Using precision editing to study human embryo development shows master gene | Hacker News Reader

Using precision editing to study human embryo development shows master gene

cam.ac.uk

67 pointsgmays47 comments

> Base editing can precisely change a single nucleotide base pair...

Absolutely not. It _cut_ the DNA at three nine precision (not that great given the number of base pairs we have); and things sitch together at much higher error rate.

It is a great technology, but it is not as great as many claim

Does anyone know why such a fundamental gene would have such different behaviours between mammals?

> In previous mouse studies, loss of NANOG disrupted both the epiblast and the yolk sac - a tissue that supports the developing embryo. In this human embryo study, loss of NANOG primarily affected the epiblast, the future body-forming line of cells.

I wonder what the regulations are for this sort of work

In the US it's legal-sorta but the NIH can't fund it and the FDA is not allowed to approve treatments based on it. So someone could do it in a research setting but there's not a pathway to market in the US (in practice people will do the first ones in a friendly legal climate like Peru).

> In the US it's legal-sorta but the NIH can't fund it and the FDA is not allowed to approve treatments based on it

What references are you following? Haven't heard this before.

> the FDA is not allowed to approve treatments based on it

Unless you live in the Whitehouse.

I don't have citations to hand but I can attest that this has been the case for a long time now. There are jurisdictions that are more open to various semi-banned (either unfundable, a regulatory morass, or both) topics of research; China is famous for offering lucrative grants to attract foreign researchers of many of these.

The short answer is the "14-day" rule, which doesn't allow development of the embryo beyond 14 days. The article gives specifics under the heading "Ethical and legal compliance"

I think it's more of the fact that they were conceived which will bother most.

A sperm on its own was never going to be a person. A egg on its own was never going to be a person.

A embryo... we cause the sparks to fly here and it's disturbing to think we can poke at the genes when we really have no idea what we are doing. Was a soul created here? Lot of people think yes. So lots of people naturally care about that taking place. Just to poke and prod 1 of billions of base pairs to see what happens does not seem like a good idea or..even a practical way to learn anything.

I would bargain there are a lot more pairs you could mess with that would have the same effect and would prevent the embryo from developing further.

I lean that we most likely are creating souls (however that works...) the moment of conception and we probably should be fooling around with doing this stuff. This article reminded me of this video I saw 10 years ago that shows there is a moment in time where sparks literally fly and it's pretty amazing to see.

https://vimeo.com/163864531

So do all sexually reproducing species’ conception create souls? Or is it just a blessed few? What about asexually reproducing species?

>So do all sexually reproducing species’ conception create souls?

No, what is your opinion?

>Or is it just a blessed few?

Specifically humans.

>What about asexually reproducing species?

They have life that's for sure but I think it's very different than humans.

you can't seriously think there is a line in the sand between homo sapiens and heidelbergensis or neanderthals which demarcates "soul" and "no soul". Especially since the latter interbred with humans.

what if heidelbergensis and other ancestors didn't exist but were written in a books by people you never met and any amount of questioning was frowned upon? do you believe in the relics never seen and take the word upon a class of believers that safeguard the history? sounds like a religion to me.

visit a museum

Are there any species you know of that would be able to interbred with each other? Why would that have been possible?

Sounds like humans to me, perhaps ones who could live longer?

Look, I think we know how these discussions go, I'm not sure they get anywhere. Your pretty sure you know what's going on, I'm pretty sure I know what's going on...

Id hope there would be caution in manipulating the formation of a human when there isn't a great way to test these things without observing the results after they are born without any significant confidence what was manipulated effected the outcome or had a desirable result. There is no world where this real world testing is not reckless.

> Are there any species you know of that would be able to interbred with each other?

Yes, it is called hybridisation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_(biology)

Unfortunately, we found that there are not so many differences. Scientists have simply decided not to cross that line.

Embryos have to reset after conception to delete all of the faulty dna inherited from the parents. Babies don’t get born with wrinkles for example. They start clean slate without (most) epigenetic damage that both sperm and egg had.

So the embryo a 10 days after conception is not the same thing as at conception. Did God kill it?

Do you have more information or citations related to epigenetic damage in the sperm and egg?

A lot of age related dysfunction is systemic as opposed to genetic. Even for the stuff that's (epi)genetic in nature it's important to bear in mind that each cell has its own independent copy.

There is a nice podcast from the NYtimes daily podcast named: “can we reverse aging?” that covers a lot of this.

(Obviously when we discovered the reset mechanism people started asking why we cannot press the reset button at 70yo)

I'm not interested in an arbitrarily open ended reading assignment but rather am asking if you can provide even a vague pointer to evidence of this because it doesn't match my understanding of how these things work.

I know for a fact that epigenetic material isn't magically reset to some prior state in a blanket manner because changes to the epigenome based on the environmental conditions in which the parents are born and raised are heritable by their children. For example widespread famine has been shown to leave changes in the epigenome that remain for at least several generations.

I am not interested in teaching you how to google. I gave you pointers and keywords. Now you have to go read. Good luck.

The trouble with that attitude is that it's much cheaper to make false claims that it is to do the research necessary to debunk them. As a result it isn't reasonable in a context such as HN to expect others to do the work of articulating your own position for you. I provided a concrete example (famine) where the existing literature appears to contradict in broad strokes your original claim.

That's true but demanding full satisfaction can be it's own bad expectation. The respondent spent their time giving you pointers which cost them. Suggesting that because they spent some of their time they are stuck giving you more of their time leads to suppressed sharing. One way to take them is that they were trying to combat you and if their goal was to win in public then they might be beholden. Otherwise they were just trying to share a lead and that was as much as they wanted to engage with what can be an exhausting and motivated line of argument. Especially so in the face of what may have seemed like a demanding response.

The Google which no longer searches for what you ask and instead rephrases your query into meaninglessness and returns irrelevant results? That Google?

I will never understand this mindset. What exactly do you think primary scientific research is if not collecting data on questions to which you do not know the answer? How are you supposed to get data to said questions without observing the actual events? I suppose you’re sanguine with the idea of letting future generations of children be born with potentially preventable genetic disorders based on your squeamishness?

Lots of breakthroughs in medicine happen without editing genes? And why do you think Im opposed to the scientific method based on this view point that maybe experimenting on human embryos is not a great way to learn stuff?

For example, what happens when we get to the point where we need to use the scientific method to test if the gene editing was successful and didn't cause negative outcomes for the child's entire existence perhaps? Will they need to live their whole life for us to confirm the cure worked?

> Lots of breakthroughs in medicine happen without editing genes?

Why would the presence of breakthroughs in medicine on other fronts mean that we shouldn't try gene editing?

> what happens when we get to the point where we need to use the scientific method to test if the gene editing was successful and didn't cause negative outcomes for the child's entire existence perhaps?

That is what clinical trials do today for medicine. Are you opposed to those as well? Many have died and many have been saved in the pursuit of better care.

> For example, what happens when we get to the point where we need to use the scientific method to test if the gene editing was successful and didn't cause negative outcomes for the child's entire existence perhaps?

Well that would be an entirely different line of research, which is not this research here, and a large expansion of the question which we could debate and discuss thoroughly on its own merits at such a time as the issue arises.

Aka this is just the slippery slope fallacy of argument.

There is no progress without possible failure in medicine. Each treatment starts with assumptions and you can only go so far until you start testing on actual people. Until we understand the mechanisms completely there is no way around that.

Genes are an important part of lifeforms. Of course, you may object to tinkering with them and wait until nature has done the tinkering for you. That will inevitably slow down progress by obtaining information so much slower that countless lives will be miserable due to missing cures and treatments. This is a zone where there is no clear moral answer. The only thing I would say with confidence is that gene editing is very likely the key to a plethora of treatments and preventative measures.

> Will they need to live their whole life for us to confirm the cure worked? People already do that right now without gene editing. A friend of mine is 10 years over the life expectancy of their condition just because their parents decided to have them live their whole life "to confirm the treatment worked". 9 out of 10 people with that condition died by the age of 12 if not within the first year of birth. I'd wager being part of a medical/scientific program to monitor your condition is the least of your concerns at that point.

> I lean that we most likely are creating souls (however that works...)

You might want to flesh this part out a bit more before criticizing scientists tweaking some cell clumps.

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