How DNA functions is far more complicated than how current accepted science pictures it.
1 - Certainly seems like he might be onto something.
2 - If so, could the use of CRISPR be premature, if not dangerous?
This is really an ill-posed question. First off, CRISPR is a tool. Its novelty is the fact that it makes an experiment vastly simpler and more reliable — but, fundamentally, the experiment was already possible beforehand. So CRISPR itself isn’t dangerous. At most, modifying genetic material could be.
Secondly, genetic modification — whether by CRISPR or other methods — is an extremely generic process. Sure, it could be dangerous, if you use it to perform dangerous experiments. Can it have unintended side-effects? Sure, we already know about those. In fact, one of the great things about CRISPR is that it drastically decreases side-effects.
But is CRISPR dangerous specifically because we underestimate the complexity of DNA? No. Nothing about CRISPR assumes that we know all biological processes that involve DNA. In fact, we know that we don’t know them all.
Lastly, somebody with an “alt view on DNA” immediately sounds like a crackpot with a poor handle on modern biology. That may sound harsh but biology is a science, not a pseudoscience or protoscience (or magic): we’re moving within some relatively fixed boundaries imposed by experimentation and evidence. Uncertainty or lack of knowledge isn’t a free-for-all to insert wild speculations that usually amount to “everything we know is wrong”. It’s very rare that “everything we know turns out to be wrong”. In reality, subsequent findings refine existing ones, or disprove specific hypotheses. They don’t disprove an established field. Even something as revolutionary as Einstein’s theory of relativity didn’t do that: gravity continued to function just fine afterwards. Newton continues to be taught in school, because Newton’s laws continue to be relevant.
I agree with your overall point but I take slight issue with this statement.
I am not biologically educated, but I am biological. I have no idea what my conscious is or why/how it works, even though I do know that I exist. And neither do you, nor anyone.
To me, that is the classic definition of magic. This differs from eg electronics, physics etc, because I am biological. I have a personal perspective on it, in a manner that I could never with electronics, physics etc. Ie. I can readily understand how far away from understanding the biological process humanity is.
However, how would you class yourself:
- biological
- electrical
- chemical
- etc
It would be biological for me, although I know I am all the above.
The layers don’t stop because you choose one: you are biological, because you’re chemical, because you’re physical (which is more like saying you’re electrical).
Ie. Laws of physics govern the laws of chemistry and the first couple are chiseled in stone for the most part. Biology, that is to physics what psychology is to surgery (perhaps mathematics is a batter analogy).
You can’t choose that you are ‘just’ biological because it is the emergent property of deeper systems of rules.
Consciousness, now that is a debate for the philosophers.
biology has everything to do with physics and electronics (and chemistry etc).
it’s just a frame of reference that decides what you choose to classify as one or the other. But the laws of nature are consistent no matter what you’re choosing to call it or which aspect of it you’re addressing.
In my opinion, this is the wrong way to frame this. We know there are unintended side-effects, but you make it sound like we already know what we don't know. Therefore, everything is relatively safe... which can't logically be true.
You can't gauge the specific danger or benefit of the unknown.
I’m not claiming to. All I’m saying is that “CRISPR [isn’t] dangerous specifically because we underestimate the complexity of DNA”.
In the context of this discussion I can go much further, though: the physiological presence of i-motifs doesn’t change the hazard or risk of CRISPR whatsoever. We know this because our risk assessment of CRISPR never relied on the non-existence of i-motifs.
We aren't creating new genetic code ex nihilo (yet).
So understanding the nuances of how different forms of genes influence outcomes is less important than knowing that they do. And what the naturally-occurring "correct" form looks like.
Numerous diseases have a genetic component; some people have a higher risk of getting a disease due to their genetic makeup. Often a significant amount of the risk is attributed to a 'single nucleotide polymorphism' or 'SNP' (this is known to be true for diseases like sickle-cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer's disease, and others).
If we could alter this SNP however, from the disease-associated nucleotide to the control nucleotide, theoretically this would substantially reduce the risk of getting that disease. CRISPR-Cas9 allows us to do that. This process relies on fabricating an RNA-guide sequence to match the segment of DNA we want edited; and if we are careful, we make sure this Guide RNA matches ONLY this segment of DNA and nowhere else in the genome. If the Guide RNA matches some other random segment of DNA, it will result in 'off-target' edits. Now, this shouldn't really be an issue if we perform whole-genome sequencing on an individual prior to making the Guide RNA. We can just make sure the Guide RNA doesn't match anywhere else in their genome and all is well, right?! Well... maybe not. Maybe these i-Motifs will fuck us over like in the picture I linked above.
Knowing about the existence of unintended side-effects is not the same as predicting their frequency. Ultimately the reduction of risk comes from hedging against an expected frequency of risk, something that we are still learning how to do, or else CRISPR would already be a widespread mode of therapeutic treatment.
It seems what you're actually trying to argue against is becoming bearish on new technology due to risk, but you're doing this with posturing that is ungrounded in both the details of the biology and the risk.
Yes.
> or else CRISPR would already be a widespread mode of therapeutic treatment
You underestimate how long it takes for anything to get from fundamental research to treatment. Not just because of risk. And CRISPR is already in extremely widespread use as a molecular biology tool.
How so? And if so, why is CRISPR such a big deal?
Not being a jerk. I'm truly interested in filling the blindspot in my "software."
That said, the gist of the guy / article was (and I'm spitballing) CRISPR is an over-simplistic view of DNA. Sure, it might work for a couple of things, but to presume that pov / lens is OSFA is likely not correct.
> "Lastly, somebody with an “alt view on DNA” immediately sounds like a crackpot with a poor handle on modern biology."
Right. Because the world was and still is flat? SMH
If I had $20 for every crackpot in the history of science I'm be FU money wealthy :) __The whole point of my comment_ was to say this new tread/artice, along with the mentioned article in The Atlantic seems to be saying it's __possible__ our understanding of our current understanding of science is off-base.
That's not crackpot. That's science.
My understanding is that CRISPR is popular because it is much simpler and cheaper than other previously available methods
"So what makes CRISPR so special?
It's much easier to employ than older gene editing technologies, and it also has a very high success rate.
Because it is more user-friendly to the average scientist, it has opened the door to all kinds of research that previously would have been too expensive or required too much time to carry out." [1]
[1] http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-crispr-c...
With other gene editing techniques, such as TALENs (and others before that).
> And if so, why is CRISPR such a big deal?
CRISPR/Cas9 is a big deal because it makes gene editing a lot easier and less error-prone (and hence cheaper, etc.). But (and not to diminish the tremendous scientific achievement behind the technique) the hype in the press around this technique is only partially warranted, and a lot is getting lost in translation. Part of the reason why CRISPR specifically is a big deal in the popular press is due to the extremely dirty fight for its exclusive patent (and the Nobel prize for its discovery): To gear up support for their side, both institutes involved created substantial media coverage that far exceeds what new discoveries normally get.
> CRISPR is an over-simplistic view of DNA
I would really like to read that original article because stated like this, the claim is simply incorrect.
> Right. Because the world was and still is flat? SMH
I honestly don’t know what you mean by the rest of your comment. But it’s worth noting that, in the modern history of science (i.e. since doing something that actually deserves that name), crackpots have virtually never been right. Progress (even paradigm shifts) came always from experts inside the field. The only near-counter-examples I can think of are Semmelweis (but that was before modern biology existed, and even he was an expert in his field), and Wegener (likewise, for continental drift). It’s easy to assert that science doesn’t have all the answers, and that theories are a temporary view of the world that’s going to be proved wrong in the future. But this has never been accomplished by people who doubt the veracity of extremely well established facts.
Our knowledge of DNA is far from complete. But the things we know about it today will stick around: they have been tested by millions of experiments, performed around the globe each day. Paradigm shifts will come because we will discover new things about it, not because we’ll disprove established facts.
My intro to science and molecular science was first massively sparked by an E. coli article I randomly jumped to in the early stages of Wikipedia. It talked about error correcting proteins, and versions of this and that, and I thought holy shit the cell is a computer.
As I came to understand more of molecular biology I was fortunate to find it very easy to visualise and understand not just the idea that the theories and molecular pathways we understand are an amazing set of dominos that have to fall in a particular order but also the stochastic relationship of them all - on, off, according to molecular affinities, and those are just the pathways we have been able to understand by way of intelligent experiments and human ingenuity.
To jump radically back on topic - There have to be and are so many more layers to how the code that builds life executes that we don’t understand that it is pure arrogance to assume that we understand the system enough to perfectly execute any modifications to it. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong to look down the rabbit hole, after all, that’s all we’ve ever done
This is not relevant in the context of gene therapy, where we only change one gene or a small number of genes. From that paper, we would expect that a single change would have a tiny, negligible effect on unrelated genes.
Moreover, the initial targets for CRISPR therapies aim to correct mutations. For example, cystic fibrosis is caused by a point mutation in the gene for a mucus protein. CRISPR would be used to restore the genotype that all healthy people have. Since healthy people have this gene, side effects are unlikely. (However, we do expect side effects from other mechanisms such as immune rejection.)
We might find out some day that there's some behavior of DNA and DNA-binding proteins that CRISPR interferes with, but if it does exist, the effect has to be small enough that we wouldn't notice it.
edit: I should clarify, there's still work left to do to ensure CRISPR's safety. It needs to be looked at in more cell types, and work in somatic cells in adult organisms is still in its early days. My point is just that putting CRISPR into a cell, in some scenarios, doesn't cause substantial problems.
So, specifically: i-motif structures were understood experimentally. They had never been detected in vivo before, and doing so constitutes great science and a solid find, but no: this isn't something out of left field that our naive hubristic minds couldn't conceive. These scientists found i-motif in vivo because they were actively looking for it.
Beyond that, what you say is true of course, but only in a specious sense that applies to every field of science. The whole point to doing these experiments is that we don't understand things completely and want to. I mean, would you argue against air flight in 1903 based on the fact that a computational framework for dealing with the Navier-Stokes equations was still decades in the future?
From what I learned in courses on edX (e.g. MITs Eric Lander's "Introduction to Biology" or RiceX BIOC300.2x "DNA: Biology's Genetic Code"), that is already well known and taught. Scientists are not naive and overconfident in their knowledge, individual examples to the contrary notwithstanding. Guess what - they teach what is actually reliably and verifiably known. It's just a bit too much to expect scientists to work with methods and knowledge they don't even know exist yet, or even to teach them - but that doesn't mean they think they already know it all.
Science is full of this exact thing: Layer upon layer of models. Bohr's atom model is very far from what a physics student learns these days. The Newton universe vs. the relativity universe. Chemical bonds in high-school, then in early university chemistry courses, and then what physicists work with who study bonding seems like it comes from entirely different universes, although it all describes the same thing.
Same with DNA. The more courses you take the more the knowledge resembles a Mandelbrot set image. Actually, that's a horrible analogy, because in that image when you go deeper you still get similar structures, but when you go deeper in science the same thing starts looking very different. The reason why I still use this analogy is because the part that seems applicable and important is that you can go deeper and deeper and deeper and... (etc.) However, as far as I could tell from just a few courses that complexity already is being taught as far as this is possible (as I mentioned above, it's hard to teach "unknown unknowns", to quote a famous American politician philosopher /s ).
What you should keep in mind though is that on each level of knowledge there are a lot - often A LOT - of experiments and applications of that level of knowledge that have been shown to work reliably and well. It's just that new levels of knowledge (and models) open up new possibilities. "Every model is wrong, some models are useful", I only understood what that means when I learned more and more and realized how useless the word "truth" is when attempted to be used in absolute terms. Each model is "true" for the things it successfully and reliably predicts, and for the applications it makes possible. Finding deeper models does not invalidate what you already learned and used successfully.
I would suggest seeing science not as the search for "the one final truth". As practised, it is far more practical (yes, same word twice, deliberately). You find something, you demonstrate that it works, you show that it is useful ("you" is many people), you move on. "If you want 'truth' you are in the wrong lecture, philosophy is down the hall" is a sentence I remember to have read having been said a (biology? physics?) professor when he started the first freshman lecture. By concentrating on what you can demonstrate you don't need to have "the final truth" before you are able to do anything useful. You go step by step, and while you don't know if there ever is a final word that does not really matter. That means your statement
> How DNA functions is far more complicated than how current accepted science pictures it.
actually already is built into science. You can always assume that there is much more that you are not yet aware of.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/its-like...