry) - on a scientist who long to short "I don't think things (i.e., DNA) are what most science thinks it is." Much like you he said, "it's not this simple. the mesh is more complex and has multiple currently unforeseen dependencies." Obviously, I'm paraphrasing. And every month since I've read something that supports this and undermine the current conventional wisdom / proof.
  • akiselev 8y ago
    It's not so much conventional wisdom as predominant wishful thinking. Everyone hypes up the possibilities for their piece of the grants, investors, and the media attention but every geneticist I've had a private conversation with has been little more than cautiously excited. CRISPR is the genetic equivalent to their first binary editor but the complexities of epigenetics and expression machinery have long been taught (and why everyone is so excited about it), as well as the giant missing pieces in embryology where we don't even have a cursory understanding of how to bootstrap an organism from a genome without artificially inseminating a very closely related species.
• e12e 8y ago
  There's been a lot of discussion on how machine learning neural nets are at all like our brains or not - but wouldn't DNA likely be more similar? Lots of random factors that in a roundabout way increase/decrease trait propagation (a new generation before death). And splicing genes would be a bit like assuming you could transplant the bit of a neural net that you think recognizes zero, to be used to write better letter/glyphs for "o"s and/or "ø"s? It might work with good, continuous testing (ie, with bacteria were you can test x generations in n specimen) - but it's hard to see how it would ever work reliably in higher animals?
• sgc 8y ago
  This is why I am strongly against anything but the most urgent genetic engineering. We completely screwed up the industrial revolution. We have never recovered from it, and maybe never will. So now we are going to start in on biology?
  • ethbro 8y ago
    > We completely screwed up the industrial revolution. Wait, WHAT?! The thing that allowed millions of people to ascend from what would now be seen as abject poverty and subsistence farming? The thing that enabled mass tool manufacture that eventually led to the Green Revolution and boosted agricultural yields enough to increase the planet's carrying capacity a few orders of magnitude? THAT screw up?! Say what you want about the environmental consequences and our failure to manage carbon and toxic byproducts. But there's objectively no way you can say the Industrial Revolution didn't vault the entire world's population technologically, medically, and materially forward.
    • denerio-a 8y ago
      What price do you put on a species? We are losing 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal every 24 hours. That’s an estimated 1,000 times the natural rate. We fucked up real bad, and the fact that there’s 7 billion of us now and we’ve got iPhones doesn’t change that a shred. we Will pay for this destruction, in unforeseen, invisible, and difficult to imagine ways. We could have done better, and ignoring that blocks our path to a better way.
    • sgc 8y ago
      Let's talk in 50 years. Odds aren't great, but there are still odds to talk about for a little while at least.
    • anigbrowl 8y ago
      You can make that argument without all the histrionics and performativity. Please give it a try.
      • 8y ago
• hanniabu 8y ago
  > Something like "everybody will get Alzheimers by age 50" where it takes 50 years to even discover it. Yup, and my then the market is established and the companies creating the market will say it's impossible to know that the side effect was actually caused by altering your DNA, and go on knowingly selling services that are destroying lives all in the name of money
  • aetherson 8y ago
    So, look, don't do this. This isn't about whether and to what degree "companies" are cartoonishly evil. And when you divert the conversation into that very well worn path, you distract from other problems. There are lots of threads on HN where complaints about corporate ethics are on topic.
    • dcow 8y ago
      This is absolutely on topic because it’s exactly how the problem proliferates. In isolation it can be corrected but as soon as we build and industry on it and it becomes part of the economy...well... It may be cartoonish with sugar and diabetes but not so much when our entire species is at stake.
• jf- 8y ago
  Hijacking the top comment to say that this thread is a mess. Nobody seems to know what they’re talking about and at several points it degenerates into arguments about GMO food. It would be really nice if some domain experts, if there are any here, would give us their opinion on the article and the issues it raises.
• macoovacany 8y ago
  > From my laymans POV, DNA is just a shit ton of variables in a very complex code that interact with each other. No single point just does a single thing. They all interact with each other. No different than changing a variable in one piece of code and having it create a bug in another that was previously working. Drew Endy did a lecture this a while ago. It's from one of the chaos computer club seminars. https://vimeo.com/18201463 https://vimeo.com/18201463
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• gus_massa 8y ago
  > No single point just does a single thing. They all interact with each other. Some parts have a very straightforward meaning. For example the DNA code for insulin is well known and understood, you can copy it to bacteria to make them produce a 100% accurate version of human insulin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin > The human insulin protein is composed of 51 amino acids, and has a molecular mass of 5808 Da. It is a dimer of an A-chain and a B-chain, which are linked together by disulfide bonds. Insulin's structure varies slightly between species of animals. Insulin from animal sources differs somewhat in effectiveness (in carbohydrate metabolism effects) from human insulin because of these variations. Porcine insulin is especially close to the human version, and was widely used to treat type 1 diabetics before human insulin could be produced in large quantities by recombinant DNA technologies. Many enzymes have also a similar straightforward DNA->protein->function story. (The regulation method to decide what enzymes to produce and how much of them is more complicated, but some are well known.) If you want to identify the genes for more general traits like height or intelligence, then you will get something like what you said, that is a very complicated interaction on many genes that we don't understand.
  • hyperpallium 8y ago
    Does the code for insulin do anything else?
    • gus_massa 8y ago
      As far as I know, no. (There are some examples of molecules families. You have many variants of it encoded in the DNA, and each is optimized for a different task. IIRC the idea is that some molecule is used for two similar thing, then after a lot of generations by a random chance you get two copies of the code in the DNA, then after a lot of generations each copy is used for one task, then after a lot of generations each copy evolves to be optimized for it's task. See the variants in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglobin#Types_in_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglobin#Types_in_humans and also the distant variant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myoglobin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myoglobin )
• hyperpallium 8y ago
  But will they do worse than random mutation? Evolution is like Motie Engineers (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye). I would summarise the essential difficulty as non-heirarchical.
• 725686 8y ago
  You will probably enjoy "DNA seen through the eyes of a coder"[1] , previously discussed on HN[2] 1: https://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/ https://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/ 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16233644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16233644
• credit_guy 8y ago
  This all sounds reasonable. On the other hand, you can randomly take half of someone's genetic code, complete it with half of someone else's and you get another fully functional one. That's not something you can say about programs written by humans.