First gene-edited babies claimed in China

Re:First gene-edited babies claimed in China by Jtsummers on Monday November 26, 2018 @09:32AM (#18533572)

You have to live to reproductive age for your genes to carry on. So a genetic difference that improves outcome for adults, but harms children won't be carried on as often (per other comments, this one may improve memory--in mice--but has negative effects related to resisting common diseases like the flu). On the other hand, genes related to cancer perpetuate because their impact often is felt after primary reproductive age (at least historical reproductive age, since we've started having children later in life over the last century).

Additionally, nothing has to be selected (evolutionarily speaking). It's a stochastic process. We could be one base-pair swap away from perpetual youth, and never see it because it just doesn't happen (or when it did happen they died from other circumstances before reproducing sufficiently to spread the genes wide enough to be useful).

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Re:First gene-edited babies claimed in China by dTal on Monday November 26, 2018 @09:55AM (#18533707)

Well, yes and no. We each have 3.2 billion bases and about roughly 100 mutations each, over 100 billion people who've ever lived. That's about 3000 mutations per base pair, so if the eternal-youth mutation was indeed a single base-pair swap away, thousands of people would already have been born with it. Of those, we could expect some decent fraction to have had children. Given that eternal youth confers a staggering reproductive advantage, and we don't have it, it's safe to say that if it exists at all, it's more than a base-pair swap away.

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