New nanoparticles can perform gene editing in the lungs

For nanoparticle delivered mRNA, things are relatively early and relatively little is to market. But I don't think we can reasonably dismiss it as being niche or not too useful, given that we just dosed hundreds of millions of people for the biggest emergent public health issue in recent memory.

The latest, greatest drugs for CF are extremely expensive (around $250k annually last I checked), don't work for everyone and must be taken forever as well.

Standard treatments for CF are extremely expensive and the condition is extremely debilitating.

It's a good candidate for new gene editing therapies in part because there is a simple, identified issue: a defective cell channel. Some genetic disorders are more complicated than that.

> Can these particles go airborne? Again, "go airborne" is a common fear with viruses. Can they mutate and gain some new function allowing them to be infectious via a new pathway. These lipid particles wont "go airborne" because they don't reproduce, they are under 0 evolutionary pressure and carry a minimal payload. It like asking if the COVID vaccine could mutate and go airborne. One could certainly spray some of these particles in the air, they will land on the nearest surface and likely break or degrade along the way. You could probably spray them on your arm and it would not result in any editing.

> If someone used them maliciously would anyone even figure it out? If someone were able to successfully deploy a targeted genetic weapon with adverse side effects, it would likely take some time to figure out, but we absolutely have the ability and technology to figure it out today. The result would be a brand new variant in the population which has never been seen before, that looks like a CRISPR edit and is making a bunch of people of one country sick.

> Has everyone involved on this project been working in a lab that has made it near impossible for this to be abused and have all these people gone through exhaustive background and psychological testing and re-testing? Almost certainly not. You are setting a bar pretty high for people doing pretty basic research in mice. I think we should probably setup this level of testing for all our police, military, elected officials, etc.

Citation 3 is the only one worth engaging with, and it answers most of these questions in the summary. Basically the tech is nowhere near ready (despite what some PLA general wants to pretend), and even if it was the actual targeting of a specific population is not even feasible given population genetics.

VO2 max capacity is an adaptation that all athletes develop through cardio training, so much so that there are drugs that make this adaptation in red blood cells abnormally abundant, like Epoetin Alfa/erythropoietin. If a drug can do it, making it permanent could be possible too.

As far as we know, the drug that Lance took makes you have high blood pressure, introduces iron deficiencies and (in people with previous heart conditions) may cause cardiac insufficiency, so it's not pure benefits.

In short, your argument of 'all mutations have benefits and drawbacks' is right, but if the benefits are that high, there's no question of who'll do it but what counter-indications are you willing to put up with for the massive benefits it brings in sports (and life!) performance. Lance said he felt like a god when he was on it, he slept like 3 hours a night, rode for 12 hours a day, and won the Tour de France with it, with no sequelae, neither (according to him, so take it with a grain of salt).

Before anyone says 'just take steroids, man', I'm all in favor for a separate league of juicers in all sorts of sports, be it team sports, combat sports and solo endeavors. To me it'd be super interesting to see what humans are really capable of.

Even worse would be to imagine that a group of people would have concerns about the use of a new technology (and to think that concerns about the use of a technology would necessarily put a person in that category of people), and to then straw-man what their supposed objections might be. I'd definitely advise against that, if our objective was to communicate in good faith and to build trust, rather than to attack, mislead, coerce and marginalize.

If there were no grounds for concern about a new technology that was currently being researched, then we might want to talk about why that is (we could write some papers on the subject for instance, I'm sure there would be some funding on offer). Or we could say "...because I said so." or cast doubt on their motivations, their capacity for critical thinking, or their scientific credentials, but arguing from authority to a skeptical audience might well be counterproductive.

We might need to admit that there may be the potential for legitimate concerns, and that we may not yet know enough about a new technology to rule them out. But the last thing we would want to do is to try to steam-roll over people's objections and drown them out (and to mislead them or misrepresent them) - that would just make people think that we're lying to them and that we have something to hide, that we're perhaps driven by a hidden motive or an over-riding ideological commitment.

> Of course, we should still disperse as widely as possible the accurate information, in detail at the outset. But we shouldn't delude ourselves to think that no conspiracy theory will arise. If it sounds technological, some arse is going to fabricate a conspiracy theory, and find followers.

There will always be conspiracy theories, nearly all of them will be harmless, and some (many, even) of them will end up being true! By their nature, governments will never stop having the temptation to misrepresent or disproportionately emphasize scientific information for political purposes, but we must do our utmost to avoid spreading official information through authoritative channels that subsequently turns out to have been knowingly inaccurate or presented in a such a way as would be likely to mislead people in serious ways, because that is a number one surefire way of destroying trust between the apparatus of the state and the population.