
A new genetic technology that can quickly change entire populations gets broader - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/68/context/gene-drives-reach-mammals
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deogeo
How long until someone releases a gene-drive that dramatically reduces the
yield of a staple food crop? Humanity is nowhere _near_ responsible enough for
this technology - we should be terrified of it.

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Santosh83
We'll have to deal with it the same way we have dealt with nuclear weapons. By
the threat of MAD. Since we do not have the maturity as a species not to
weaponise in the first place.

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captainmuon
I'm not convinced MAD actually works. Once you see the bombs flying, the only
logical thing to do is to _give up_ your pre-war resolve of retaliation and
completely submit - start printing Soviet flags so to speak. Of course, pre-
war you'll try to convince the enemy that it isn't so, but they are not
stupid.

The only thing that saved us IMO was the power of the political elites (in
East and West), that despite all saber-rattling rhetorics, never wanted a war.
Now that that power is waning, I'm not sure what will save us this time
around. Maybe religious elites can instill a taboo against using this kind of
technology for harm?

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nokcha
>Once you see the bombs flying, the only logical thing to do is to give up
your pre-war resolve of retaliation and completely submit

Not necessarily -- it depends on one's ethical philosophy. And it is well-
known that humans do sometimes seek revenge even at the risk of their own
lives. Plus, there are procedures in place for retaliating responding to a
nuclear attack, so all that is required is for military personnel to act in
accordance with the established procedures.

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DoctorOetker
is this useful beyond improved breeding for genetic experiments? I understand
there is scientific value in being able to quickly and cheaply breed in fewer
generations a mouse with specific sets of genes as a tool for downstream
research.

I have a hard time imagining gene drive is useful for improving some species:
how does one determine the utility of one set of genes versus another? we can
not accurately reflect the real world in a lab environment to determine if
some change is a net advantage or net disadvantage over all environments,
situations a species faces. I agree it will be possible to assess the
performance of traits in a lab benchmark, but then it's obvious we are over
fitting to the genetic fitness of pulling a lever, or running in a wheel etc,
and disregarding the cost of the change on all other functions the organism
would face in a representative test. The real world with millions or billions
of creatures is a much faster and parallellized test, i.e. a lab with space
for 1000 mice, could in theory face 1000 micedays per day of artificial
selection, while those in the wild are performing giga micedays per day of
natural selection over the whole challenge set without overfitting...

Again, I _do see_ the utility for breeding selective traits and downstream
learning about the functions of the genome in a cheaper way compared to fifty
fifty coin flip breeding...

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wonderwonder
There are quite a few useful applications. Sickle Cell anemia is caused by a
recessive gene, "Recessive means that two copies of the gene are necessary to
have the trait, one inherited from the mother, and one from the father." If we
code the gene out, no more Sickle Cell. There are also a plethora of
degenerative diseases such as Huntington's that are caused by a defect in a
single gene that this could potentially help eliminate. I would think
essentially any disease that can be genetically tested for could be
potentially cured by the application of gene drives.

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DoctorOetker
what keeps sickle cell anemia in the gene pool? is there some rare beneficial
aspect?

or is it because natural selection acts largely on chromosomes instead of
genes, and the other variants of the chromosomes have similar negative
imperfections? or is it because the chromosome variants that propagate sickle
cell anemia contain a different gene that is comparatively better than the
equivalent gene on some of the non SCA carrying chromosomes?

i.e. chromosome binding of genes forces natural selection to largely take the
good with the bad genes, without cherry picking genes within chromosomes, and
mostly operates on chromosome fitness as opposed to gene fitness?

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pjscott
Being heterozygous for the sickle cell trait gives some protection against
malaria, which explains why the two tend to be common in the same parts of the
world:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterozygote_advantage#Sickle-...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterozygote_advantage#Sickle-
cell_anemia)

(Nicely guessed, by the way!)

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DoctorOetker
thanks for pointing this out!

does this mene using gene drive to expell SCA alleles from the gene pool would
result in a higher malaria rate? it would seem that if one could put both SCA
and non-SCA alleles in the same chromosome the advantage would be
unconditional?

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NotAnEconomist
This is one of the many existential risk vectors we face as a species.

It's also disturbing that the same people who brought us widespread hormone-
like chemicals leeching into our food are arguing that this, too, is good for
us.

Scientists are definitely batting low on responsible R+D and not causing
society-wide or global damage through their amoral-to-immoral, ego-stroking
work.

But sure. It's about mosquitoes and not some post-doc trying to be alpha nerd
to the point they're willing to endanger the species.

> Yet what first drew the developmental biologist Kimberly Cooper to dabble in
> gene drive technology for mice was not conservation but evolution. In her
> laboratory at UCSD, she and her colleagues study the evolution of the
> jerboa, a long-legged rodent with a jumping, bipedal gait, which diverged
> from the mouse lineage tens of millions of years ago. Cooper and her
> colleagues are trying to find the unknown combination of genetic changes
> responsible for that evolutionary transformation by making lab mice carry
> incrementally more jerboa traits.

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chr1
> It's also disturbing that the same people who brought us widespread hormone-
> like chemicals leeching into our food are arguing that this, too, is good
> for us.

I am not sure this argument works, because it's continuation is that "they
also brought us autism inducing vaccines, cancer inducing wifi, and potato
fish hybrids that are evil in some vague way".

Whether you like it or not eliminating mosquitos, colorado beetle, etc. will
help billions of people to live better lives, and your ad hominem at "some
post-doc trying to be alpha nerd" is out of place, because no matter their
motives, the work of people like this is what allows us to write things on
screen, instead of sitting in a cave.

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crazynick4
> I am not sure this argument works, because it's continuation is that "they
> also brought us autism inducing vaccines, cancer inducing wifi, and potato
> fish hybrids that are evil in some vague way".

Just because wifi doesn't induce cancer doesn't mean it's a good idea to have
plastic leeching into our water. I don't see the correlation.

Also, I should add that messing with the balance of an ecosystem can have
drastic unforeseen consequences. China decided to get rid of sparrows (or some
other small bird) mid-20th century, and for the next few years they were
struck with famine because there were no birds left to control the locust
population, which then multiplied out of control.

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chr1
There can be unforeseen consequences, that's why nobody advocates to just
randomly create gene drives for all the insects. The targeted species of
mosquito is not the only one, it is an invasive species in many places, and
everywhere there are other mosquitos that can take its place.

Should we use gene drives to eliminate species with caution? Of course! But
does that mean we should not even think about it just because there may be
unforeseen consequences (or as the grandparent comment says: because it is
invented by scientists who also invented plastic, which other people used as
cheap water bottles, and there is an unconfirmed hypothesis about it being
bad)?

I think the answer to this question is clearly no, and the way the grandparent
comment is written is simply antiscience fear-mongering.

~~~
crazynick4
I just think that there needs to be significantly more caution - almost a
pathologically high amount of caution.

Think of it from a software engineering perspective. All the unit tests that
are done to ensure 100% code coverage, all the testing in identical staging
environments, and yet we still have to revert sometimes, once the code is in
production.

And this all still happens in environment where the code is something we wrote
ourselves, is properly and thoroughly documented, with all dependencies and
relationships clearly defined. And still, major problems happen but it's nice
that we can just go to Git and try again.

With genetic engineering, the genetic code was not written by us, has zero
documentation, the relationships are left for us to figure out, and there's no
proper staging environment with a working ecosystem for us to test things in.
We basically deploy straight to production after a few unit tests. So, yes,
definitely I don't think there is currently enough caution being taken.

Of course, the reality is that genetic engineering won't stop, not until we
shoot ourselves in the foot a few times and people realize the seriousness of
it.

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jostmey
These new biotechnologies are eerily reminiscent of what's in the novel "Oryx
and Crake" by Margaret Atwood. In a subplot, an inner circle of biohackers
compete to drive species to complete extinction for fun. It's worth a read

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryx_and_Crake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryx_and_Crake)

