TL;DR version

In the course of my life, there have been a handful of times I discovered an idea that changed the way I thought about where our species is headed. The first occurred when I picked up Nick Bostrom’s book “superintelligence” and realized that AI would utterly transform the world. The second was when I learned about embryo selection and how it could change future generations. And the third happened a few months ago when I read a message from a friend of mine on Discord about editing the genome of a living person.

We’ve had gene therapy to treat cancer and single gene disorders for decades. But the process involved in making such changes to the cells of a living person is excruciating and extremely expensive. CAR T-cell therapy, a treatment for certain types of cancer, requires the removal of white blood cells via IV, genetic modification of those cells outside the body, culturing of the modified cells, chemotherapy to kill off most of the remaining unmodified cells in the body, and reinjection of the genetically engineered ones. The price is $500,000 to $1,000,000.

And it only adds a single gene.

This is a big problem if you care about anything besides monogenic diseases. Most traits, like personality, diabetes risk, and intelligence are controlled by hundreds to tens of thousands of genes, each of which exerts a tiny influence. If you want to significantly affect someone’s risk of developing lung cancer, you probably need to make hundreds of edits.

If changing one gene to treat cancer requires the involved process described above, what kind of tortuous process would be required to modify hundreds?

It seemed impossible. So after first thinking of the idea well over a year ago, I shelved it without much consideration. My attention turned to what seemed like more practical ideas such as embryo selection.

Months later, when I read a message from my friend Kman on discord talking about gene editing adults in adult brains, I was fairly skeptical it was worth my time.

How could we get editing agents into all 200 billion brain cells? Wouldn’t it cause major issues if some cells received edits and others didn’t? What if the gene editing tool targeted the wrong gene? What if it provoked some kind of immune response?

But recent progress in AI had made me think we might not have much time left before AGI, so given that adult gene ed...

Wielkopolanin

Wielkopolanin

Wielkopolanin

Wielkopolanin

Wielkopolanin

Wielkopolanin