Thread by @blog_supplement

Since everyone and their mother are talking about the birth of CRISPR Dong and CRISPR Ding I’m piling on with a couple of long threads. I’m just saying a little bit about the science in case someone is interested but mostly the politics: They disrupted the CCR5 gene which codes

for a 7-transmembrane receptor protein for at least 5 signaling proteins called chemokines in the immune system. It is expressed on many cells of the immune system called white blood cells in lay language and is used as the receptor by HIV-1 one of the AIDS viruses. It might

have been used in someway by the unrelated smallpox virus too.The genetic manipulation they did is not technically very exciting from whatever we see in their announcements. Such have been used in non-human animals for sometime now and is sort of the thing CRISPR tech is best at:

disrupting a gene. I would be v.curious to see how the 2 edited chIna-s fare in life especially if they get some West Nile like virus infection for CCR5 would prove useful rather than deleterious for such infections. More generally, the wisdom of knocking out a chemokine receptor

which does have a positive role in the immunity against certain viruses should be seriously questioned. But then these chIna-s are not living in the “wild”.