Unfortunately, I could see things like this becoming illegal solely because they help people play sports too well.
Not necessarily. We as a society have come up with many activities which seem, on their surface, to only harm the individual, but are illegal. This shares many concerns with drug use, gambling, etc.
Killing yourself harms others, and society has a vested interest in the population being healthy and productive. If you harm yourself an ER has to treat you regardless of whether or not you can foot the bill. Perhaps most importantly, you can procreate and pass on defective generic material.
This is far from an issue which only concerns the individual in question.
If you can edit your genes in a bizarre way for cheap, I imagine it wouldn't be very expensive to reverse such a modification.
Imagine all the data we're just throwing away with people biohacking. That data, properly done by 3rd party non-biohackers, could be invaluable long term. Sure, it wouldn't be as valuable as a massive double blind trial (or w/e), but we're basically talking about "mad scientists" doing experiments in their basements.. I imagine lots can still be learned, if we simply watch.
He could also get that way from driving a car, being thrown from a horse, or any number of activities that are a personal choice.
Maybe a bunch of people try this and end up with terrible side effects. Researchers will still be interested in the results if they know what a person did to themself. And then maybe some of them will have good results and then we'll all know. It's a mixed bag and probably a very tiny percent of the population. I say let em go for it.
Ok, scary thought already. But, casting aside all the safety concerns, how many attributes would someone in general want to change as an adult? You can't change your height, you can't change your hair color, you can't change your eyes. Is a myostatin-inhibitor going to be the "killer app" of DIY Crispr, so we can all look like a Belgian Blue cow?
As adults, we're still chemical machines. There are a million knobs to tweak.
I was referring specifically to the DIY crowd, which this articles discusses. Things a Dr would say "no, I'm not going to help you with that". Or as the quote discusses, things a drunk person would say "I think this is a good idea".
I find this highly concerning, biological organisms are orders of magnitude more complicated than man made hardware and software. I think all he will achieve is either giving himself an infection or cancer.
You can change the DNA of specific cells. A change in you skin cell's DNA will not propagate to your bone cells. The skin cell has instructions to make a bone cell, but skin cells do not make use of that part of the code.
Could someone with actual knowledge fill this in? Am I right? Or am I very wrong?
It's not unreasonable that tinkering with dna will unleash some dormant retrovirus.
Does anyone else remember this? Maybe link to the paper, as well?
What does seem likely is that they give both themselves and their germ line a genetic mutation. Editing yourself and then having children would be incredibly irresponsible. If you affect your germ cells, you're not just editing yourself, but all of your descendants.
Gene changes aren't intrinsically infectious; they're only infectious at all because we tend to modify infectious organisms to carry our changes (e.g., viral gene therapy).
There certainly at least three grad students who have transformed skin cells w/ eGFP (very very low efficiency w/ Lipofectamine) and one with a cosmetic tumor (later removed after it grew too much)
>So when Zayner saw Ascendance Biomedical’s CEO injecting himself on a live-stream earlier this month, you might say there was an uneasy flicker of recognition.
>Ascendance Bio soon fell apart in almost comical fashion. The company’s own biohackers—who created the treatment but who were not being paid—revolted and the CEO locked himself in a lab. Even before all that, the company had another man inject himself with an untested HIV treatment on Facebook Live. And just days after the pants-less herpes treatment stunt, another biohacker who shared lab space with Ascendance posted a video detailing a self-created gene therapy for lactose intolerance. The stakes in biohacking seem to be getting higher and higher.
>“Honestly, I kind of blame myself,” Zayner told me recently. He’s been in a soul-searching mood; he recently had a kid and the backlash to the CRISPR stunt in October had been getting to him. “There’s no doubt in my mind that somebody is going to end up hurt eventually,” he said.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/biohacki...
https://www.genomeweb.com/gene-silencinggene-editing/paper-o...
His reasons for doing it seem a bit confused. But one interesting point he makes it that it's not particularly expensive or difficult to brew up some CRISPR. If this guy can do it in his garage, imagine what's going on in secret labs elsewhere.
