China: A genetic experiment that inserted tardigrade genes into human stem cells | Hacker News Reader

China: A genetic experiment that inserted tardigrade genes into human stem cells

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43 pointsRadixDLT41 comments

This is not exactly new, see this paper from 2016, for example: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12808

Medical science is one field where, assuming your can handle the deaths, ignoring ethics will let you move faster than competitors. You can skip early phases and go right to testing in people, you can try gene editing and just bring embryos to term and check the results. An interesting counter to this is that CCP draws some power from its ability to be seen as a legitimate protector. So losses from overly aggressive medical experimentation will have to be kept quiet.

At some point we will be able to engineer people with more of the positive traits we see all at once, and many fewer defects. If you do it safely at scale first it would make your society more robust, but that is a big “if”.

It is unproven whether genetic “improvements” to intelligence or other traits would make a society like China’s more robust. Conversely there are very few countries with average incomes above $15k per annum that are able to survive as dictatorships, this is often attributed to education levels increasing with wealth. That could indicate that increasing intelligence would make China less stable.

You don't really need to keep things too quiet if everyone understands they will be jailed or disappeared (or worse, their family forever will have negative social credit) for dissent. It's not as if Tiananmen happened in some faraway village with few witnesses.

If everyone knows about something but no one would admit it, does it matter that everyone knows it? The knowledge will go away in a generation. As a dictator it surely is magical.

Even better is to just do the experiments on the vilified. That's how it was done in most of the cases in the 20th century.

The citizenry does't care of its billed as protection from an enemy or a punishment against the enemy.

> assuming your can handle the deaths, ignoring ethics will let you move faster than competitors.

An aside, completely ignoring humans in this story for one minute, that's evolution leaning into a fitness gradient.

We often forget that because of our plastic bubbles and lattes. No big cats with huge claws to run from. But nature guided this process in us for a long time.

"Nature is metal"

People have an intense fear of this sort of thing. It is very deeply wired into our brains to worry about threats from people who are alien to us, and who are also potentially stronger. So if you’re going to make an army of super-human soldiers (or even just citizens) you’d better be sure their performance is so much better that it’s worth alienating every other person on Earth. Given that warfare seems to be moving in the direction of autonomous machines, it’s a little bit difficult to imagine that anybody is going to get a lot of benefit out of this sort of thing, but who knows.

"uncanny valley" - things that appear human but behave wrong/differently are deeply disturbing to us.

I assume this is a evolved defence against mental illness, parasitical infection, or something similar. But it could be aliens ;)

there was quite a long period of pre-history where homo sapiens were living alongside other branches of humans - around 300,000 years ago there could have been as many as 8 (!) other species of humans running around. I imagine we developed the uncanny valley sense during a period like that.

Wow, fascinating. I had never considered that angle before, that the genetically engineered would be "aliens" in the eyes of the public (even on your own "team") and therefore enemies.

I don't know what to draw from it, but it's interesting nonetheless.

You're joking right? This is literally the premise of the entire X-Men franchise. Or pick any trope where regular people develop supernatural powers.

“Positive traits” is subjective. What may be seen as a positive trait in the western world may be considered a negative trait by Chinese Communist Party. The CCP will not want critical thinkers and people rejecting authoritarian power. A positive trait in their eyes is NOT being a critical thinker and NOT rejecting authoritarian power.

Imagine an army of 10 million Chinese soldiers bred with “CCP positive traits” for the purpose of fighting, who follow orders without questioning and sacrifice themselves for any mission, no matter how small or inconsequential. You can squash enemies inside and outside of China. In a perverted sense this also creates a robust society: A robust dictatorship or even world power.

"My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack's muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?"

- Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang (SMAC)

say the line, genejak

What is to stop a future dictator to spead obedient and loyal genes except their family

None. In fact, it's expected to be the Nash equilibrium for nation-states & their leaders: Any leader that doesn't utilize it to create their own loyal army will inevitably encounter internal resistance & therefore be less effective than the leaders that do use it.

The only thing stopping such an event from occurring is the near-universal human moral belief that there's something fundamentally lacking with such loyal citizens. However, for such leaders, there's no such difference.

This line of reasoning can also be used to argue that dictatorships are inevitable, and democracies would never survive against them. Dictators can mobilize vast resources for war, while democracies will suffer in internal conflicts.

Our present world shows that this is not the only equipment possible.

Our present world state is quite a short period compared to the entire human history. For most of the human history, it is the dictators who are the most tactical, brutal and powerful won and we sang songs to praise them. In the future, this current democratic society can all change. No body knows.

I remember a time when stem cell research was an off-limit topic because of the moral issues. Meanwhile, China is beginning to show breakthroughs with human-animal hybrids. Where do most people stand on this issue? Is this concerning at all? Has the genie already left the bottle?

In my mind one of the biggest no-brainers. The upsides are almost unlimited, the downsides seem much smaller than in almost any other controversial field of research. Unlike viral research or weapons research it's not like some half tardigrade-human randomly is going to run out of the lab. We're talking abou the ethics of what, cells in a petri dish?

Radiation resistance, ability to survive better in space, probably a good shot to eliminate a lot of diseases, maybe fewer usage of resources, better cognitive function (in an age where people are afraid of machines outpacing us), solving fertility issues that seem to get more urgent. Compared to a lot of other questionable research these are tangible issues.

>I remember a time when stem cell research was an off-limit topic because of the moral issues.

IIRC there were two points of contention. The first being the origins of embryonic stem cell lines require human embryos, which resulted in a similar controversy to abortion. The second is the notion of "playing God" which I think is still a pretty large controversy. Stem cell research really benefited from the introduction of induced pluripotent stem cells to a certain extent. I don't think the ethical debate really resolved so much as petered out because the notion and extent to which stem cell research is playing God is much more abstract than an extension of the abortion debate.

>Meanwhile, China is beginning to show breakthroughs with human-animal hybrids.

This is a bit extreme wording. It evokes mixed-parentage hybrids but in reality it's just inserting a gene that produces a protein in one organism to the genome of another. It's much more similar to inserting a gene found in one human into the genome of another to resolve some genetic disorder.

Nits aside, I'd hazard that the ethics of gene editing are still pretty important to consider, at the very least because of the historical relationship between genetics research and eugenics. Playing God in my opinion is less about the ability to manipulate genomes so much as the discursive determination of what genetic changes ought to be made. That said, I think fears of the Chinese making unusual or unethical advancements in this field are overblown and always have been. Things are probably even more tightly regulated there (hell, TCM is considered a strategic resource), and the idea that the East is unrestricted by the more civilized Western values is also a pretty old trope that doesn't really have much historical basis.

Yeah but I think all their soldiers will be tarded.

I won't say that this has no chance of succeeding, even though that is the most likely outcome. But it is these kinds of blind and reckless experiments that will bring new understandings that can potentially add more knowledge that will make a success later on. Yes, that sentence was that long because that is how much importance this experiment will hold in the end.

They tested the genes on single cells or at best a couple of them together. I guarantee you that these cells won't even make it past the embryonic stage unless dramatic changes are introduced to the procedure. Gene expression is easy. The hard part is how to seamlessly integrate that extra gene into a network of densely expressed native genes, all of which interact and regulate with each other, and not disrupt any of them. Because if even just one in a few thousands get affected, like say instead of making 100 copies, it makes 90, then that fetus will likely become nonviable.

So we aren't going to make Space Marines anytime soon. Unless they manage to change all somatic cells in a human body at the same time, at which point it probably more likely the AGIs are in charge already.

> the AGIs are in charge already.

Assuming AGI with a quantum component added in, this type of experiment could be run digitally exposing all of the possible variables.

Brave new world indeed...

You can’t just throw AGI & Quantum together and have it mean anything. This is how a sci-fi show would explain away its technology

Combing the two doesn’t result in anything, besides the fact one is questionable if it can ever be realized (AGI) the other technology is extremely nascent and even physics wonder if there is a limit to the # of qbits (I’m more optimistic we’ll surpass that)

Even then the usefulness of quantum computers is called into question, and quantum inspired algorithms might net benefits without having to use a quantum computer for all inference ops

Compare the size of today's training sets (unknown, I'm guessing PB given who's doing the work), models (TB for the good ones), versus the sizes of quantum computers (hundreds for gate model, a few thousand for adiabatic). We're looking at about 10 orders of magnitude (30 doublings) of progress that would need to be made, for quantum + ML to make any sense purely on dimensional analysis. If we're generous and give both sides a doubling every year, that's still 15 years out. My money is on classical computing owning this space for a long time.

> You can’t just throw AGI & Quantum together and have it mean anything. This is how a sci-fi show would explain away its technology

Let's add Blockchain to it!

Once they figure out what genes they need/want, they can look to using CRISPR technology modify adults or children. But probably adults first. One they can experiment on prisoner sentenced to death which is no more ethically challenged than harvesting the organs of those sentenced to death, and two I'm sure any life extension genes would be highly desirable for the ruling class.

Of course, this is not something I fear today based on their performance with their COVID vaccine. But who knows what can happen in 20 years. Then again it was 27 years ago that we cloned a sheep and we can see the impact that that has had on the world

Not that approve of this at all, but this alone could make China win the space race.

If they can reliably engineer humans that can easily survive extended periods of time in space they will colonize and control way faster than any other nation.

That kind of reminds me of the short story "Surface Tension" by James Blish [1]. There's a link at the bottom of the Wikipedia page to the story at the Internet Archive if anyone wants to read it. It's pretty good.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Tension_(short_story)

One of the solutions to the climate crisis is make us all hardier. Would also be great for long duration space travel. Just add in some cockroach, axolotl, gecko and maybe a Kea and we are good.

Unless you solve the need to eat food and drink water I think the better solution is to stop ruining our biosphere instead of building new humans.

At this point I suspect that CCP is inspired by doom3-style demonology. In theological/occult literature, demonic creatures are said to wear a grey metallic-like shell instead of skin, that makes them nearly invincible: even a nuclear strike wouldn't break them. However that super-shield has a weakness: it conducts heat, so its owners suffer greatly from cold and heat. It's not impossible that a bored dictator, havong nothing else to do, will try to recreate this material.

Wait, I’m still not clear on exactly how these protect against ionizing radiation. Is there some unique structure of these proteins that act as shielding?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31505739/

This abstract talks a bit about tardigrades DNA repair and radiation damage avoidance, and possibilities of gene identification.

The article is great in giving no scientific context and not even linking to a reference.

I assume they talk about Dsup (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dsup), an enzyme preventing DNA breaks by stabilization. DNA breaks are caused by radiation and are what causes mutations (increased cancer risk) and in the extreme case cell death.

Honestly, I can't find the result referenced in the article, nor in a similar article posted to SCMP. It might be because I'm searching in English, didn't dig too deep. My guess is that they added a gene that codes for Dsup[^1]. I don't think Dsup is well characterized mechanistically. I think it probably mostly protects DNA from secondary damage from ionizing radiation[^2], so protection from radicals produced by ionizing radiation, rather than direct breaks to the DNA itself (though maybe, I'm not familiar with research in the field).

[^1]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12808 similar research noted in another comment as well. Note that most likely the novelty of the OP research is using CRISPR instead of the transfection method cited in the paper.

[^2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6773438/

Add time travel, UAPs etc to the mix and you have the grey alien stereotype making sense. I've always thought China would be the one to make the leaps that humanity doesn't want.

Not to digress but we are not able to regulate / control the use of genetic engineering, how can we regulate the current GenAI hype?

The more stories like this I read, the more I fear that there is some truly horrific, Unit 731-type program out in the western Chinese desert where they are using Uyghurs and political prisoners as laboratory models.

Uyghurs are Chinese, why the wish to separate them from China, due to their location on the map? The US likes to split countries, but c'mon, not using that argument..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Chinese_Muslim_genera...

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