“We had a bigger crowd than anyone. People were attached to them. Everyone wanted to hold them.” In the United States, people wanted a porcine lap pet, but were disappointed when animals touted as ‘teacup’ pigs weighing only 5 kilograms grew into 50-kilogram animals. Genetically-edited micropigs stay reliably small.
Tag: biotech
Choosing eye color
Our clinical trials thus far have been limited to changing eye color from brown to blue, since that is both the simplest and most sought-after color change. We will soon begin testing dark brown to light brown color change, as well as changing hazel or green to blue, and it is possible that our first commercial laser will also be able to accommodate these color changes. Changing brown or hazel eyes to green is more complicated, and it is unlikely our initial laser will be able to accomplish this. Because our technology relies upon the removal of pigment, it will not change eye color from light to dark, e.g., blue to green, green to hazel, or hazel to brown.
Gene Therapy
This is the first time human cells, engineered in this particular way, have been given back to a patient. The technology has got enormous potential to correct other conditions
2019-06-30: Germline Gene Therapy
means of correcting disease-causing nuclear and mitochondrial DNA mutations in gametes or preimplantation embryos have now been developed and are commonly referred to as germline gene therapy (GGT). We will discuss these novel strategies and provide a path forward for safe, high-efficiency GGT that may provide a promising new paradigm for preventing the passage of deleterious genes from parent to child.
2020-12-07: Cures
Both the Vertex/CRISPR and Bluebird techniques seem to work – and in fact, to work very well. There are now people walking around, many months after these treatments, who were severely ill but now appear to be cured. That’s not a word we get to use very often.
Make humans smaller
at 50cm, humans would consume 2% of the food and fuel we do now.
being smaller would have huge benefits for spacefaring humanity too
Observing protein folding
Proteins convert from one observable shape to another in less than 1 trillionth of a second, and in molecules that are less than 1 millionth of a cm in size. These changes have been simulated by computers, but no one had ever observed how they happen. Apparently ~0.02% get trapped in a highly unlikely shape that is like a single frame in a movie. The set of these trapped residues taken together have basically allowed us to make a movie that shows how these special protein shape changes occur. And what this movie shows has real differences from what the computer simulations have predicted.”
Hearing restoration
Patients with hearing loss will one day have their genome sequenced and their hearing restored by gene therapy. A proof-of-principle study takes a step in that direction, restoring hearing in deaf mice. Clinical trials of gene therapy for humans could be started within 5 to 10 years
Implantable drug scheduling
a wirelessly controlled, implantable, microchip-based devices that store and release drugs inside the body over a period of years
bad adherence seems like low hanging fruit that this device will overcome.
Blood cells for drug delivery
using red blood cells as drug delivery vectors: they lack DNA, have excellent biocompatibility, and blood transfusions are a widely used technique already.
AI prospects for biology
Banging through it all, though, to come up with a model that fit the data, tweaking and prodding and adjusting and starting all over when it didn’t work – which is what the evolutionary algorithms did – takes something else: inhuman patience and focus. That’s what computers are really good at, relentless grinding. I can’t call it intelligence, and I can call it artificial intelligence only in the sense that an inflatable palm is an artificial tree. I realize that we do have to call it something, though, but the term “artificial intelligence” probably confuses more than it illuminates.
2022-12-09: Some new hopes for paper mining, but see this caveat.
SciHub has 88m papers, and if we assume that we can extrapolate the Semantic Scholar dataset statistics (2600 words per article) with some paper loss due to old/faulty PDFs, it could be reasonable to expect 200b tokens of scientific knowledge, 10x bigger than the Minerva training set of Arxiv papers (21b tokens). This is a 10x boost in technical knowledge that would exist inside current LLMs.
There will be a universal language of physical science work that does not speak directly to humans. Monolithic cloud labs alone may not be optimal deployment of automated biology in the future. Projects like PyHamilton demonstrate growing open source communities for benchtop automation, and the SayCan collaboration by Google and Everyday Robots is a reminder of how multifunctional robots are steadily progressing (as well as ultralight indoor drones). As the cost curve goes down and the natural-language programmability goes up, there may be an intersection at which it is easier to convert an existing lab environment/protocol into an automated one, rather than to outsource work to a physically separate facility. Or, there may be a steady-state solution that some tasks are optimal for large automated warehouses and others are optimized for more distributed, edge labs. If there is any future of multiple robotic work providers, then interoperability will become a bottleneck, which will motivate a universal formalization of life science work.
Synthetic poaching
We are fabricating wildlife products, such as rhino horn and elephant ivory, at prices below the levels that induce poaching. Our goal is to replace the illegal wildlife trade, a $20B black market, the fourth largest after drug, arms, and human trafficking, with sustainable commerce.
people will have to decide whether they can get over their fears of biotech for this.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 