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Old school selective breeding is full of consequential mistakes too. See "Africanized killer bees". If anything, gene editing is much more predictable than ran

Old school selective breeding is full of consequential mistakes too. See "Africanized killer bees". If anything, gene editing is much more predictable than randomly mashing together the genes of select specimens.

ricardobeat 7y ago
You might be overestimating our gene-editing abilities - our current knowledge is, in rough terms, a bunch of guesses where we only discover other roles a gene has years later. It’s anything but predictable.
- acomjean 7y ago
  We’re actually getting pretty good at gene editing at this point. Predicting what the consequence of those edits is another story. (Although I think that’s what you were getting at). Plant genes are odd. From and old article by Michael Polan: “When I got home from St. Louis, I phoned Richard Lewontin, the Harvard geneticist, to ask him what he thought of the software metaphor. ''From an intellectual-property standpoint, it's exactly right,'' he said. ''But it's a bad one in terms of biology. It implies you feed a program into a machine and get predictable results. But the genome is very noisy. If my computer made as many mistakes as an organism does'' -- in interpreting its DNA, he meant -- ''I'd throw it out.'' I asked him for a better metaphor. ''An ecosystem,'' he offered. ''You can always intervene and change something in it, but there's no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don't get one rude shock after another.''” https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-the-garden.html https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-t...
  - russh 7y ago
    ''An ecosystem,'' Thats a brilliant metaphor.
- stickfigure 7y ago
  I'm trying to point out that our previous tool for gene editing - mashing two sets of DNA together randomly - is even less predictable. We just consider it normal because it's been going on for much longer.

ricardobeat 7y ago

You might be overestimating our gene-editing abilities - our current knowledge is, in rough terms, a bunch of guesses where we only discover other roles a gene has years later. It’s anything but predictable.

acomjean 7y ago
We’re actually getting pretty good at gene editing at this point. Predicting what the consequence of those edits is another story. (Although I think that’s what you were getting at). Plant genes are odd. From and old article by Michael Polan: “When I got home from St. Louis, I phoned Richard Lewontin, the Harvard geneticist, to ask him what he thought of the software metaphor. ''From an intellectual-property standpoint, it's exactly right,'' he said. ''But it's a bad one in terms of biology. It implies you feed a program into a machine and get predictable results. But the genome is very noisy. If my computer made as many mistakes as an organism does'' -- in interpreting its DNA, he meant -- ''I'd throw it out.'' I asked him for a better metaphor. ''An ecosystem,'' he offered. ''You can always intervene and change something in it, but there's no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don't get one rude shock after another.''” https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-the-garden.html https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-t...
- russh 7y ago
  ''An ecosystem,'' Thats a brilliant metaphor.
stickfigure 7y ago
I'm trying to point out that our previous tool for gene editing - mashing two sets of DNA together randomly - is even less predictable. We just consider it normal because it's been going on for much longer.