Science Memes

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meow >:) (lemmynsfw.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (17 children)

Lmao, who's this guy?

[–] [email protected] 115 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (14 children)

He was found guilty of medical malpractice after gene editing babies by treating their embryos with CRISPR/Cas9. He claims that he was trying to make them resistant to HIV, and that medical ethics are preventing cures from being discovered, but his critics say that we know CRISPR is too unreliable to use on a genome the size of a human's, and is more likely to introduce dangerous mutations than apply the intended change, hence why no one else has done this before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Ok, but, does it really not work, or like, it's just that you would have to run it in a batch and kill the bad cells, which could be unethical on human embryos?

Like, could we grow legs on a lungfish (which Google says has a larger genome than humans) using CRISPR-cas9 if we did not care about botched embryos?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

You'd need to test every cell in the embryo to be sure none of them had off-target mutations, and DNA sequencing doesn't leave the cell alive, so you can't prove it worked without killing the embryo. He tested some of the cells and discarded embryos where those cells were damaged, but there's no way to know if the untested cells in the embryos were fine, and given what we know about the reliability, it's more likely that there are problems than not.

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