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It seems more & more the solutions to the big 3 diseases: cancer, heart disease, and dementia/alz, involve direct DNA / RNA / Mitohcondrial DNA reprogramming.

It would then seem prudent to ASAP get your own DNA sequenced. As time goes on, you collect more & more DNA damage & probably your original DNA becomes harder & harder to find.




DNA damage is not a major issue at all. Most of the damage can be "reversed" by looking at your close relatives since it's single nucleotide mutations.

Right now you can't even get the genome sequenced without gaps for a reasonable price. The current $1000 genome is 30x coverage which leaves some parts unsequenced. You can probably infer what some of those sequences should be, but that would be much harder than reversing potential DNA damage over your lifetime.

But even if we had the whole thing sequenced, modifying DNA in some or every cell is definitely not easy and in some cases impossible. Also, all current methods have all kinds of side effects.

Finally, even if you had some dangerous DNA mutation reversed, it may not help if a mutation induced cascade already began.


Eh, genome engineering is a possible solution to those problems, but that doesn't mean that it has to be the only solution. I'm working on genome engineering solutions for a couple of cancers right now-- we're close to solving problems in vitro, but that doesn't mean these treatments can be transferred to actual sick human subjects successfully.

Genome engineering is white hot right now, sailing off of CRISPR. Wait five years, see what pans out. I highly doubt that we'll have cures in hand on that timescale, but we can hope! I expect that genome engineering will improve human health vastly, but it's not going to be as easy as they make it out to be.

A last tidbit: like all medical interventions, genome engineering has side effects, too. They're largely side effects that have never been seen or treated before, and they can frequently be fatal or severe. I wouldn't expect that there is an incentive for these side effects to go away unless they're fatal more than 10% of the time.




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