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Guy Says He's the First Person to Attempt Editing His DNA with CRISPR
- SSchick 8y ago> Biohacker I find this highly concerning, biological organisms are orders of magnitude more complicated than man made hardware and software. I think all he will achieve is either giving himself an infection or cancer.
- interlocutor 8y agoYes, highly concerning but not because biological organisms are more complicated, but because biological organisms reproduce. Any "hacking" mistake will reproduce for eternity.
- all2 8y agoI thought there were 'host' hacks and 'germ-line' hacks. Could someone with actual knowledge fill this in? Am I right? Or am I very wrong?
- peteey 8y agoOnly changes to the gamete cells (sperm and eggs) will move on to the next generation. You can change the DNA of specific cells. A change in you skin cell's DNA will not propagate to your bone cells. The skin cell has instructions to make a bone cell, but skin cells do not make use of that part of the code.
- Someone 8y ago”The skin cell has instructions to make a bone cell, but skin cells do not make use of that part of the code.” The scary thing is that it may require only a small change to change that. Muscle cells also have instructions to make bone and do not make use of that code, except when things go wrong as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibrodysplasia_ossificans_progressiva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibrodysplasia_ossificans_prog...
- emilfihlman 8y agoJust biohack it back to normal...
- frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago2017 but also here's a bit of follow up on Josiah: >So when Zayner saw Ascendance Biomedical’s CEO injecting himself on a live-stream earlier this month, you might say there was an uneasy flicker of recognition. >Ascendance Bio soon fell apart in almost comical fashion. The company’s own biohackers—who created the treatment but who were not being paid—revolted and the CEO locked himself in a lab. Even before all that, the company had another man inject himself with an untested HIV treatment on Facebook Live. And just days after the pants-less herpes treatment stunt, another biohacker who shared lab space with Ascendance posted a video detailing a self-created gene therapy for lactose intolerance. The stakes in biohacking seem to be getting higher and higher. >“Honestly, I kind of blame myself,” Zayner told me recently. He’s been in a soul-searching mood; he recently had a kid and the backlash to the CRISPR stunt in October had been getting to him. “There’s no doubt in my mind that somebody is going to end up hurt eventually,” he said. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/biohacking-stunts-crispr/553511/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/biohacki...
- beaconstudios 8y agoSelf experimentation has a long history within medical science so I don't think it's too alarming.
- bluedevil2k 8y ago"I want to live in a world where people get drunk and instead of giving themselves tattoos, they’re like, ‘I’m drunk, I’m going to CRISPR myself." Ok, scary thought already. But, casting aside all the safety concerns, how many attributes would someone in general want to change as an adult? You can't change your height, you can't change your hair color, you can't change your eyes. Is a myostatin-inhibitor going to be the "killer app" of DIY Crispr, so we can all look like a Belgian Blue cow?
- patorjk 8y agoThe article talks about some scientists doing DNA injections meant to stall aging. I could see that becoming popular if it turned out to work.
- phkahler 8y agoI could see that being popular even if it didn't work.
- SCAQTony 8y agoLOL - Amazing observational comedy on what people will try despite being proven utterly irresponsible and dangerous.
- beatgammit 8y agoI don't know about your area, but here in Utah, essential oils and herbal remedies are very popular despite not having any scientific evidence whatsoever. People buy whatever you tell them to buy, provided you give them an emotional reason to buy it. We just had someone try to sell to us in our home today, and when we told them the price was completely unreasonable, they tried to appeal to emotion (we need this sale to get a bonus, so we're willing to give you an awesome price...). If you're a good enough salesman, you can sell air, as long as they think there's something different about your air.
- nomel 8y ago
- MiddleEndian 8y agoRegardless of how well this particular case works, I'm in favor of people being able to modify their bodies as they see fit. If he wants to become more muscular, morbidly obese, or ten feet tall, that's his right. Unfortunately, I could see things like this becoming illegal solely because they help people play sports too well.
- drak0n1c 8y agoI agree, but there are externalities. Medical care resulting from personal choices should be paid by the risk-taking individual (or the research firm, if it's a sponsored experiment), rather than society or other people in the insurance pool.
- MiddleEndian 8y agoIf this becomes cheap enough for a person to effectively do for $20, I imagine the cost of resulting medical care would end up proportionally cheap.
- EpicEng 8y agoWhy do you believe that? The cost of medical care is proportional to the cost of treatment, not the cost incurred while performing the injurious act. I can down a cheap bottle of aspirin and rack up a large medical bill. I don't see the correlation.
- MiddleEndian 8y agoFor your aspirin example, you can already do that without breaking any laws, and you will still get medical care in pretty much any country. Not that many people do it, and medical costs haven't been ruined by people chugging aspirin. For instance, if there were a way to make yourself extremely susceptible to becoming obese with $20 on-the-fly gene editing, presumably you (or medical staff) could reverse that. And I can't imagine many people doing the first thing.
- searine 8y agoPlay stupid games, win stupid prizes.
- bronzeage 8y agoThis shouldn't be legal. If people fuck themselves up the worst case isn't just them dying, they can accidently unleash a virus. Pretty unlikely, but just the smallest possibility is still too much when the outcome can be so bad. It's not unreasonable that tinkering with dna will unleash some dormant retrovirus.
- tectonic 8y agoThat seems unlikely to me. What does seem likely is that they give both themselves and their germ line a genetic mutation. Editing yourself and then having children would be incredibly irresponsible. If you affect your germ cells, you're not just editing yourself, but all of your descendants.
- nexuist 8y agoif you can edit yourself to change your genes....can't your children edit themselves to fix whatever you mess up? Or to just revert to normal genes, regardless of what their parents had?
- lukejduncan 8y agoI'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Whether or not you agree with the conclusions, there are very real concerns about the externalities of self gene-editing.
- tuxxy 8y agoI remember a few years back where a few biologists released a paper on how to weaponize influenza from CRISPR (IIRC). Before it got produced (or after?) the DoD stepped in and had them redact and classify their paper to have it (re-)published. Does anyone else remember this? Maybe link to the paper, as well?
- thrillgore 8y agoThis is how that movie starts, where it ends with cancer becoming airborne, contagious, and terminal in hours.
- rrggrr 8y agoTransmissible CRISPR gene edits are not impossible (Paywall link below). Vectors for these edits probably aren't limited to injection. Which makes me wonder if the obsession over 3D printed firearms ought to share a bit of worryshare with do-it-youself genome editing. https://www.genomeweb.com/gene-silencinggene-editing/paper-outlines-scheme-create-transmissible-crisprcas9-gene-edits https://www.genomeweb.com/gene-silencinggene-editing/paper-o...
- beaconstudios 8y agoThe problem is that neither of these things can truly be prevented without introducing totalitarian state measures.
- kyrra 8y agoIt likely it didn't do anything if a previous study on this was correct[0]. It showed that possibly 96% of people have a pre-existing immunity to CRISPR-Cas9. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18334240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18334240
- UltimateFloofy 8y agoI am all for self-experimentation, however, when it exposes risk to humanity, I think we should tread carefully. In the long run, will these genes or other self-experiments be introduced into the global genome with unintended consequences?
- jerf 8y agoThe probability of that is basically the same as the probability of an already-existing known deleterious mutation being transmitted into the "global genome". Only if he has children in the future, and not necessarily even then. Gene changes aren't intrinsically infectious; they're only infectious at all because we tend to modify infectious organisms to carry our changes (e.g., viral gene therapy).
- copperx 8y agoI always dismissed Children of Men as laughably implausible. But with CRISPR it seems like it could happen at least to a portion of the population, given enough generations.
- notatcomputer68 8y agoIn the long term we should bee able to clean it up again. I'd be more worried about shorter terms
- java_script 8y agoI hope David Cronenberg makes a movie about him.
- codeulike 8y agoThis was over a year ago, I posted it at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16021738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16021738 His reasons for doing it seem a bit confused. But one interesting point he makes it that it's not particularly expensive or difficult to brew up some CRISPR. If this guy can do it in his garage, imagine what's going on in secret labs elsewhere.
- sgt101 8y agoI don't know anything about gene editing, but is there any chance that doing this could cut loose viruses buried in the human genome?
- sgt101 8y agoThis is a genuine question! Does anyone know, and if it can't why can't it?
- alevskaya 8y agoWhat is it about biology that attracts crazy people? As a profession genetic engineer (I've worked on successful engineered CAR-T cell therapy startups, etc.) the most appalling thing about this isn't the hubris or defiance of norms. It's how sloppy and technically laughable all of these preparations and experiments are from a biological point of view - both in terms of what I know about the viral/crispr vector design as well as the biological targets chosen (you're not going to do much by sparsely manipulating myostatin that way as an adult!). This is technical incompetence attempting to masquerade itself as maverick, edgy research for press attention. If you want to be a "biohacker": make a high-penetrance GFP/mCherry tattoo visible to the eye on a patch of your skin that doesn't get rejected by the immune system. i.e. Why take seriously claims about building a supercomputer from people that can't even wire up an 8-bit toy?
- xkcd-sucks 8y agoThe pros are worried about career prospects should they publish something pearl-clutchers deem "unethical." There certainly at least three grad students who have transformed skin cells w/ eGFP (very very low efficiency w/ Lipofectamine) and one with a cosmetic tumor (later removed after it grew too much)