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Comment by markdown | Hacker News Reader

Why do people even share this sort of news anymore. I don't think I've ever read an article about novel medical science that is supposed to treat [bad disease] that eventuated in any actual treatment or cure.

The actual cure is perpetually a decade away.

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Because it's interesting science. Isn't that a good enough reason? It may work out to something amazing or it may not, but thinking about it is cool either way.

Are articles about black holes pointless because in our lifetimes it's extremely unlikely that any human being will ever observe a black hole directly or do any engineering involving black holes?

That's because the process to put a novel technology on the market takes approximately 10 years. Clinical trials are long, but new tech do get there

You didn't answer my question. Yes, of course clinical trials take forever. Why share this article here or anywhere? There is no cure or treatment for anything mentioned in the article. There might be one, but if there is it's a decade away. How is that news?

It's like someone writing an article about a few people potentially being President of the USA a decade from now. Except nobody is actually named in the article. Would you share such an article?

Is there a lot of money invested in CRISPR? Is this all about building hype for CRISPR? Because I can't think of another motive.

It's also a lot like an announcement of any other tool of great importance: a new programming language, a new rocket engine, a new alloy, a new psychological principle - or any other discovery of import. It's profoundly interesting to watch, understand, and organize those discoveries (as news) - precisely so the more pragmatic downstream affects can be achieved.

Those who can put those various discoveries together are those that will be the ones that use those tools in conjunction in order to benefit everyone. But how are they to know about them if the discoveries themselves 'are not news'?

The article couldn't have been shared here simply because the submitter found it interesting and thought others here might feel similarly?

Even if it doesn't lead to a medical treatment, the impact of CRISPR on everyday biomedical research has already been enormous - it's probably the biggest advance in molecular biology lab techniques in the past decade. Getting it to work in humans is of course a huge project, and we can expect many failures along the way, but genetic modification is vastly easier than it was 10 years ago, when we barely had any idea how to make these kinds of changes. Every improvement to the technology makes it that much more likely that we'll see a human application in the near future.

CRISPR has such a vast potential to radically change the world (for good or ill) that any significant advances are going to be newsworthy.

I mean Zinc Finger technology, while not as advanced, is much farther along than CRISPR and has the potential to change the world.

You can read about Sofosbuvir, an actual _cure_ for Hepatitis C, and Zolgensma a novel treatment for spinal muscular atrophy. CRISPR is still very new, this field will be unrecognizable by the end of the next decade.

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