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Comment by aperrien | Hacker News Reader

Optogenetics possibly provides a solution to the interface problem. When you can use light to read from and send signals to neurons, you don't have to worry about scar tissue at all, as far as I know.

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I don't think optogenetics is feasible for human BCI. Optogenetics requires one to express channelrhodopsin proteins in the neurons of interest - which means you need to genetically modify the human at birth. We know how to do this in mice, but not humans since the gene expression pathway for neural proteins in humans is poorly understood (unlike mice and zebrafish). Even with optimal designer baby scenarios, there's no hope for us adults; gene-editing therapies for adults is way harder and we'll likely be long dead before we see anything close.

CRISPR techniques allow us to modify gene expression in organisms long after birth; it has been heavily used in adult animals, but I don't think it's been used in humans just yet.

CRISPR is cool, but isn't the challenge of adult genome editing bottlenecked by the delivery vehicle? Last time I checked it's still hard to deliver viral vectors past the blood-brain barrier. Does CRISPR have a unique solution to that? I also would imagine that a "BCI" optogenetic adapter would be so massive that payload size alone (never mind electric properties) would never make it past the BBB.

You don't need to genetically modify an organism at birth to use optogenetics.

But it is not applicable to humans because in order to use it with human brain one has to modify genes and breed humans from embrions with modified genes.

CRISPR techniques allow for editing genes of adult organisms.

Here's a good video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAhjPd4uNFY

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