3 ms·

The article doesn’t seem to mention any of the risks of this type of procedure, only the potential benefit (possible immunity to AIDS) Is this benefit worth wh

The article doesn’t seem to mention any of the risks of this type of procedure, only the potential benefit (possible immunity to AIDS) Is this benefit worth what I assume is a massive risk of developing cancer?

Symmetry 7y ago
Probably not cancer? Cancer is usually caused by a large enough number of mutations occurring in some cell over its lifetime that it starts reproducing uncontrollably. It's very bad in that a single bad cell can kill you but it takes a bunch of mutations to occur. A typical child has 0-3 or so new mutations depending on chance, how old their parents are, etc. We might very well expect that if this treatment was badly targeted it would produce many more. Generally a random mutation won't hit anything that has an effect at all on a cell's operation. Fairly often a mutation occurs in an area that's critical to a cell's function and the fertalized egg never turns into a pregnancy. Rarely the embryo turns into a child which survives to birth but has some problem with missing some protein or other that you need. If this was, e.g., AMY1 which is used to digest starch and which you probably have a bunch of copies of if your ancestors were farmers no big deal. But if it hit Factor VIII then you've got hemophilia and that really sucks. Only a small fraction of the genes in your body are involved in cancer and it's very unlikely that if you get a germline mutation that it will be one of these that it affects. Again, it's different as an adult because mutagens affect different genes in different cells and you only need the mutations to line up the right way once across essentially all the cells in your body to give you cancer. If one cell in your body gets Factor VIII knocked out then it doesn't matter, other cells can keep making the clotting factor you need and you'll be fine.

Symmetry 7y ago

Probably not cancer? Cancer is usually caused by a large enough number of mutations occurring in some cell over its lifetime that it starts reproducing uncontrollably. It's very bad in that a single bad cell can kill you but it takes a bunch of mutations to occur. A typical child has 0-3 or so new mutations depending on chance, how old their parents are, etc. We might very well expect that if this treatment was badly targeted it would produce many more. Generally a random mutation won't hit anything that has an effect at all on a cell's operation. Fairly often a mutation occurs in an area that's critical to a cell's function and the fertalized egg never turns into a pregnancy. Rarely the embryo turns into a child which survives to birth but has some problem with missing some protein or other that you need. If this was, e.g., AMY1 which is used to digest starch and which you probably have a bunch of copies of if your ancestors were farmers no big deal. But if it hit Factor VIII then you've got hemophilia and that really sucks. Only a small fraction of the genes in your body are involved in cancer and it's very unlikely that if you get a germline mutation that it will be one of these that it affects. Again, it's different as an adult because mutagens affect different genes in different cells and you only need the mutations to line up the right way once across essentially all the cells in your body to give you cancer. If one cell in your body gets Factor VIII knocked out then it doesn't matter, other cells can keep making the clotting factor you need and you'll be fine.