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A Serious New Hurdle For CRISPR: Edited Cells Might Cause Cancer, Find Two Studies (statnews.com)
Editing cell genomes with CRISPR-Cas9 might increase the risk of developing cancer, two studies published Monday warn. From a report: Editing cells' genomes with CRISPR-Cas9 might increase the risk that the altered cells, intended to treat disease, will trigger cancer, two studies published on Monday warn -- a potential game-changer for the companies developing CRISPR-based therapies. In the studies, published in Nature Medicine, scientists found that cells whose genomes are successfully edited by CRISPR-Cas9 have the potential to seed tumors inside a patient. That could make some CRISPR'd cells ticking time bombs, according to researchers from Sweden's Karolinska Institute and, separately, Novartis. CRISPR has already dodged two potentially fatal bullets -- a 2017 claim that it causes sky-high numbers of off-target effects was retracted in March, and a report of human immunity to Cas9 was largely shrugged off as solvable. But experts are taking the cancer-risk finding seriously.
If CRISPR does cause cancer, researchers might be able to use that to find causes and treatments.
Maybe not as a designer baby maker, but CRISPR is a lot more than that, being a potential cure for a huge number of genetic diseases that are devastating to those that have them.
I think that the scientists are unworthy of grants.
So because you don't like the results, you want to take away their grants? Are you kidding me? That's not how science works.
In any case, like you, I also hope that the results are wrong, but even if I hate the results, I just can't wish them away (assuming their results are correct, I have no idea if they are, or not).
Nah. Most of human progress has been less perfect knowledge and careful action and more "hold my beer and check this shit out!"
Anyone who's delivered software should intuitively realize this to be true.
Cancer is basically cells that went rogue. You telling me that slicing and dicing DNA (sometimes accidentally in non-target locations) can sometimes cause a cell to not do what it was suppose to? CRISPR is more targetted than say getting hit with a blast of radiation which causes random mutations but you are still changing the programming of a highly complex instruction set written in obfuscated code that we barely understand.
This is an obvious and expected issue. Only the particulars are new science. Seems to be solid work, and gives us something else to "tune" in order to make gene editing a reality.
Software isn't a great example of human progress in any real way. Maybe you're not considering human progress correctly.
Says the person using software running on their device, talking to dozens if not hundreds of others devices, all running their own software, to share their comment with us.