Hacking Darwin Quotes

whatever your genes might predict, height can be stunted if you don’t get the nutrients you need as a child.

We wouldn’t expect to make perfectly fresh cheese from old milk, but it seems perfectly normal to us that two thirty-year-old adult humans can have a child who is born zero years old, not thirty or sixty. Clearly, our cells already have a way of resetting the clock.

After years of painstaking research, in 2006 Yamanaka and his team discovered that proteins encoded by just four “master genes” could turn back the clock and transform any adult cell back into a stem cell. Just as a stem cell could differentiate itself forward in developmental time into a skin, blood, liver, heart, or any other of the two hundred types of human cells, these Yamanaka factors could revert any skin, blood, liver, or other type of cell back into the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell.

In 2012, Japanese cell biologists Katsuhiko Hayashi and Mitinori Saitou announced they had used the Yamanaka factors to reprogram adult mouse skin cells in a dish into iPS cells. They then added more chemicals to turn these stem cells into egg and sperm progenitor cells, the precursors of eggs and sperm. After they placed the same artificial cells into mouse ovaries, the cells matured into eggs. When they put induced sperm precursor into mouse testes, these cells matured into sperm. These induced eggs and sperm were used for mouse IVF, resulting in perfectly healthy baby mice.

Then, in September 2018, Saitou and his collaborators announced they had induced egg precursor cells from human blood cells, which were then incubated in tiny ovaries developed from mouse embryonic cells.

Six-month-old embryos could become genetic parents. Year-old frozen embryos (or three-month-old babies) could become grandparents.

Making a thousand embryos could increase the average differential between the highest and lowest IQ of all the embryos to about twenty-five points.

Although many gene-therapy protocols are now being actively explored, one of the most exciting and widely covered in the media is genetically enhancing the ability of a person’s T cells, white blood cells that play an essential role in the body’s natural immune response. In CAR-T therapy, blood cells are extracted from the body of a person with specific cancers and then engineered to boost the ability of their T cells to express a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) before being put back into the person’s body with cancer-fighting superpowers.

Scientists are also now using CRISPR not just to change the genes but also to alter the epigenetic marks dictating how the genes are expressed.5 Although early skeptics of human gene editing correctly warned that epigenetic influences on the expression of genes made effective gene editing a lot more complicated than first understood, recent advances have made clear that epigenetic editing is “on the verge of reprogramming gene expression at will.

I’d proffer the thought that this is all too common, that companies built for the past may offer glimpses into the incredible, but are mired in vulnerabilities in other places. Modern-day businesses are asymmetric constructs: a legacy of patches, quick fixes, hacks, workarounds, and hope.