I’m a software developer by training with an interest in genetics. I am currently doing independent research on gene therapy with an emphasis on intelligence enhancement.
GeneSmith
Karma: 3,614
Yes. Once this tech works you can use it for basically anything so long as you can make enough edits and the genes involved are known.
So we really don’t need to make any special considerations for memory.
We will be hiring fairly soon. Reach out to me genesmithlesswrong@gmail.com
Good question! What’s the name of the skin condition you have?
Yeah I pretty much agree with this assessment. I think you could probably get to 80% with 100 million and ten years and maybe 50% with 30 million and 7 years. Perhaps I’m optimistic, but right now the entire field is bottlenecked by the need for $4 million to do primate testing.
Aspen dental is a franchise based venture capital funded organization that already does this.
This is interesting, thanks for sharing.
I asked my friend about your other concerns regarding enshittification of the dental industry. If you’re interested, this was their response:
Patients tend to do better with DSOs. There’s a number of reasons:
The first is doctor supervision—when doctors have their own offices, no one checks their work or holds them accountable. In a corporate setting, there is typically a clinical director that the doctors will report to.
The second issue is that the worst case is actually the doctor being the owner—that’s when they have the strongest financial incentive to do bullshit. The more the doctor is removed from being the owner, the less I think their judgement is influenced.
Now in nearly all DSOs and private practices, revenue is the chief KPI for doctors. So the pressure is there still to a degree.
With us, revenue is not a KPI—we don’t ever tell the doctors how much they produce And so we remove the financial biasing of their diagnosis and treatment.
But we are unique in this—definitely an outlier in how much we are trying to have the doctors be unbiased by the finances.
What’s also ironic about some of the replies is that our lobby goals are to actually get real regulation put into place so patients are protected from doctors doing whatever to maximize revenue But these somewhat personal ideals and goals being acted out—that do run counter to the pure capitalist logic
Dentistry, Oral Surgeons, and the Inefficiency of Small Markets
@towards_keeperhood yes this is correct. Most research seems to show ~80% of effects are additive.
Genes are actually simpler than most people tend to think
You’re ignoring several facts:
A significant fraction of cells turn over frequently in adults so the number of divisions for those cell types is far, far higher than 45 divisions. Those cell divisions CAN cause cancer, it a single extra cell division is going to have negligible impact on risk.
There’s an enzyme called telomerase which can extend telomeres. It’s active in embryos. So this isn’t really a concern.
I’m hosting laser tag again at 8:30 PM after the reading group. All are welcome!
I’m hosting laser tag tomorrow at 8:30 after the reading group. Everyone is welcome!
I appreciate the offer. It’s going to be a long time before we start human trials. At least five years, probably longer.
GeneSmith’s Shortform
Billionaires read LessWrong. I have personally had two reach out to me after a viral blog post I made back in December of last year.
The way this works is almost always that someone the billionaire knows will send them an interesting post and they will read it.
Several of the people I’ve mentioned this to seemed surprised by it, so I thought it might be valuable information for others.
Can you link to a source about the increased cancer risk? Every source I’ve seen on this subject indicates retinoids DECREASE cancer risk, though I agree with you that this doesn’t make much intuitive sense.
According to Claude they were first studied for cancer but the first actual FDA approval was for acne.
I’ve read the article and notice that all the negative side-effects listed are due to issues with oral Retinoids rather than topical Retinoids.
Several of the articles I’ve read indicate that topical retinoids actually DECREASE the risk of cancer, though I agree this is confusing since they supposedly increase cell turnover rates, which should theoretically cause more mitosis-induced mutations to occur. But Retinoids are actually frequently used as anti-cancer drugs.
Google’s AI summarizer says you the mechanism of action is promotion of cell differentiation and inhibiting the progression of pre-malignant cells to malignant cells.
It also reduces “keratinocyte differentiation and decrease keratin deposition” which makes skin more fragile, and it increases sensitivity to UV light.
This is correct of course and why I specifically recommend in the post that people wear sunscreen when using retinoids.
Hard to say. Retinols are recommended as a preventative. Though incidentally I have noticed acne fading much faster after using them. I suspect this is because they speed up the healing process of the skin.
Why you should be using a retinoid
I’ve started a gene therapy company, raised money, opened a lab, hired the inventor of one of the best multiplex gene editing techniques to be our chief scientific officer, and am currently working on cell culture experiments with the help of a small team.
I may write a post about what’s happened at some point. But things are moving.
Paper 1 is pretty interesting and is related to one of the methods of brain delivery I’ve looked at before.
I’m not sure we really want to have a lot of T cells floating around inside the central nervous system, but a friend of mine who spent a few days looking into this earlier this year thought we might be able to repurpose the same tech with synthetic circuits to use microglia cells in the brain to do delivery.
Microglia (and to a lesser extent oligodendrocytes and astrocytes) naturally migrate around the brain. If you could get them to deliver RNA, DNA or RNP payloads to cells when they encounter a tissue-specific cell surface receptor, that might actually solve the brain delivery issue better than any other method.
This would take a lot of work to develop, but if you managed to get it working you could potentially continuously dose a patient’s brain with an arbitrary protein for an indefinite time period. That could be pretty damn valuable.
Alternatively you might be able to use a conditionally activated system like Tet-On to temporarily turn on expression of gene editors or gene editor RNA for some time period to do editing.