Comment by athom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by athom | Hacker News Reader

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Actually, you wouldn't want to do that. A lot of human cells actually rearrange their genome as part of their normal function. This is how lymphocytes come up with antibodies, for example.

By selecting and rearranging several different coding sequences from three different chromosomes, each lymphocyte develops its own antibody "design", permanently changing its own genome in the process. This is what allows us to develop immunity to a broad range of foreign antigens with a relatively small amount of genetic code. Think of it as an "immune alphabet", if you will. You certainly don't want to interfere with that!

Other rearrangements also occur, some harmful, others not so much. Even if you wanted to target just the bad ones, though, a virus really isn't the tool for it. Your cytoxic T lymphocytes already do that. In fact, what you're really describing isn't all that far off from what we already have. I think we even have mechanisms for genetic error correction and repair, but I'll have to hit the books again to double-check that.

Thanks for the detailed answer, you've given me a bunch of stuff to go read about. My original idea came from something from SENS about moving mitochondrial DNA into the nucleus to take advantage of the better repair systems: http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes/mitosens

Obviously it would be more complex than

    if hash(nuclear DNA) != clean_DNA_hash) die;

but I wonder to what extent the immune system could be enhanced. I wonder if there are some techniques that could be adapted from the computer virus/malware detection field back into biology.

A recent article on creating false-positives for a virus scanner (http://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/aids8064.html) by analysing the signatures makes me think of creating 'virus pre-images' for vaccination.

Other than the specialised cells which manipulate their own genome, would there be value in positively checksumming {D,R}NA, rather than adaptively pattern-matching for the bad ones, which is (I think) how it mostly works now?

Granted, you'd be hindering the evolutionary process by preventing mutation, but if we ever intend to start messing around inside ourselves, the first step would probably be to make sure that whatever we create, it's going to stay that way, or die.

One interesting thing to remember about the human immune system is that its always on - IE it spends more time correctly identifying something as NOT THREAT, than it does spending time finding THREAT. Mucking about with this could have extreme consequences, a la auto-immune diseases for example.

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