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Re:Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA by chiefalchemist on Saturday December 22, 2018 @03:41PM (#18742351)
That's not only a layperson's POV. There was an article in The Atlantic (approx a year+ ago) - which I've looked for an cannot find (sorry) - on a scientist who long to short "I don't think things (i.e., DNA) are what most science thinks it is." Much like you he said, "it's not this simple. the mesh is more complex and has multiple currently unforeseen dependencies." Obviously, I'm paraphrasing.

And every month since I've read something that supports this and undermine the current conventional wisdom / proof.

Re:Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA by akiselev on Saturday December 22, 2018 @04:57PM (#18742682)
It's not so much conventional wisdom as predominant wishful thinking. Everyone hypes up the possibilities for their piece of the grants, investors, and the media attention but every geneticist I've had a private conversation with has been little more than cautiously excited. CRISPR is the genetic equivalent to their first binary editor but the complexities of epigenetics and expression machinery have long been taught (and why everyone is so excited about it), as well as the giant missing pieces in embryology where we don't even have a cursory understanding of how to bootstrap an organism from a genome without artificially inseminating a very closely related species.