4 ms·

How about creating a virus to give a disease to everyone of a specific race

by brigadier132 3y ago

Arch485 3y ago
Assuming that technology even exists, you wouldn't need 23andMe to get the relevant genetic data.
jjtheblunt 3y ago
you'd have to define "race" but the idea seems legit considering crispr-cas9
dekhn 3y ago
That's science fiction. No matter what you read in the popular press or scientific journals, engineering a virus specific enough to perfectly target a group of people sharing a common genetic history with perfect specificity and sensitivity, is still not something we could do. I also don't see this as being technically possible for some time.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  I keep re-reading what you wrote, and I think it's less far fetched than you imply, for the following reasons. Huge datasets labelled as to ancestry exist, characterizing distributions of alleles that imply "race", which is how Ancestry and 23andme, for American company examples, do some of their analyses. At least two Nobel prizes were recently awarded, one to Doudna and Charpentier related to Crispr-CAS9 for context-sensitive genome edits, and another for mRNA (which was in development for a decade or so before the entire Covid repurposing arose). So, I think the part missing, to your point, is the "vector" that would deliver a sequence of patch files, perhaps via CRISPR-cas9 etc, which would perhaps bind to the constellation of race-implication genome sites to collectively build some proteins of whatever sort of interest, whether for fitness repair or fitness reduction in the host.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    I said what I said above based on 30+ years of experience in this field. Be aware that the entire field of gene therapy was paused for 20 years because a single patient died in a single study in the 90s. Race is a proxy variable for genetic history and we have enough genetic history to identify what "race" people belong to, in a computational way, with a great deal of human judgement. Implementing that "logic" in the form of a gene therapy delivered as a virus is much harder. Molecular logic, these days, is fairly simple and doesn't allow us the level of accuracy you would need. If you don't require 100% sensitivity and specificity the job is "easier". For example, what should your theoretical virus do to people who are children of two parents with very different genetic history? Which "race" do they belong to? And if you go down that path, you're basically going to have to convince your funders (because this would be an extremely expensive research project) that your weapon of mass destruction will likely kill some fraction of allies. Those are just a couple things off the top of my head; I could write a whole book on how hard delivering gene therapy is.
    - jjtheblunt 3y ago
      yep, totally understand and agree it's a super vague notion, with super imprecise possible consequences.

How about creating a virus to give a disease to everyone of a specific race

Arch485 3y ago

Assuming that technology even exists, you wouldn't need 23andMe to get the relevant genetic data.

jjtheblunt 3y ago

you'd have to define "race" but the idea seems legit considering crispr-cas9

dekhn 3y ago

That's science fiction. No matter what you read in the popular press or scientific journals, engineering a virus specific enough to perfectly target a group of people sharing a common genetic history with perfect specificity and sensitivity, is still not something we could do. I also don't see this as being technically possible for some time.

jjtheblunt 3y ago
I keep re-reading what you wrote, and I think it's less far fetched than you imply, for the following reasons. Huge datasets labelled as to ancestry exist, characterizing distributions of alleles that imply "race", which is how Ancestry and 23andme, for American company examples, do some of their analyses. At least two Nobel prizes were recently awarded, one to Doudna and Charpentier related to Crispr-CAS9 for context-sensitive genome edits, and another for mRNA (which was in development for a decade or so before the entire Covid repurposing arose). So, I think the part missing, to your point, is the "vector" that would deliver a sequence of patch files, perhaps via CRISPR-cas9 etc, which would perhaps bind to the constellation of race-implication genome sites to collectively build some proteins of whatever sort of interest, whether for fitness repair or fitness reduction in the host.
- dekhn 3y ago
  I said what I said above based on 30+ years of experience in this field. Be aware that the entire field of gene therapy was paused for 20 years because a single patient died in a single study in the 90s. Race is a proxy variable for genetic history and we have enough genetic history to identify what "race" people belong to, in a computational way, with a great deal of human judgement. Implementing that "logic" in the form of a gene therapy delivered as a virus is much harder. Molecular logic, these days, is fairly simple and doesn't allow us the level of accuracy you would need. If you don't require 100% sensitivity and specificity the job is "easier". For example, what should your theoretical virus do to people who are children of two parents with very different genetic history? Which "race" do they belong to? And if you go down that path, you're basically going to have to convince your funders (because this would be an extremely expensive research project) that your weapon of mass destruction will likely kill some fraction of allies. Those are just a couple things off the top of my head; I could write a whole book on how hard delivering gene therapy is.
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    yep, totally understand and agree it's a super vague notion, with super imprecise possible consequences.