Showing that many genes can be successfully and accurately edited in a live animal (ideally human). As far as I know, this hasn’t been done before! Only small edits have been demonstrated.
This is in fact the plan.
2. Showing that editing embryos can result in increased intelligence. I don’t believe this has even been done in animals, let alone humans.
This would be a very big thing in and of itself. Also, it wouldn’t give you much useful information about whether adult editing would work, because most of the uncertainty centers around delivery efficiency, the effect size of edits in adult brains, mosaicism and other things you wouldn’t be able to validate in embryos.
Gene editing to make people taller. You’d be an instant billionaire. (I expect this is impossible but you seem to be going by which genes are expressed in adult cells, and a lot of the genes governing stature will be expressed in adult cells.)
To the best of my knowledge, this is not possible in adults. The growth plates fuse at the end of puberty. This is why bodybuilders taking HGH don’t get taller.
Gene editing for transitioning (FtM or MtF).
I don’t think gene editing will be able to help with this one. You’d need to swap an X chromosome to a Y or vice-versa. None of the delivery vectors are large enough to fit an entire chromosome. They’re not even close.
And even if you could select a subset of the genes most impactful, you’d have to eliminate the existing chromosome, which is not trivial.
And even if you could do that, it wouldn’t be able to undo male or female puberty.
And even if you could do that I have no idea how this tech could be used to grow different sexual organs, which is what you would ideally want.
MAYBE this could be used to enable endogenous sex hormone production or something. But apart from that, nothing comes to mind for ways this tech could help people who want to transition.
Gene editing to cure male pattern baldness.
This one could actually be possible. In fact it would probably be easier than intelligence or brain disorders. But your competition is going to be hair transplants and rogaine, which would be difficult to beat on price.
[Exercise for the reader: generate 3-5 more examples of this general type, i.e. highly desirable body modifications that involve coveting another human’s reasonably common genetic traits, and for which any proposed gene therapy can be easily verified to work just by looking.]
Obviously there are many more examples. That’s one of the exciting things about in-vivo editing. But you have limitations:
The trait must be heritable (true for many things we’d want to change)
We need good genetic predictors for the trait
All of the above are instantly verifiable (on the other hand, “our patients increased 3 IQ points, we swear” is not as easily verifiable). They all also will make you rich, and they should all be easier than editing the brain. Why do rationalists always jump to the brain?
We would not even attempt the therapy unless the difference was easily measurable.
The market has very strong incentives to solve the above, by the way, and they don’t involve taboos about brain modification or IQ. The reason they haven’t been solved via gene editing is that gene editing in adults simply doesn’t work nearly as well as you want it to.
Yeah, this is what I used to think before I actually worked at a bunch of startups and realized that the efficient market hypothesis doesn’t apply to all markets equally. In reality there are hundred dollar bills lying around everywhere, but most people can only see a few, and some can’t see any.
This is particularly true when there are high barriers to entry, hidden information, many steps of inference to reach a conclusion, and cultural taboos that prevent people from looking. Every one of those is getting in the way here.
This is in fact the plan.
This would be a very big thing in and of itself. Also, it wouldn’t give you much useful information about whether adult editing would work, because most of the uncertainty centers around delivery efficiency, the effect size of edits in adult brains, mosaicism and other things you wouldn’t be able to validate in embryos.
To the best of my knowledge, this is not possible in adults. The growth plates fuse at the end of puberty. This is why bodybuilders taking HGH don’t get taller.
I don’t think gene editing will be able to help with this one. You’d need to swap an X chromosome to a Y or vice-versa. None of the delivery vectors are large enough to fit an entire chromosome. They’re not even close.
And even if you could select a subset of the genes most impactful, you’d have to eliminate the existing chromosome, which is not trivial.
And even if you could do that, it wouldn’t be able to undo male or female puberty.
And even if you could do that I have no idea how this tech could be used to grow different sexual organs, which is what you would ideally want.
MAYBE this could be used to enable endogenous sex hormone production or something. But apart from that, nothing comes to mind for ways this tech could help people who want to transition.
This one could actually be possible. In fact it would probably be easier than intelligence or brain disorders. But your competition is going to be hair transplants and rogaine, which would be difficult to beat on price.
Obviously there are many more examples. That’s one of the exciting things about in-vivo editing. But you have limitations:
The trait must be heritable (true for many things we’d want to change)
We need good genetic predictors for the trait
We would not even attempt the therapy unless the difference was easily measurable.
Yeah, this is what I used to think before I actually worked at a bunch of startups and realized that the efficient market hypothesis doesn’t apply to all markets equally. In reality there are hundred dollar bills lying around everywhere, but most people can only see a few, and some can’t see any.
This is particularly true when there are high barriers to entry, hidden information, many steps of inference to reach a conclusion, and cultural taboos that prevent people from looking. Every one of those is getting in the way here.