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[...]
Earlier this year, Baltimore joined 17 other researchers for another California conference, this one at the Carneros Inn in Napa Valley. “It was a feeling of déjà vu,” Baltimore says. There he was again, gathered with some of the smartest scientists on earth to talk about the implications of genome engineering.

The stakes, however, have changed. Everyone at the Napa meeting had access to a gene-editing technique called Crispr-Cas9. The first term is an acronym for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” a description of the genetic basis of the method; Cas9 is the name of a protein that makes it work. Technical details aside, Crispr-Cas9 makes it easy, cheap, and fast to move genes around—any genes, in any living thing, from bacteria to people. “These are monumental moments in the history of biomedical research,” Baltimore says. “They don't happen every day.”

Using the three-year-old technique, researchers have already reversed mutations that cause blindness, stopped cancer cells from multiplying, and made cells impervious to the virus that causes AIDS. Agronomists have rendered wheat invulnerable to killer fungi like powdery mildew, hinting at engineered staple crops that can feed a population of 9 billion on an ever-warmer planet. Bioengineers have used Crispr to alter the DNA of yeast so that it consumes plant matter and excretes ethanol, promising an end to reliance on petrochemicals. Startups devoted to Crispr have launched. International pharmaceutical and agricultural companies have spun up Crispr R&D. Two of the most powerful universities in the US are engaged in a vicious war over the basic patent. Depending on what kind of person you are, Crispr makes you see a gleaming world of the future, a Nobel medallion, or dollar signs.

The technique is revolutionary, and like all revolutions, it's perilous. Crispr goes well beyond anything the Asilomar conference discussed. It could at last allow genetics researchers to conjure everything anyone has ever worried they would—designer babies, invasive mutants, species-specific bioweapons, and a dozen other apocalyptic sci-fi tropes. It brings with it all-new rules for the practice of research in the life sciences. But no one knows what the rules are—or who will be the first to break them.


http://www.wired.com/2015/07/crispr-dna-editing-2/

So why do we immediately disbelieve these claims? 

First there is the publication style, making it seem like written-for-idiots clickbait. 

Second, we have been through this with PCR and 30 years of basically the same claims.  Effectively these techniques have as their only successes those modifications of genomes that made plants less productive, e.g. either needing more chemicals or needing purchasing seeds, because that means you could charge the farmers more.     

None of all this tech has been able to reproduce anything like the feats of e.g. the ancient american agricultural scientists. 

I like to keep an open mind so I'm not going to fully discount crispr.  However it's totally clear nothing useful will come from this while the research is paid for in fiat. 

Britain becomes first nation to legalise three-parent babies


Britain will become the first nation to legalise a "three-parent" IVF technique which doctors say can prevent some inherited incurable diseases but which critics fear will effectively lead to "designer babies".
After more than three hours of debate, lawmakers in parliament's upper house voted on Tuesday for a change in the law to allow the treatments, echoing a positive vote in the lower house earlier this month.

The treatment, called mitochondrial transfer, is known as "three-parent" in vitro fertilisation (IVF) because the babies, born from genetically modified embryos, would have DNA from a mother, a father and from a female donor.

Although the techniques are still at the research stage in laboratories in Britain and the United States, experts say that now legal hurdles have been overcome, Britain's first 3-parent baby could be born as early as 2016.

Mitochondrial transfer involves intervening in the fertilisation process to remove faulty mitochondrial DNA, which can cause inherited conditions such as heart problems, liver failure, brain disorders, blindness and muscular dystrophy.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/02/25/britain-becomes-first-nation-to-legalise-three-parent-babies.html

Critics Lash Out At Chinese Scientists Who Edited DNA In Human Embryos



For the first time, scientists have edited DNA in human embryos, a highly controversial step long considered off limits.

Junjiu Huang and his colleagues at the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, performed a series of experiments involving 86 human embryos to see if they could make changes in a gene known as HBB, which causes the sometimes fatal blood disorder beta-thalassemia.

The report, in the journal Protein & Cell, was immediately condemned by other scientists and watchdog groups, who argue the research is unsafe, premature and raises disturbing ethical concerns.

"No researcher should have the moral warrant to flout the globally widespread policy agreement against modifying the human germline," Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society, a watchdog group, wrote in an email to Shots. "This paper demonstrates the enormous safety risks that any such attempt would entail, and underlines the urgency of working to forestall other such efforts. The social dangers of creating genetically modified human beings cannot be overstated."

George Daley, a stem cell researcher at Harvard, agreed.

"Their data reinforces the wisdom of the calls for a moratorium on any clinical practice of embryo gene editing, because current methods are too inefficient and unsafe," he wrote in an email. "Further, there needs to be careful consideration not only of the safety but also of the social and ethical implications of applying this technology to alter our germ lines."

Scientists have been able to manipulate DNA for years. But it's long been considered taboo to make changes in the DNA in a human egg, sperm or embryo because those changes could become a permanent part of the human genetic blueprint. One concern is that it would be unsafe: Scientists could make a mistake, which could introduce a new disease that would be passed down for generations. And there's also fears it this could lead to socially troubling developments, such as "designer babies," in which parents can pick and choose the traits of their children.


http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/04/23/401655818/critics-lash-out-at-chinese-scientists-who-edited-dna-in-human-embryos

So it looks like life is turning into a sci fi movie, BUT WHERE IS MY DAMN HOVERBOARD!  And dont link me to that cheesey one they made, I want something I can buy at walmart dammit.

I would be happy with an AmazonBasics© Jet pack

Finally I can start work on my Monkey-Dog! Funnest pet ever!!!!  ;D

Nice parlor trick.  Of course anyone with half a brain knows that "designer babies" are produced by -actually taking part in their development as living beings-.  

Anyway, legal hurdles?  lmao.  

LOL, she just overstated them!!

Social dangers??  wtf is she on about?  

I just knew I had seen this article before New DNA-editing technology spawns bold UC initiative (http://news.berkeley.edu/2014/03/18/new-dna-editing-technology-spawns-bold-uc-initiative/)

That wired site is Plagiarising, does not even give credit at all, just quoting a small section is quite the norm these days.
A link back (from wired) would have been the right and proper thing to do.

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?

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.

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

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.

:)

And now this decade old idea is shared on bitcointalk.

 :)

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

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

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

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.

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/

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.. 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..."

 :)

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/

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

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

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

The time has come.

https://i.imgur.com/w57Uxzr.jpg

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

-----------------------------------------
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...

Thats awesome!!

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

Not after my indiegogo project...

https://i.imgur.com/FFytMqs.jpg