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0 pointsdekhn5y ago0 comments

I can't even imagine why you would want to synthesize and inject a replacement human chromosome (let alone the entire genome). That sounds like a huge waste of time and money, unlikely to achieve any reasonable goal, and prone to far more unintended side effects than localized patching

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sbierwagen5y ago· 2 in thread

GWASes have shown that many strongly heritable things that we care about (height, heart attack risk, IQ) are hugely polygenetic, the result of the interaction of thousands of genes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study#...

CRISPR is too unreliable and has too many off target effects to move the needle on height. By the time you've made a hundred CRISPR edits to a single genome, you've shot the other chromosomes full of holes. It's only useful for taking out one or two genes, for someone who knows they carry a fatal genetic disease, but still wants to have kids. True designer babies will be done with genome synthesis.

dekhnOP5y ago

What you're describing is basically science fiction, far in the future. We have no technology to do what you're describing, nobody is planning on "repairing thousands of genes" to increase somebody's height.

I understand it's fun to speculate about this.

sbierwagen5y ago

Factual statement: "We have no technology to do what you're describing"

Correct. We can only assemble synthetic bacteria right now. Synthetic sperm is years away. Synthetic eggs are too complicated, I wonder if they'll ever be made. Synthetic embryos would be true sci-fi stuff, requiring heavy engineering and many breakthroughs.

Emotional statement: "nobody is planning on"

Human germline engineering inspires strong feelings. I'm sure that the advent of motorized vehicles would have inspired the same strong feelings in horses, if they could have understood what was about to happen to them. Nevertheless.

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