Posted on 05/29/2017 8:13:36 PM PDT by Ciaphas Cain
It's been hailed as one of the most potentially transformative inventions in modern medicine, bringing the prospect of designer babies closer than any other technology to date, but CRISPR-Cas9 could be riskier than we thought.
The technology that could spark a gene-editing revolution has been caught introducing hundreds of unintended mutations into the genome, and with scientists already testing it in humans, it's set off some serious alarm bells.
"We feel it's critical that the scientific community consider the potential hazards of all off-target mutations caused by CRISPR, including single nucleotide mutations and mutations in non-coding regions of the genome," says Stephen Tsang from the Columbia University Medical Centre.
Tsang and his team have conducted the first whole-genome screening of a living organism that's undergone CRISPR gene-editing to discover that unwanted mutations can crop up in areas that are totally unrelated to the targeted genes.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencealert.com ...
CRISPR has become a tool unlike anything before in the realm of tailoring genes. We've been told that with CRISPR, anything would be possible. From cube-shaped tomatoes for efficient packaging, to super-intelligent babies.
How much of CRISPR-edited DNA is now out in the wild, without us having a clue what it will do?
I don’t understand how it’s adding mutations that they didn’t intend. I was under the impression that they could only modify the genes they targeted, no?
Well, I’d say before they make one more creature: plant, animal, or God forbid human, they need to find out why it’s expressing elsewhere.
Oops.
“I was under the impression that they could only modify the genes they targeted, no?”
First, a lot of genes look like other genes. It’s thought that mutations of one created the other, which then was kept because it had different useful properties. Even if these mutated genes had no function, they sometimes stayed as inter-gene spacers.
Second, there are only four bases, and given the size of the genome, just by chance there are bound to be places that look similar to CRISPR.
CRISPR is very promising, but could turn out to be impractical for most things.
Man cannot play God—be careful, very careful. The same has been shown in fungal genetic manipulations.
As if mother nature hasn’t proved that already
I had a tour of the Salk Institute in la Jolla circa 1997. They had a chick with two wings on he same side that they caused to grow there. i don’t know all the terminology.
I remember the Thalidomide babies with really short arms in the cover of Life Magazine.
The Salk people said that if a baby was born with no arms or a deformity they hoped to help grow a healthy limb.
Is this okay with everyone Don’t we want them to do this kind of research?
This research should be allowed to progress, but under very strict conditions. Biotech can’t be allowed to run rampant without trampling over our Christian heritage. Bush, for all his faults, was right in fighting fetal stem cell research and it forced private industry to do adult stem cell research.
Funny that the libtards start screaming “free enterprise” when it comes to this kind of research because:
A. They want government support for their $70,000/yr universities (you’d think with all the scholarships they give to illegals, they’d be able to fund some labs)
B. They want to trample Judeo-Christian values
Liberals will pay in the afterlife.
It’s always a bunch of hype. Pushed by companies selling it for research.
“How much of CRISPR-edited DNA is now out in the wild”
None.
CRISPR kits are cheap. For a few hundred bucks you or anyone else can have CRISPR FedExed to you, custom-tailored for the genes you want to snip out and have replaced. There are even CRISPR sets not unlike the chemistry sets a lot of us played with as kids.
Gene hacking has been an underground art for some time now. CRISPR made it even more alluring. And then there is the ever-present possibility of it being used by more nefarious parties. Today its pressure-cooker bombs. Tomorrow it's potentially airborne rabies.
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