Science and Exploration

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Little Fish

Thanks for those links Corkey, I look forward to reading them!

And thank you dreadgeek for your post too, it's important to always tease apart cause and effect, as well as in what context it exists too. I agree with your analogy, today's genetic engineering is merely a refinement of yesterday's advanced animal husbandry. (my apologies to you greadgeek, I'm quite oversimplifying your eloquence)

If anything, I think genetic engineering provides an avenue of precision as a technique unequaled previously in history--my hope is that it will unlock many of our most challenging problems in health / science and in the end, improve our quality of life in the most sacred and profound ways.

This is last is why I try to explain the science. There's a lot at stake. I'm going to give just one example: Huntington's chorea. There is a gene on chromosome 4 that consists of a single 'word' CAG (you can, in some ways, think of a genome) that repeats over again. On average people have between 6 and 15 repeats. Any number of repeats up to 35 and you're fine. The trouble starts at 39 or higher. Here's Matt Ridley talking about how not only do we know what gene causes it we can predict, based upon the number of repeats at what age you can expect to start showing symptoms.

If you have thirty-nine, you have a 90 percent probability of dementia by the age of seventy-five and will on average get the first symptoms at sixty-six; if forty, on average, you will succumb at fifty-nine; if forty-one, at fifty-four; if forty-two, at 37; and so on until those who have fifty repetitions of the 'word' will lose their minds at roughly twenty-seven years of age. The scale is this: if your chromosomes were long enough to stretch around the equator; the difference between health and insanity would be less than one extra inch.

(Matt Ridley -- Genome: Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters)

Now, we don't know what the gene is actually there for but one day we will and when we do we will be able to manipulate the genome so that we can simply edit out all repeats above 35. We could test for it pretty much as soon as the woman realizes she is pregnant. When we can, we should.

That's the promise. It would be beyond sin if we turned our back on this technology.

Cheers
Aj