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It should have been clear from the article that they haven't used this technique in humans yet. What other context is needed? They can easily do these things in

It should have been clear from the article that they haven't used this technique in humans yet. What other context is needed? They can easily do these things in cell lines and mice.

gwern 11y ago
I'm not sure what 'this technique' means, but if you mean CRISPR itself, it has been used in humans: a Chinese team caused a big stink just months ago when they published their paper on using CRISPR to edit a batch of human embryos http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-scientists-genetically-modify-human-embryos-1.17378 http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-scientists-genetically-mo...
- daughart 11y ago
  If the embryos were not viable, can you really call them humans? In my opinion they're really not more human than a cell culture of human cells. By "in humans" I meant using cas9 in vivo to edit the genome of a living human person.
  - dekhn 11y ago
    If you permit an approach where cells are removed from the person, modified in vitro, and then returned to the human, that's already possible today. This addresses many issues simultaneously and I suspect this will become a major treatment methodology in the future. Making cas9 work on a person's genome, in vivo, is still not possible and I believe it would take a lot of technical work to make it actually useful (but it's certainly along the lines I have been anticipating for several decades). Sure, you could put cas9 in a pill, but you would still need a way to get the cas9 into the right cells and integrate efficiently, without it going into the wrong cells, or causing all sorts of unintended side effects.
  - gwern 11y ago
    > In my opinion they're really not more human than a cell culture of human cells. Sophistry. CRISPR on human embryos (which were going to be discarded) is CRISPR on humans: human cells were geneticly edited with CRISPR. The point has been proven - human biology is not some special snowflake that CRISPR will uniquely fail upon.

It should have been clear from the article that they haven't used this technique in humans yet. What other context is needed? They can easily do these things in cell lines and mice.

gwern 11y ago

I'm not sure what 'this technique' means, but if you mean CRISPR itself, it has been used in humans: a Chinese team caused a big stink just months ago when they published their paper on using CRISPR to edit a batch of human embryos http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-scientists-genetically-modify-human-embryos-1.17378 http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-scientists-genetically-mo...

daughart 11y ago
If the embryos were not viable, can you really call them humans? In my opinion they're really not more human than a cell culture of human cells. By "in humans" I meant using cas9 in vivo to edit the genome of a living human person.
- dekhn 11y ago
  If you permit an approach where cells are removed from the person, modified in vitro, and then returned to the human, that's already possible today. This addresses many issues simultaneously and I suspect this will become a major treatment methodology in the future. Making cas9 work on a person's genome, in vivo, is still not possible and I believe it would take a lot of technical work to make it actually useful (but it's certainly along the lines I have been anticipating for several decades). Sure, you could put cas9 in a pill, but you would still need a way to get the cas9 into the right cells and integrate efficiently, without it going into the wrong cells, or causing all sorts of unintended side effects.
- gwern 11y ago
  > In my opinion they're really not more human than a cell culture of human cells. Sophistry. CRISPR on human embryos (which were going to be discarded) is CRISPR on humans: human cells were geneticly edited with CRISPR. The point has been proven - human biology is not some special snowflake that CRISPR will uniquely fail upon.