https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Especially please don't do this when a thread is new. Threads are remarkably sensitive to initial conditions, and this is a kind of defacement.
Has happened before where patients were okay with deadly side effects - F.D.A. Allows Some Patients to Resume M.S. Drug https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/16/business/fda-allows-some-...
Will bacteria be “programmable” in the same way that a computer is?
Hard to believe so maybe that’s not the right word for it.
If it will be then we will, in a way, be monkey patching natural selection’s code.
Testing would also be a pain!
> Hard to believe so maybe that’s not the right word for it.
They already are.
https://media.ccc.de/v/24c3-2329-en-change_me
That's a video from 2007 talking about how high school student can program bacteria. It's gotten a couple orders of magnitude easier and cheaper in the past decade since that talk.
Makes me think of the studies showing how much of an effect your gut bacteria have on your health. Perhaps this could be harnessed to treat disease without the sledgehammers that are antibiotics.
Unfortunately I'm a software developer, not a biologist, so I know nothing about this. I'm sure smarter people are already working on it.
