
One Man’s Quest to Hack His Own Genes - saycheese
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603217/one-mans-quest-to-hack-his-own-genes/
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microcolonel
I find it almost offensive when they entertain that it is the public's
business to dictate what one man does to a small section of his bodily tissue.

Human life is not precious anymore. If somebody wants to risk their life for
scientific progress, I feel that we should support them instead of
discouraging them.

Just as we did when life was more precious.

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reasonattlm
As I've been saying for the past couple of years, gene therapies are
straightforward enough and cheap enough to carry out that people are doing it,
usually quietly, but it is happening. You only have to be connected enough to
know a biotechnologist or two with the right skills, as the example here
shows. The stage of the adventurous and the self-experimenters is an important
part of the development of any new medical technology, helping to overcome
institutional reluctance while gathering initial data on how best to approach
such treatments in practice. The next part of the process, something that does
requires much greater funding and participation from the research and
development community, will happen over the next few years; it involves making
the therapies more robust, the outcomes more reliable, and assembling the
suite of tools and clinics needed for those tasks. That is certainly the goal
of BioViva, and as they move forward, others will join them.

There is more than enough evidence for the potential utility of enhancement
gene therapies based on producing greater muscle growth and improved
metabolism via increased follistatin or myostatin knockout, ranging from
numerous animal studies to existing natural human and animal mutants to
myostatin antibody trials. There is also considerable interest in telomerase
gene therapies, though I'd like to wait for more data on that front before
diving in myself, given the potential cancer risk. Once these initial
approaches are out there, available, and the methodologies of gene therapy
have progressed to the point at which there is reliably comprehensive cell
coverage - especially in stem cells, as that will determine how lasting the
effect is - then a score of other genes bear further investigation and
consideration as targets for enhancement therapies.

While I applaud those who set out to undergo gene therapy today, as their work
is necessary to move matters along in this age of overabundant caution and
oppressive regulation of every activity, I can't say as I think the fellow
here made a good choice of gene. This has the look of a more sophisticated
form of the hormone therapies practiced over the past few decades, approaches
that really don't have a good impact on aging, and outside of correcting
deficiencies are not something that should benefit or is expected to benefit
someone in normal health for their age. Increased growth hormone, if anything,
is exactly the opposite of what animal and human studies suggest is good for
longevity.

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gravelc
He's not 'hacking his own genes' though, is he? There's no modification of his
germ cells, nor is there stable incorporation of the exogenous material into
the genome of the affected cells - more just transient expression of the
protein he's interested in.

Giving the extraordinary complexity of the ageing process, with the interplay
between multiple genes, each with multiple splice variants and post-
translation modifications, and whose expression is modulated by both genetic
and epigenetic factors, the chance of success with this approach is minimal.

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tmearnest
It's an interesting first step to hacking one's own genes, though. It makes me
wonder if it would be possible to transfect human skin cells in situ with a
plasmid containing a gene for a fluorescent protein. If possible, it would be
the nerdiest of nerd tattoos.

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Sarki
Am I the only one to foresee that such changes can do way more harm than good?

As comments went on a previous post on a similar topic: Genetic changes are a
lot like assembler software changes.

The best part? In living things there's very little documentation, based on
"poor" reverse engineering (as we know little about it).

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cixin
Realistically, what harm can the experiments described in the article do to
the general population?

It's so hard to do anything, even design diagnostic tests, that requires FDA
approval that personally I'd avoid any startup that had that on their route to
revenue.

It's kind of a shame, and countries where it's easier to develop new
treatments and tests are likely to take the lead.

~~~
Sarki
First of all, I'm not a biologist but a software consultant and have worked in
several software companies as level 3 support.

My personal experience on tiny and sometimes unrelated changes having a
catastrophic impact: software configuration changes, new hardware, other
softwares bug, antivirus rules and updates, etc.

These points can be roughly related to a living being:
psychological/environmental/habit changes, transplant/implant, organ
failure/traumatism, immune system false positive (e.g. alergies?), ...

I'm not against the idea gene manipulation, just saying that his doings are
very marginal and must not be praised.

If labs have been relying on white mice and drosophilae it's for some good
reasons:

Common sense (how many people died because of charlatanism?), ethics and Human
Rights.

What is at stakes here can lead either to a nobel price (I sincerely hope for
him) or a darwin award (thanks to the ignorance of such red flags).

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DyslexicAtheist
> What is at stakes here can lead either to a nobel price (I sincerely hope
> for him) or a darwin award (thanks to the ignorance of such red flags).

We need something like this
[https://iotdarwinaward.com/](https://iotdarwinaward.com/) but for genetic
engineering :-)

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kumarski
7 Billion People on Planet Earth

3 Billionish Genetic Base Pairs

15,000 disease modalities-ish(and many that are obfuscated or clustered as one
disease)

60,000 genetic marker tests on the market.

8-10 new ones each day.

Knowing what they actually do? --- Costs Billions.

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tudorw
add in phenotype, microbiota, mitochrondrial DNA, behaviour , environmental
and societal factors, we have some way to go....

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hprotagonist
>Hanley says he did not secure the approval of the FDA before carrying out his
experiment either. The agency requires companies to seek an authorization
called an investigational new drug application, or IND, before administering
any novel drug or gene therapy to people. “They said ‘You need an IND’ and I
said, ‘No, I don’t,’” recalls Hanley, who traded e-mails with officials at the
federal agency. He argued that self-experiments should be exempt, in part
because they don’t pose any risk to the public.

Until you start modifying the germ line, of course.

~~~
x1798DE
Posing a risk to your _potential_ immediate descendants hardly counts as "the
public", and you probably don't want to start down the road of enforcing that
people don't have the right to do things to themselves which have the risk of
possibly being teratogenic as if it's a public health threat.

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xiaoma
This is a bold step on the path towards comic book super-villains existing in
the real world.

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frgtpsswrdlame
Reminds me a lot of the TDCS people.

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LordKano
Just wait until they combine their efforts.

