Scientists have put human brain genes in monkeys | Hacker News Reader

Scientists have put human brain genes in monkeys

technologyreview.com

63 pointsVaslo29 comments

> “Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.” (Thief of Time - Sir Terry Pratchett).

That's a quote that I find myself thinking about at least once or twice a month.

The flip side of that is: "Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Good god that quote is incredible.

If you've never read Terry Pratchett's books you should check them out.

I'd love to be able to read each for the first time again.

In a very large part he formed my entire worldview from a comedic series set in a fantasy world (and I don't much like Fantasy as a genre), they are sublime.

Douglas Adams did this for me, but science fiction instead of fantasy

Understandable and they are often compared.

For me it’s pratchett (strangely because I’m a massive sci-fi fan), his world is deeper, richer and the comedy is a backdrop to his view of the world expressed through fully realised and nuanced characters (while still very funny).

I can’t imagine anyone ever building a more fully imagined world than discworld, not least because few authors write 41 novels in their lifetime (that’s just the Discworld - he wrote others, one has omnipotent world builders carefully putting in fossils, one whom gets in trouble for trying to sneak in a fossil holding a sign saying “ban nuclear testing” that was the first of his works I read an 9 year old me thought that was hilarious).

I suspect a fan of either would find much to like in the other though :).

This is also why I hypothesize that at least one human clone is likely to exist or have existed. Cloning technology exists, and humans have therefore probably tried it somewhere.

Cloning primates is difficult because the proteins that guide chromosomes during cell division are not scattered throughout the cell like for other mammals, and this causes problems when the nucleus of an egg cell is replaced[1]

Researchers only reported successful cloning of monkeys in January 2018 [2]. (So if cloned humans exist already, they were likely born in the last few months.)

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2003/04/problem-cloning-prim...

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-01027-z

Thank you for the links. I had wrongly assumed cloning humans would be pretty much the same as cloning sheep.

Quoting the second article:

“Technically, there is no barrier to human cloning,” says ION director Mu-Ming Poo, who is a co-author of the study."

It would seem extremely likely the quote is applicable now. The paint is drying so to speak.

That is an interesting issue. However, there is another technique to create cloned mammals that has is used industrially to create non chimeric mice from embryonic stem cell cultures. A donor blastocyst is used as a host. At a particular stage of development, implanting a number of ES cells from the desired clone into the center of the blastocyst induces the donor blastocyst to develop into the placenta, while the ES cells continue development as the fetus. This allows for engineering of the ES cells independently, without failure prone nuclear transfer. It would be interesting to know if this would work in primates. It may be difficult to maintain the ES cell cultures. It might also be riskier in some sense. I'm curious what others know about this.

Humans have an inner need to see their actions cause effects, so anything that requires low effort but has an outsized effect is going to be taken advantage of. I think that’s why you see otherwise pointless vandalism and why if you leave an insecure website out in the wild eventually someone will hack it.

Made me think of this sketch based on a mediocre sci-fi movie[1] from a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7rzIwrEqpw

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(2009_film)

Some people just want to watch the world burn

There have been a few attempts to create a human/chimpanzee hybrid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanzee

Found this in an old version of the page, after it was referenced in one of the citations. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Humanzee&diff=pre...

> "The draft regulations, issued by the National Health Commission on 26 February, state that gene editing in any type of cell that will end up in humans, including embryos, will need the commission’s approval, as will other high-risk biomedical procedures."

First loophole in the proposed regulation[0]?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00773-y

So any gene editing of a cell that ends up somewhere else, but with human components, is good. I guess you can learn a lot that way.

"Sounds like a good idea."

"Because... everything is a great idea...?"

"Exactly!"

Am I the only one thinking of Planet of Apes?

More complete article: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613277/chinese-scientists...

Thanks, we've updated the link from https://www.brecorder.com/2019/04/11/488194/scientists-put-h....

“Planet of the Apes” is not part of the title.

Thanks! Removed.

It doesn't sounds like an smart move.

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