highlights from Hacking Darwin 🌱

  • It was fascinating to read this book and learn about the future of personalized medicine and recent innovations in biotechnology and genetics. I had no idea that biotechnology had come so far.
  • This book is what first sparked my interest in biology, and it inspired me to start doing research in computational biology at CMU.
  • One of the most interesting things I recall from reading was: experiments have successfully shown that you can take a specialized adult cell and transform it back into a stem cell that can then differentiate into whatever you want. Some of the applications of this are really crazy, like in the future we will be able to draw someones blood, convert those blood cells into some egg cells and sperm cells and then create a child made completely from that person. Freaky.
  • you can take a specialized adult cell and transform it back into a stem cell that can then differentiate into whatever you want. Some of the applications of this are really crazy, like in the future we will be able to draw someones blood, convert those blood cells into some egg cells and sperm cells and then create a child made completely from that person. Freaky.
  • Currently, instead of direct gene editing, you can just collect a bunch of egg cells/sperm cells, screen them for their genes, and then use the one you like best and destroy the other ones. This first happened in 1990, doctors executed the first successful PGD or preimplantation genetic diagnosis procedure along with IVF. These are used together today all the time.
  • Genes really correspond more to probabilities than are deterministic. you’ll be able to select that your child will have a 70 percent likelihood of being tall.
  • Currently, IVF makes up around 1.5 percent of all births in the United States, but the author of Hacking Darwin predicts that IVF will soon be adopted by the mainstream, surpassing sex as humanity’s primary method of reproduction by around 2045.
  • On top of that, older women using IVF have seen a higher rate of birth abnormalities. Because of this, many younger women have begun freezing their eggs to reduce the risk of birth abnormalities if they choose to use IVF later in life. Companies such as Facebook and Apple have been covering the costs for women to freeze their eggs since 2014.
  • In 2015, scientists in China used CRISPR to alter genes in an unimplanted embryo to prevent the development of a severe blood disorder. In 2017, a team in the United States successfully altered defected sperm cells to prevent hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which reduces the heart’s ability to pump blood.
  • But scientists aren’t only working toward editing our genes. Progress in the field of synthetic biology suggests that we’ll one day be able to write them from scratch. In 2010, the American scientist Craig Venter created the world’s first synthetic cell by replicating the genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides in an empty bacteria shell_._ In the future, scientists might write genetic code for new traits that don’t even exist yet, like heat-resistant skin, in order to survive radiation, a hotter planet or space travel.
  • Uzbekistan’s national sports program has incorporated genetic testing since 2014. China recently announced that the selection process for the 2022 Winter Olympics will include genetic sequencing.

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