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Comment by yes_man | Hacker News Reader

Cancer sucks and I wish your father the best.

Also not a doctor or microbiologist, but just wanted to share my layman’s guess on why fixing enzymes will not completely solve the issue: there’s 2 strands of DNA and to fix the broken (mutated) strand you need to have one correct template strand intact so you know what it should be fixed into. It could be the nucleotides swapped places between strands or are deleted completely or otherwise both mutated, which would mean any repair will not revert the sequence to what it used to be.

The other comments so far are probably more informed.

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Cancer sucks, I wish all the best towards a recovery.

You’d also have to ‘fix’ DNA: unless we can re-engineer a bunch of key enzymes and then re-encode the entire genome (or maybe key parts) with forward error correction without breaking everything else, it might work. You might also break evolution to some degree by making random point mutations less likely.

But what I learned so far is that as soon as you’d attempt something like this in bacteria, the fitness advantage from an evolutionary standpoint is negligible compared to the efficiency loss introduced by FEC, so your colony would get outcompeted by other bacteria unless there is a niche your resistant bacteria survive in (high radiation environments?). The efficiency loss induced ‘disadvantages’ would probably be less pronounced in mammals though - If (big if) you manage to not also break anything essential in the wonderful yet surprisingly efficient Rube Goldberg machine that is life.

What I meant was there are collection of genes responsible for error correction. If there is a failure in duplication then these genes have not done their job.

Thought experiment, again as a layman, was to see if these genes responsible for error correction at the base level can be fixed or bolstered and that will act like a cancer vaccine. But looks like from other comments that this is even more harder!

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