4 ms·

Is there any news on whether or not it worked? I read the article (albeit quickly as I'm on lunch break), but I can't find anything reporting on whether or not

Is there any news on whether or not it worked? I read the article (albeit quickly as I'm on lunch break), but I can't find anything reporting on whether or not the experiment resulted in healthy children, or if they are immune to HIV (if that can be tested without infecting them, of course - I don't know anything about immunity detection either).

sohkamyung 7y ago
There is, for now, little to no news as to what has happened to the babies. For reporting on the experiment itself, see one of the linked articles [1] which does not end on a hopeful note: > [T]he editing of CCR5 in Lulu and Nana could have no detectable consequences at all. With no one providing updates on the health of the children, that outcome, perhaps the most likely one, may never be headline news. [1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/did-crispr-help-or-harm-first-ever-gene-edited-babies https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/did-crispr-help-or-h...
imtringued 7y ago
Maybe it is possible to take skin cells and infect them in a laboratory.
- vibrio 7y ago
  HIV infects White blood cells. it won't infect skin cells. Its trivial to draw blood and infect them in the laboratory, but that isn't an interesting experiment. His poorly executed (and unethical) experiment was attempted to be based on the established knowledge that there is a subset of people that have a CCR5 mutation that confers some resistance to HIV infections. That is established and wasn't an experiment that needed to be done on humans.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    And why is modifying a human unethical, or more so than modifying any other animal which we do all the time? Technically, there should've been phase 1 trials. How do you propose to do that otherwise with genetic modification of germline cells otherwise? Someone will have to be risked, like with any unproven treatments. Either you can ban human modification on shaky grounds (not really ethics), or you will have to take that risk to just see if modification can take. There is no third way, no amount of animal studies proves the technique works in humans. You could test it on embryos, but then you have to either kill them or are back in the same place. And it does not provide complete information - only about relatively early development.
vibrio 7y ago
It "worked" is binary and that doesn't exist in medicine. The people who have the naturally occurring deletion 32 CCR5 mutation aren't immune. they have decreased risk of infection. There are safe and approved medicines that can greatly reduce the risk of transmission whether given before or shortly after exposure. Unconsented Germ line genetic modification of humans cannot justified, at very least for this use case.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  >Unconsented Germ line genetic modification of humans cannot justified How are you going to get consent from a human that isn't even conceived yet?
  - teh_infallible 7y ago
    Exactly! I don’t see how anyone can justify permanently altering a human life like this, in the absence of a clear pathology. Wouldn’t it be better to simply not have a child?
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      Easily. If it is an improvement with low chances of failure and even lower of catastrophic failure, why leave all the failures to nature? Not having, say, HIV resistance could be considered a failure of nature, a deficit. We're not talking about frivolous modifications for no reason here.
  - eximius 7y ago
    That is sort of his point, whether you agree or not.
  - SkyBelow 7y ago
    If one views the genetic material as belonging to the parent until conception, one simply needs to get the consent of the parent. If one views the fetus as part of the mother until some stage of conception, it is even simpler to justify. You might as well be asking when did any two parents get consent to produce their child with the specific DNA that child has (say in a situation where both parents are at risk to genetic defects).
dontreact 7y ago
I'm not sure that the mutation conferred actually proves to be beneficial, even if it took place without any offsite modifications. It is associated with a fairly large increase in mortality. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190603124709.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190603124709.h...

sohkamyung 7y ago

There is, for now, little to no news as to what has happened to the babies. For reporting on the experiment itself, see one of the linked articles [1] which does not end on a hopeful note: > [T]he editing of CCR5 in Lulu and Nana could have no detectable consequences at all. With no one providing updates on the health of the children, that outcome, perhaps the most likely one, may never be headline news. [1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/did-crispr-help-or-harm-first-ever-gene-edited-babies https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/did-crispr-help-or-h...

imtringued 7y ago

Maybe it is possible to take skin cells and infect them in a laboratory.

vibrio 7y ago
HIV infects White blood cells. it won't infect skin cells. Its trivial to draw blood and infect them in the laboratory, but that isn't an interesting experiment. His poorly executed (and unethical) experiment was attempted to be based on the established knowledge that there is a subset of people that have a CCR5 mutation that confers some resistance to HIV infections. That is established and wasn't an experiment that needed to be done on humans.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  And why is modifying a human unethical, or more so than modifying any other animal which we do all the time? Technically, there should've been phase 1 trials. How do you propose to do that otherwise with genetic modification of germline cells otherwise? Someone will have to be risked, like with any unproven treatments. Either you can ban human modification on shaky grounds (not really ethics), or you will have to take that risk to just see if modification can take. There is no third way, no amount of animal studies proves the technique works in humans. You could test it on embryos, but then you have to either kill them or are back in the same place. And it does not provide complete information - only about relatively early development.

vibrio 7y ago

It "worked" is binary and that doesn't exist in medicine. The people who have the naturally occurring deletion 32 CCR5 mutation aren't immune. they have decreased risk of infection. There are safe and approved medicines that can greatly reduce the risk of transmission whether given before or shortly after exposure. Unconsented Germ line genetic modification of humans cannot justified, at very least for this use case.

whatshisface 7y ago
>Unconsented Germ line genetic modification of humans cannot justified How are you going to get consent from a human that isn't even conceived yet?
- teh_infallible 7y ago
  Exactly! I don’t see how anyone can justify permanently altering a human life like this, in the absence of a clear pathology. Wouldn’t it be better to simply not have a child?
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Easily. If it is an improvement with low chances of failure and even lower of catastrophic failure, why leave all the failures to nature? Not having, say, HIV resistance could be considered a failure of nature, a deficit. We're not talking about frivolous modifications for no reason here.
- eximius 7y ago
  That is sort of his point, whether you agree or not.
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  If one views the genetic material as belonging to the parent until conception, one simply needs to get the consent of the parent. If one views the fetus as part of the mother until some stage of conception, it is even simpler to justify. You might as well be asking when did any two parents get consent to produce their child with the specific DNA that child has (say in a situation where both parents are at risk to genetic defects).

dontreact 7y ago

I'm not sure that the mutation conferred actually proves to be beneficial, even if it took place without any offsite modifications. It is associated with a fairly large increase in mortality. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190603124709.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190603124709.h...