Topic: Easy DNA Editing Will Remake the World. Buckle Up. (Read 1480 times)

Not after my indiegogo project...

Thats awesome!!

We need to crowd source this and get flying pigs into the world,been held back far to long.

Bill Gates and others just invested $120 million in a revolutionary medical startup


A recently discovered tool that gives scientists the ability to edit DNA — the basic blueprint for life — and to rewrite the genetic codes of humans and other creatures just got a major boost toward breaking through from research to applications that might affect human health.

Editas Medicine is one of the first companies using this genome-editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9, to develop new ways to cure human disease. On August 10, the startup announced that they've raised $120 million from a group of investors led by Dr. Boris Nikolic, the managing director of bng0 (which was formed to invest in Editas) and who was before this was a chief science and technology advisor to Bill Gates.

"The company is at the forefront of genome editing – one of the most exciting and important frontiers in science," Nikolic said in a press release.

The massive investment is a vote of confidence in a tool that many scientists say could change everything — and in Editas Medicine's ability to use it wisely.

Gates has been confirmed to be one of the bng0 backers, according to Forbes's Matthew Herper.

The company was founded in 2013 with $43 million from Flagship Ventures, Polaris Partners and Third Rock Ventures, as well as Partners Innovation Fund. Other new investors include a long list: Deerfield Management, Viking Global Investors, Fidelity Management & Research Company, funds and accounts managed by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Google Ventures, Jennison Associates on behalf of certain clients, Khosla Ventures, EcoR1 Capital, Casdin Capital, Omega Funds, Cowen Private Investments and Alexandria Venture Investments.

Why it matters

This news is a major development because Editas is one of the leading startups coming up with ways to use CRISPR-Cas9 to eliminate human diseases in ways that weren't possible in the past. Such a massive spike in the financial resources of the company could have a transformative impact on health and medicine — and of course, as Wired pointed out in a recent feature on how CRISPR will change the world, health and medicine is where the real money is.

Researchers think they'll be able to cure genetic diseases with CRISPR by changing the part of a person's genome that causes that disease. If a person has a disease caused by a gene or a specific mutation, scientists think they'll be able to use this tool to rewrite or delete the parts of a genetic code that cause that illness. Right now, those ideas are still largely hypothetical: We haven't used CRISPR to cure anything just yet.

Editas is first trying to use CRISPR to treat a cause of blindness by snipping out a genetic mutation, the company's CEO told Forbes. After that, they may try to treat a blood condition by actually replacing a section of DNA with a new section of DNA.

The ability to make these changes is what gives CRISPR its incredible promise, but researchers haven't yet figured out how to make this happen safely and effectively enough to do this work in humans. They can delete or even replace sections of DNA in certain lab settings without many unwanted other effects (like deleting other, desired sections of DNA), but can't do it consistently enough yet to try this in people.

George Church, a leading Harvard geneticist and CRISPR researcher who is a scientific advisor for Editas, previously told Tech Insider in an email that he thinks researchers might eventually be able to use the tool to change genes so that people wouldn't be vulnerable to HIV.

And that's just the start. In a series of interviews, a number of researchers have told Tech Insider that CRISPR's implications for human health — and for transforming the world in other ways — are almost impossible to overstate.

As Jennifer Doudna, one of the first to discover the capabilities of CRISPR, told us: "We’re basically now able to have a molecular scalpel for genomes."

A possible wrinkle

Editas was founded by some of the first scientists to discover CRISPR, including Doudna (of the University of California, Berkeley) and Feng Zhang of the Broad Insitute of MIT and Harvard.

There's now a patent dispute over who owns the intellectual property rights for the genetic-editing technology. Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier published some of the first work on CRISPR and filed for a patent; Zhang filed for another patent after subsequently publishing other work and his patent was granted first. Now, Doudna has licensed her patent to another company, while Zhang's is licensed to Editas, and Charpentier's is licensed to yet another group.

Still, Editas's list of scientific advisors includes some of the top researchers working with CRISPR, and various investors told Forbes they aren't worried about how courts settle the intellectual property dispute.

The worst-case scenario is that they have to pay a royalty, but if they're the first company to use genome editing to cure human disease, paying a royalty would be well worth it.


http://www.techinsider.io/bill-gates-and-others-invest-in-editas-for-crispr-gene-editing-2015-8

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Monsanto for human DNA? I can see a business model here: you'll have genes that keep you alive via a monthly injection... As long as you pay the licensing fee...

The time has come.

Can you have sex with a altered species that has human features?

Not sure if the hetero gene has been isolated yet...

Maybe sometime in the future prospective parents may be asked what kind of son/daughter you want.

Healthy male 6 feet tall, brown eyes no ailments ever (maybe the occasional cold) Life expectancy 85 years  heterosexual throughout life, no  abnormal tendencies, if this was to happen a lot of the human traits would die out.

To be quite honest I would not like it, but it could happen this way.
We should evolve  naturally with no interference in our DNA but what I am saying is a two edge sword, what if DNA manipulation could cure all kinds of disease would I endorse it then.... I am on the fence for now

Caution Urged over Editing DNA in Wildlife






“Crap!” That was the first word out of Kevin Esvelt’s mouth as he scanned a paper published in Science last March. The work described the use of a gene-editing technique to insert a mutation into fruit flies that would be passed on to almost all of their offspring. Although intriguing, the report made Esvelt feel uneasy: if engineered flies escaped from a lab, the mutation could spread quickly through a wild population.

But that was exactly what exhilarated molecular biologist Anthony James at the University of California, Irvine. “Holy mackerel!” he wrote to the study’s authors. “Can we use it in mosquitoes?”

On July 30, the US National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) held the first in a series of meetings meant to find ways to balance the promise and perils of the technique, called ‘gene drive’. The method can rapidly modify not just a single organism but a whole population, by inserting a desired genetic modification into an organism along with DNA that increases the rate at which the change is passed to the next generation. The technique could be used to render mosquitoes unable to carry malaria parasites or to wipe out harmful invasive species, but it could also have unanticipated environmental costs and might be impossible to reverse. “Once this is out there, you cannot call it back,” says Walter Tabachnick, a population geneticist at the University of Florida in Vero Beach.

The idea of gene drive has been around for more than a decade. But its practicality was given a huge boost around three years ago with the arrival of CRISPR, a gene-editing technique that allows precise changes to an organism’s DNA.

The Science paper, by developmental biologist Ethan Bier and his student Valentino Gantz at the University of California, San Diego, used CRISPR to insert a modification into genes on both chromosomes in a pair, so that when the flies bred, they would pass the modification on to practically all of their offspring.

The work came out of a desire to develop a system that would make it easier to study genetic changes in organisms that are difficult to breed in the laboratory. Because CRISPR has been shown to work in a wide range of creatures, researchers hope one day to be able to engineer wild populations in much the same way.


Call for concern

Mindful of both the potential and the risks, Esvelt, a bioengineer at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, brought together a group of scientists to write a Comment in Science, published last week, laying out the need for multiple containment strategies for gene-drive research that is done in the laboratory. Meanwhile, the NAS meeting marks the start of a 15-month search for ways to minimize the risk in advance of field releases. Because no one is known to have made CRISPR work in mosquitoes—the mostly likely organism for the application of the technology—the committee has some time to do its work.

But there is still urgency, noted Todd Kuiken, who explores the interface of science and policy at the Wilson Center, a think tank in Washington DC. CRISPR gene-drive technology is developing at a breakneck pace, and has the potential to dramatically alter ecosystems in unexpected ways. At the meeting, Kuiken used the invasion of Asian carp into some US lakes as an example of how little is known about some wild ecosystems. “While this is an invasive species, it’s also an established species,” he says. “I don’t think we have a good understanding of how we evaluate what happens when we remove a species from as large an ecosystem such as this.”

Meanwhile, Esvelt and his colleagues are studying the CRISPR gene-drive system in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to learn more about what happens to a population as engineered DNA is passed down through generations, accumulating mutations as it goes. They are also testing ways to make sure that a gene drive can be countermanded once it has been set loose.

These issues need immediate attention, says geneticist Daniel Wattendorf at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Virginia. Security concerns may mean that DARPA needs to start working on the technology before guidelines are drawn up, he adds.

And Tabachnick remains concerned that these preparations may not suffice. “How do you test such a system, and how do you do it safely?” he asks. “I’m not convinced that any of this work could ever possibly provide the assurance of safety that one might demand.”


http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/caution-urged-over-editing-dna-in-wildlife/

Well.. You can't pinpoint the DNA that makes someone gay, but I am sure it will be easier to splice human/animal DNA as a fashion statement...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfFDT2XNCGU


"Splicing is not just style... It's lifestyle..."

 

Fact:

Your DNA will get a full download, also your neurons & synapses will upgrade if you stop watching Fox News, NBCNews, ABCnews and CNN.

Well, this is kind of expected. Western hypocrisy on one hand supports global inequality, yet laments that some people are naturally smarter, stronger or richer, than others.

China for most of its history has been on other hand practicing soft eugenics to ensure health of its population. Now augemented by increasing knowledge of genetics.

Geoffrey Miller claims, that just in several generations Chinese could outcompete West from top down, solely thanks to the fact, that while they will get smarter, we will get dumber.

http://edge.org/response-detail/23838/

with DNA editing, we can do anything easier, but in side we get bad condition too.
cause everything can changed with that.
we can make something new and experience or researcher with that. always make new experience and experience for all the human being.

If she's religious, it will be like claiming gay marriage will cause beastiality.

http://andrew.gibiansky.com/blog/genetics/crispr/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9854220

And now this decade old idea is shared on bitcointalk.

 

Back around 1990, a geneticist who was also a violet flower grower, got an idea. If he could add an extra purple gene to his violets, he should be able to get some extremely purple violets, and win the violet growing contest. But when he did this, the violet flowers turned out white.

Around the turn of the century, a couple of geneticist researchers figured out why the violets turned white. It had to do with an immune system protection that shuts down an active gene if a duplicate is added to the original.

This was used in the early 2,000s to cure a woman of glaucoma by turning off a gene that was producing too many capillaries in her eyes. I never heard if there were complications, and I don't have the info to back it up. But the idea has been around for about a decade now.

Crispr: Breakthrough announced in technique of 'editing' DNA to fight off deadly illnesses


A revolutionary technique for “editing” the human genome with extreme precision has been used for the first time to “cut and paste” the genes of a key type of immune cell involved in protecting the body against a wide range of diseases, from diabetes to HIV and cancer.

Scientists believe the development could eventually result in a new approach to fighting viral infections and cancerous tumours, by “gene editing” the T-cells of the immune system in the laboratory before putting them back into the patient to protect against ill health.

Medical researchers have been trying for years to perform accurate gene therapy on T-cells circulating in the bloodstream, which are involved in protecting against invasive pathogens and cancer, as well as auto-immune disorders such as type-1 diabetes, where the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues.

However, they have not succeeded until now in cutting out mutations and precisely replacing them with healthy strands of DNA, said Alexander Marson of the University of California, San Francisco, who led the latest research.

Dr Marson and his colleagues used the Crispr (Clustered, Regularly Interspaced, Short Palindromic Repeat) gene-editing technique to cut and splice fragments of DNA within the chromosomes of human T-cells living in a laboratory dish – as “proof of principle” that the process is precise enough for eventual use as a clinical treatment.

“There is increasing interest in manipulating the genome of T-cells, either by correcting mutations or changing the genome to increase the chances of the cells being able to fight off cancer or infections,” Dr Marson said.

“We wanted not only to cut the genome, but to paste in sequences of DNA into the genome of T-cells. We have now been able to cut as well as paste pieces of the genome into human T-cells – for the first time to our knowledge.”


Crispr (pronounced “crisper”) has proved a highly accurate method of identifying precise positions on the DNA molecule and, with the help of an enzyme called Cas9, cutting the double helix strands and replacing exact sections with synthetic, healthy sequences of DNA.

Experiments on animals have shown that Crispr/Cas9 works better than any previous gene-editing technique and offers a realistic alternative to gene therapy on human cells that does not involve viruses or other cumbersome methods of editing and inserting the corrected DNA sequences.

“Genome editing in human T-cells has been a notable challenge for the field,” Dr Marson said. “So we spent the past year and a half trying to optimise editing in functional T-cells. There are a lot of potential therapeutic applications, and we want to make sure we are driving this as hard as we can.”

“It has been really challenging to get Crispr to work in T-cells. This, in our hands, allows us to achieve a new level of efficiency for cutting and repair,” he added.

A key factor in the breakthrough was the use of a technique called “electroporation”, where an electric field is applied across the T-cells in order to open up microscopic pores in the cell that allow the Crispr/Cas9 molecule to enter.

Dr Marson said that although some of the human T-cells did not survive exposure to the electric field in tests, many more recovered completely and around one in five showed they had successfully taken the gene-editing on board – a 20 per cent efficiency rate that is good enough for clinical use.

In the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers were able to convert the CXCR4 protein on the surface of T-cells so that the genetically-modified cells were no longer prone to attack by the HIV virus.

“This could be a stepping stone to engineering T-cells that are immune to HIV and then putting them back into the body. Potentially we have the power to engineer proteins that are a target for HIV infection,” Dr Marson said.



http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/crispr-breakthrough-announced-in-technique-of-editing-dna-to-fight-off-deadly-illnesses-10420050.html

From a Christian, no. We're not supposed to.

Will society do it if they can? Yes. That can be argued to be prophesied in the bible.

Let's wait and see if wired get sued for plagiarism...

So far we have the monkey-dog as a the closest on topic participating winner in the thread... Is that good or bad? Oh! And of course total dismissal as being untrue, click bait, science fiction, etc, etc... The usual response from the unknown.


Even if science can do it, should we do it?