Scientists Control Human DNA with Electricity in 'Leap Forward', Study Reports
www.vice.com
Breakthrough research represents “the missing link that will enable wearables to control genes in the not-so-distant future,” researchers say.

Researchers used electric stimulation to switch on exact genes involved in regulating insulin. Blood glucose concentrations of model mice returned to normal.

  • GustavoM@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    1 year ago

    So you are telling me that really soon I’ll have genes inside me removing cancer and even “fixing” some “unfixable” things like poor eyesight and even brain-related ones? Sign me up.

      • GustavoM@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        1 year ago

        Eh, not really. Unless we are talking about something like genes able to rejuvenate someone a decade back, etc. Or a “everlasting” gene that lasts forever inside your body instead of a couple months, etc.

    • Mossy Feathers (She/They)@pawb.socialEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      When it comes to cancer it’s more likely to come in the form of mRNA vaccines. My understanding is that the silver lining of COVID is that because it radically accelerated the development of mRNA vaccines, it should be fairly inexpensive to modify them to vaccinate against cancer. My understanding is that you get cancer all the time, it’s just that your body normally identifies it as a problem and attacks the cells; in fact, there are some people who may have an immunity to cancer as they’ve been observed healing from tumors without outside help. The cancers that people die from are ones that our bodies don’t recognize as a threat until it’s too late. Supposedly mRNA vaccines could be used to teach the body that it should target certain cancerous cells which it has no prior defense against.

  • NoRodent@lemmy.worldEnglish
    239·
    1 year ago

    Scientists have demonstrated that human genes can be controlled with electricity, a breakthrough that could pave the way toward wearable devices that program genes to perform medical interventions, reports a new study.

    That’s actually fucking scary.

    These scientists definitely didn’t stop to think if they should.

    • kennebel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      251·
      1 year ago

      “Sorry, but your credit card declined the monthly charge, we are turning off your insulin until you resolve the payment issue. Customer service hours are …”

      • DistractedDev@lemm.eeEnglish
        51·
        1 year ago

        How is that worse than the huge amount of money they have to pay for insulin now?

        • kennebel@lemmy.worldEnglish
          81·
          1 year ago

          The current set up is wrong, without any doubt. Giving a remote agent direct access to control your biological functions is more wrong. :)

        • dartos@reddthat.comEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          They can switch to a continuously charging “usage” based model for insulin, the same way GPU time is rented out now.

          any big Pharma people here. I’m available for hire btw ;)

    • DistractedDev@lemm.eeEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      We already have tons of terrifying sounding technologies. Almost every technology can be used in good and bad ways. We could use current gene editing to make super viruses that wipe out the entire world population. Gene editing has also given us the power to make way more food than we ever thought was possible. This new tech could create miracles for people with genes that harm them, like diabetes. Nuclear physics gave us the atomic bomb but also gave us an amazing and world changing source of energy. Staying ignorant of some science just because it could theoretically be used for something bad is never the right way to go. We have to learn everything and try to use it for the most good that we can. Plus I doubt this is something they could just randomly do to people. It’ll probably still be a rather complicated procedure only done in certain situations.

  • theodewere@kbin.social
    5·
    1 year ago

    so we really will be able to have a ray gun that turns people into sheep or amoebas or whatever… sweet…

  • nymwit@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    This seems super cool. Like…too cool. I want to know how this electrogenetic interface works. They talk about using electrically stimulating acupuncture needles to activate human pancreatic cells in the test diabetic mice.

    They just zap it? They zap it with a certain frequency or pattern of direct current? How do they make it affect certain genes specifically and not some other gene or something else in the cells?

    Guess I’ll go to the article linked paper in the journal Nature:

    Here we provide the missing link by developing an electrogenetic interface that we call direct current (DC)-actuated regulation technology (DART), which enables electrode-mediated, time- and voltage-dependent transgene expression in human cells using DC from batteries. DART utilizes a DC supply to generate non-toxic levels of reactive oxygen species that act via a biosensor to reversibly fine-tune synthetic promoters.

    Ah. Of course, reactive oxygen species to fine-tune synthetic promoters. Obvious, really because I…uh, I totally understand this.