He explained CRISPR as "one of the crucial technologies we don't yet have the wisdom to wield"
I recently learned (I believe on here, in the past week), CRISPR was used to develop a genetic treatment on the first human patient to solve an inherently genetic disorder.
I'm honestly terrified we're accelerating our technology faster than our societies can adapt to the potential threats they may pose.
They are different technologies but zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) but they both do DNA editing.
I think the original warning is still valid.
We are on the cups of this being an actual treatment. My niece and mife's MS might be next.
This is a correct and useful analogy. Nonetheless, biologists are excited about CRISPR because, to continue your analogy, we were previously working with spears. And now we have bullets. Still don't know where to quite fire them yet. But it's a nontrivial advance.
My naivete surrounded me. I didn't realize that even though there was a high output of genetic marker tests that very few if of them would result in viable CRISPR targets.
There's 60K genetic marker tests on the market.
8 to 10 new ones come out each day.
Humanity has little hope of figuring out the sort of "druggable targets."
Genome Wide Association Studies aren't like websites or apps waiting to be optimized with more data.
The more data you feed in the more obfuscated the truth becomes.
Drug discovery is hard and CRISPR modifications are technology way ahead of clear problem framing.
https://omicsomics.blogspot.com/2017/03/targets-drugability-...
For 12 years, I've had a chronic autoimmune disorder that I had hoped would be solved by the likes of a massive genetic dataset of Ulcerative Colitis twins that had been separated at birth where one twin had the disease and the other didn't.
I had hoped that CRISPR would be the solution given enough problem context from a solid GWAS, but this was foolish.
Our best bets in biotech are not in the latest technologies, they are in ensuring that basic science, phase 0, and phase 1 trials get large unfettered funding.
I had hoped Liz Parrish's outfit would make leaps and bounds in genetic modification for patients like me, but that ended up being baloney. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11560943
CRISPR technologies are like bullets to attack problems, but the operator is always increasingly blind. Bonferroni Corrections abound and family wise error rate are unforgiving in all things related to GWAS studies.