there’s been some (what appears to me to be) remarkable progress in the field, in that I know that it’s possible to create intentional structures. it’s very much not my field so I can’t speak to it in detail, I think the best way I could describe where I understand it to be is that it’s like people building with lego, if that makes sense?
but yeah it’s still a damn far way off from what we’d call “gene programming” as we have “computer programming”
I am not a geneticist, but I have had reasons to talk to geneticists. And they do a lot of cool stuff. For example, I talked with geneticists who researched the genom of a hard to treat patient group to find genetic clusters to yield clues of potential treatments.
You have patient group A that has a cluster of genes B which we know codes for function C which can go haywire in way D which already has a treatment E. Then E becomes a potential treatment for A. You still have to run trials to see if it actually has effect, but it opens up new venues with existing treatments. This in particular has potential for small patient groups that are unlikely to receive much funding and research on its own.
But this also highlights how very far we are from understanding the genetic code as code that can be reprogrammed for intelligence or longevity. And how much more likely experiments are to mess things up in ways we can not predict beforehand, and which doesn’t have a treatment.
I wouldn’t say that modern computer programming is that hot either. On the other hand, I can absolutely see “no guarantee of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose” being enthusiastically applied to genetic engineering products. Silicon Valley brought us “move fast and break things”, and now you can apply it to your children, too!
there’s been some (what appears to me to be) remarkable progress in the field, in that I know that it’s possible to create intentional structures. it’s very much not my field so I can’t speak to it in detail, I think the best way I could describe where I understand it to be is that it’s like people building with lego, if that makes sense?
but yeah it’s still a damn far way off from what we’d call “gene programming” as we have “computer programming”
That is cool.
I am not a geneticist, but I have had reasons to talk to geneticists. And they do a lot of cool stuff. For example, I talked with geneticists who researched the genom of a hard to treat patient group to find genetic clusters to yield clues of potential treatments.
You have patient group A that has a cluster of genes B which we know codes for function C which can go haywire in way D which already has a treatment E. Then E becomes a potential treatment for A. You still have to run trials to see if it actually has effect, but it opens up new venues with existing treatments. This in particular has potential for small patient groups that are unlikely to receive much funding and research on its own.
But this also highlights how very far we are from understanding the genetic code as code that can be reprogrammed for intelligence or longevity. And how much more likely experiments are to mess things up in ways we can not predict beforehand, and which doesn’t have a treatment.
I wouldn’t say that modern computer programming is that hot either. On the other hand, I can absolutely see “no guarantee of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose” being enthusiastically applied to genetic engineering products. Silicon Valley brought us “move fast and break things”, and now you can apply it to your children, too!