Comment by 0xDEFC0DE | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xDEFC0DE | Hacker News Reader

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Can't say for sure since I'm not in this field, but some reddit research led to this:

>Whether acute klotho elevation represents a strategy that can rapidly enhance cognition, motor functions, and/or induce brain resilience is a gap in our knowledge of its therapeutic potential. Here we show that αKL-F, a fragment of the α-klotho protein similar to its secreted form, can acutely improve cognitive and motor functions following peripheral administration. It does so despite apparent impermeability to the blood-brain barrier in young, aging, and hSYN transgenic mice. Further investigation of αKL-F-mediated molecular mechanisms revealed activation of glutamatergic signaling and enhancement of synaptic plasticity.

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(17)309...

So the research around klotho may produce something which doesn't actually need to cross the BBB as a retail drug, but on a simultaneous front, we have gene manipulation via CRISPR that would also increase klotho production.

You want to CRISPR yourself to gain a few IQ points?

Anyways that's at the least two decades away if even that, for what can at best be defined as recreational gene therapy.

>You want to CRISPR yourself to gain a few IQ points?

Depends on the side effects, depends if you can safely and reliably reverse the decision.

Would I personally be patient zero? No, not likely. Will someone be patient zero? Yeah, of course, there's always people willing to be on a new frontier.

> depends if you can safely and reliably reverse the decision

Can you safely and reliably reverse a find/replace on a program's source? Generally, unless you have a backup, the answer is no. There's also a lack of any kind of guarantee that the resulting program will compile, or if it does, that it will run without any more bugs than it had before.

CRISPR is just about the same way. We need to do research in ethical and humane ways, ways that balance the possible gains with the possible losses. We've already had an incident where human DNA was edited, and not particularly ethically or responsibly. I'd really wish that people not bring sci-fi futurist fantasy thinking to this particular table.

> Can you safely and reliably reverse a find/replace on a program's source? Generally, unless you have a backup, the answer is no.

Bad analogy as source code is one of the things that is super easy to reliably reverse anything as it is always in version control.

I think in this context that would count as having a backup

You can and I have done so, it's just quite difficult when you don't have backups so we usually try not to do this.

> You want to CRISPR yourself to gain a few IQ points?

Would you CRISPR yourself to not get Alzheimers or Dementia when you get old?

Nope. CRISPR is a research tool, not a therapy.

Hell, not OP, but I'd CRISPR myself to get rid of a pimple.

Making myself smarter or healthier or stronger would be a no-brainer.

I think you're overlooking the implication that modifying your genes the way CRISPR does is never going to be risk-free. The question probably isn't "Would you get rid of a pimple if there were no other consequences?" but more like "Would you accept a 2% risk of slow, painful death to get rid of a pimple?"

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