Re:Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA
by lukeschlather on Saturday December 22, 2018 @03:44PM
(#18742362)
I don't think it's really accurate to describe selective breeding as restricting how you can modify the underlying data. I'd rather say that the executable itself contains layer upon layer of consistency checks so if you modify it too much it will just refuse to "boot up." In fact selective breeding relies heavily on this mechanism since it can create hundreds or even millions of nonviable organisms for every viable organism.
If the consistency checks in the natural genome don't stop you, pretty much by definition whatever you're doing could happen through an unlikely coincidence of selective breeding (especially if you involve a wild virus to take the place of the lab virus.)
Re:Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA
by pskk on Saturday December 22, 2018 @03:24PM
(#18742279)
I was trying to reason about CRISPR (and other editing methods) and try to get an analogy. It sounds a lot like an efficient hex editor. Sure you can edit parts of the "code" but we don't have any debuggers readily available. We can edit randomly and "run" the code, but as far as I know that's about it.
Re:Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA
by saltcured on Saturday December 22, 2018 @04:18PM
(#18742498)
It's not a perfect analogy, but I think CRISPR is a bit like a regexp-replace edit function being used to hot-patch your live system memory. It has an extremely narrow pattern-recognition buffer, and you are gambling that you found a sufficiently unique signature at your edit point(s) so that it doesn't also corrupt unrelated parts of your system image that happen to match the same pattern.
In the case of genetics, we have a some understanding, but it is fairly limited. There is real potential for unexpected harm, given how much we don't know and the complexity of the code. Of course, we can do some amazing things with the parts we do understand.
Selecting breeding is like using a high level GUI that is decently functional. Like most GUIs, it significantly restricts how you can modify the underlying data. The plus side is that it is harder to put the data in a bad or dangerous state using only the controls offered by the GUI.