CRISPR twins who had their genes edited also had their brains altered to make them smarter, scientists believe

Further down the Brunner path.

In Brunner’s novel, a prominent professor named Sugaiguntung is working on a comparable line of research, and hopes to create superhumans by drawing on his experiences manipulating the DNA of orangutans.

Naturally they did two kids. One for a study and one for a control.

Do you know who else liked experimenting on twins…?

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Oh great. Isn’t this how Childhood’s End started?

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Scientists believe that the “CRISPR twins,” who had their genes edited last year before birth, will now have an easier time learning and memorizing. Apparently, the gene alteration, which was meant to make the girls immune to HIV, also altered their brains.

When definitive proof of said super powers is provided, give me a shout.

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Then it will be too late for all of us. They must be stopped!

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This is how it all ended.

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You’re one of the people here with whom I’d gladly share a Coke.

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Or just a bunch of brain tumors. That’s just how Mad Science be sometimes.

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I totally mis read what you and @knoxblox meant…

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Immune as in can’t be infected, or immune as in won’t suffer harm as carriers?

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Both have has / had zero definitive proof that it is actually a fact.

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We are well past the “should we” phase of genetic manipulation in unborn children and are now in the “we are” phase. The “should we” question is moot and we now must face the reality of understanding the outcomes.

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they have already made their own duplicates and have snuck out of the laboratory to hunt us with no one the wiser. … i just heard something …

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Yeah, usually in biology the answer to the question “Why don’t we just alter this aspect of the cell to cure this disease?” is “It will cause all of the cancer if we do that.”

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Wait, which thread am I in?

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We think along the same lines; here is a relevant passage from Stand on Zanzibar:

Sugaiguntung drew a deep breath. “Mr. Hogan, what is a man? Some of him is the message passed down the centuries in a chemical code - but very little. Take a human baby and let it grow among animals as a feral child. At puberty is that a human being, even though it can mate and breed its physical form? No, it’s a bad copy of the animal it was raised by! Listen, there is a point on a chromosome which I can touch - I think I can touch - and after fifty, a hundred failures, I can give a baby forebrain development which might be to ours as my orang-outangs to their mothers’; Who is going to teach that child? When four out of my five apes killed themselves because we could not teach them how to live except as humans - and they weren’t human!”

http://www.negrophonic.com/pdfs/Brunner,%20John%20-%20Stand%20On%20Zanzibar.doc

Update: Added first sentence to quotation.

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Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches had bellies with stars. The Plain-Belly Sneetches had none upon thars.

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Faces, cats, people, now this!?

Weird week, right?

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“These gene alterations will make these girls smarter, but we have no idea what the gene alterations will actually do to their intelligence.”
Uh, ok.

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“Could it be conceivable that at one point in the future we could increase the average IQ of the population? I would not be a scientist if I said no." -UCLA researcher Silva.
This guys gonna be really disappointed when someone tells him IQ is a normalized score with 100 always being average, so increasing the average IQ is by definition impossible.
I’ve said it for years, don’t listen to scientists

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