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Comment by bobwaycott | Hacker News Reader

> Or we could freeze a sample of DNA when we are young to ensure we have a non-mutated cell-line available for therapy.

So we just need some light, paradox-correcting time travel for those of us that have presumably passed the point of freezing young-enough DNA. :)

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;)

We could just use statistics.

Example: the DNA has 3.2*10^9 base pairs. We have trillions of cells. Even if each cell division introduced 1000 mutations, the cells would hit the Hayflick Limit at around 60 divisions. The last generation of a cell line would have 60000 mutations on average and the other cells less so.

It's nothing compared to the size of the DNA. I can't go through with the calculation right now but my guess is that it wouldn't take more than a billion cells to get to your birth DNA.

That part of my argument was just an easy way to deal with the writer's assumptions.

Also - we likely could correct most of the damage by sequencing only one or a few cells. Almost all human genetic variation is in a relatively small number of well known locations in the genome - if we assume mutations occur at random locations, we can fix almost all of them by looking at any reference genome.

If something is missing replace with frog DNA. Should not cause any problems.

Cool, I've always wanted to procreate without the pesky inconvenience of sex... ;)

I'd rather use software to error/spell check my genome, and slowly edit to improve over time with crispr. No need to focus on my genome at birth.

I really love the error/spellcheck analogy.

Thanks! I wish I could take credit, but I recall reading it in a passage about future tech possibilities in the book "Superintelligence":

https://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-...

Oh, nice. I hadn't heard of this book before. Thanks for the pointer. I'll have to check it out.

I'm going to die from a bad implementation of bitcopy(). Great.

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