What a terrible article - completely misunderstanding the intent of this project while hyperboling around the moon and back. Engineer humans to add a 47th chrom

What a terrible article - completely misunderstanding the intent of this project while hyperboling around the moon and back. Engineer humans to add a 47th chromosome? This is not about humans themselves at all. What the actual project [1] wants to do: HACs are used to introduce novel genes into populations of human cells, not actual humans. For example, if you want to get a green fluorescent protein into cancer cells you currently have to use BACs (bacterial artificial chromosomes) which carry that gene into the cell. HACs are relatively novel and can carry much larger genes and are also stable over mitosis (that is, all offspring carries the gene). Currently, HACs are not very feasible due to a couple of hurdles, all of which this project tries to overcome (which is why it sounds so generic - like all good project description it tries to catch all possible outcomes). This has great implications in gene therapy! Of course, because DARPA is involved the author has to make it sound ohh so scary. This has no place on HN. [1] http://sbirsource.com/grantiq#/topics/88854 http://sbirsource.com/grantiq#/topics/88854