Hacker News Reader

Comment by vikramkr | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that the alzheimers consensus is the amyloid beta hypothesis anymore where it's one protein going rogue. Otherwise interesting article, though I disagree with this idea that its "less" like scissors and "more" like malware. They pretty much are molecular scissors, but they're definitely not malware. They're actually the anti-virus system of a bacteria. Calling them malware doesn't make sense as a metaphor (they arent Infcetious etc) and just confuses things more.

View on HN

Yeah I don't think the problem is the metaphor for Crispr, the problem is that we don't really understand most of the stuff it's supposed to be able to cure some day. Crispr is at the end of the day just a tool. If we don't know where to "cut" with Crispr, we can't very well use it to do anything. Now that we know we have the tool to cut, in the future it will probably be very useful, but for all the Crispr hype, it was never really going to be a "nice everything is cured now" like some of the media liked to imply, rather that we have another tool in the box to work towards making use of.

You're not thinking broadly enough. Crispr is already very, very useful for biological research. Thinking just in terms of medicine is far too narrow for such a game-changing biological technology.

No offense intended, but maybe you're not thinking broadly enough? It's a breakthrough technology for biological labs now, sure, but a lab using this to get a bunch of papers or grants or patents really doesn't matter for the general populace in the short term until the research has produced some practical applications.

Agreed, I think the disconnect here might be that the author has no idea how malware works or what malware really is.

If the author had said that crispr based gene drives are malware then I can see that metaphor working, but I don't think that was what was the case here. Also, crispr for neuro diseases isn't just knockouts, there's work with single base change Cas forms and RNA targeting crispr, it's a broad range of tools

And also, the scissor analogy actually works better with the riot analogy. You arent going to stop a riot with scissors, but you could totally use some form of malware to censor social media/knock out communications/etc to prevent the riot from being able to organize. Malware is a constructive thing, it allows you to hijack systems you take over, which is much much much more powerful than some blunt scissors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com