Posted on 07/21/2011 3:42:56 PM PDT by posterchild
The power to edit genes is as revolutionary, immediately useful, and unlimited in its potential as was Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press. And like Gutenberg’s invention, most DNA editing tools are slow, expensive, and hard to use — a brilliant technology in its infancy. Now, Harvard researchers developing genome-scale editing tools as fast and easy as word processing have rewritten the genome of living cells using the genetic equivalent of search and replace — and combined those rewrites in novel cell strains, strikingly different from their forebears.
“The payoff doesn’t really come from making a copy of something that already exists,” said George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who led the research effort in collaboration with Joe Jacobson, an associate professor at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You have to change it — functionally and radically.”
Such change, Church said, serves three goals. The first is to add functionality to a cell by encoding for useful new amino acids. The second is to introduce safeguards that prevent cross-contamination between modified organisms and the wild. A third, related aim, is to establish multiviral resistance by rewriting code hijacked by viruses. In industries that cultivate bacteria, including pharmaceuticals and energy, such viruses affect up to 20 percent of cultures. A notable example afflicted the biotech company Genzyme, where estimates of losses due to viral contamination range from a few hundred million dollars to more than $1 billion.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.harvard.edu ...
this is good stuff. what’s important for America is that the patents for useful new genes remain in the possession of US entities. This kind of thing will revolutionize medicine. We don’t want foreign competitors beating us to the punch here. Because the R&D was funded, in large part, by US tax payers, the US tax payers have a partial right to the patents IMO.
In all seriousness there might be some good in this, but it still makes me concerned.
They’re going 2 make bacon with Omega-3 fats, or bananas containing vaccines.
It’s the future.
I have no issue with Bacon with Omega-3 but vaccines in food make me worry a LOT!
I recall a few years ago a company was looking into genetically engineering goat or sheep cells to produce milk containing vaccines. The intent was not to deliver the vaccine in the milk but use the biological processes related to lactation to produce the vaccine and then to extract it for traditional delivery.
Mark
Yeah, vaccine generated peanut allergies are bad enough.
Imagine being allergic to bacon!
The horror!
what could possible go wrong?
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“Where is your God now Mother F***ers!?!?! AAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!”
///
...i have no doubt, that God,
WILL have the last laugh.
that said, i know some Gays and Christians both agree on one thing - that homosexuality isn’t genetic.
from the finger length study, the Mormon sibling study, the brain autopsy study, and many many others, i am convinced it is. (even animals have it.)
...i believe, just like blindness, or any other birth defect, it is simply a cross to bear, as it says in the Bible, to “test” us.
but once it’s found, and a gene therapy treatment, perhaps even prenatal is made, then things will get REALLY interesting...
[ Yeah, vaccine generated peanut allergies are bad enough.
Imagine being allergic to bacon!
The horror! ]
A lot of people in the middle east claim to be allergic to bacon already!!!!
I wish these guys would hurry up with the research and put something on the market.
I want some stem cell therapy that will make me tall, athletic and fast so I can play professional basketball before I die. (don’t go there Sunken Civ.)
I’m already so handsome I’d be in danger if I messed with editing that gene.
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