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Comment by nordsieck | Hacker News Reader

> This was the immediate concern shared by me and several genomics researchers - gene variants that are often shown to be good for one thing may be bad for another.

I think it's certainly possible to get mixed or even bad results with gene editing by trying to push the technology farther than we really understand.

That being said, the basic priority for gene editing is probably to prevent/reverse bad genetic conditions that we understand well. No more downs syndrome.

That seems to be an unmitigated win to me.

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One thing that worries me is, that by attempting to prevent and/or reverse one set of conditions, other issues may pop up because of adding/removing/changing something we don't understand the full functionality of and how it interacts with other parts of DNA.

DNA looks mightily like an extreme and profoundly complicated, complex piece of programming, with unnecessary redundancies removed, and useful redundancies left in, as well pieces of code that call lots of other pieces, as well as being called by others.

If the genome is analogous to a computer binary... we don't understand the file format, and how it is read and interpreted.

Nature knows far-and-away better than we do how to make it all work 99.99% of the time, with occasional errors due to radiation, poisoning, interbreeding being accounted for so that things don't get out of hand.

Well, these assumptions held... until we intelligently stupid creatures came along, using our intelligence to create dangerous tools that are most abused by those least worthy to wield them...

We understand a lot of about the DNA ‘file format’ and how it works. That’s been a major priority of research.

Nature does not ‘know how’ to make it work 99.99% of the time. Nature very frequently aborts pregnancy’s when any number of things go wrong. Getting all the way to birth is a huge checksum that validates the majority of critical DNA.

Which gets it the larger point. Evolution focuses more on species propagation than individuals.

It could be argued that miscarriages due to genetics that are incompatible with life to whatever degree are nature getting it right.

That’s a near tautology.

Cell division is one of those things you need or get right or you don’t get a pregnancy.

It’s not like the mother needs or do anything at that point, the result is just death by default.

> We understand a lot of about the DNA ‘file format’ and how it works. That’s been a major priority of research.

We may understand a lot, but nowhere near enough to be able to confidently edit DNA, and know that it won't causes a ton of unforeseen issues down the line.

We don't know what we don't know ~ that is, as much as we like to believe that we understand a lot about DNA and how it works, odd things pop up all the time that prove us wrong. I dare say that there are far deeper mysteries about DNA that we have no current understanding of.

> Nature does not ‘know how’ to make it work 99.99% of the time. Nature very frequently aborts pregnancy’s when any number of things go wrong. Getting all the way to birth is a huge checksum that validates the majority of critical DNA.

This is merely an example of nature getting it right ~ abort if there are serious issues.

> Which gets it the larger point. Evolution focuses more on species propagation than individuals.

It is about both ~ the individual matters most ~ species propagation doesn't even register in importance to a majority of individuals. Having children does. They're subtly different ideas.

> confidently edit DNA, and know that it won't causes a ton of unforeseen issues down the line.

That’s a question of code not file format. I may understand C, but that does not mean I can edit any C program safely.

> abort if there are serious issues.

That stance suggests there is no way to fail as death is the worst option. But even that fails as a significant number of women died due to pregnancy or birth before modern medicine. Even now pregnancy’s are higher risk than most things people do.

The genome is spooky action at a distance. A lot of physical traits seem connected to personality which indicates studies are insufficiently rigorous.

Personality presupposes so many things working that you have basically won at that point.

Nope. Many people both have personalities, and need staff looking after them 24/7. Some of them can't even speak.

They are a tiny fraction of people who died from DNA issues.

People with personalities also have neurons and wonder of wonders a centural nervous system.

PS: It’s hard to get good numbers for this stuff as but many things like drug use my pregnant mothers can cause significant developmental issues. But, everyone has several random mutations and mental problems from them seem to be far less common than other issues. Especially when you exclude things getting passed down over time and just look at new mutations.

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