Need CRISPR research help

[Tyche]

I have to write a paper for grad school on a controversial health topic and present both sides of the debate in an unbiased fashion. So, knowing that 95% of the class will do assisted suicide and abortion and I'm not stepping into the religion realm in this paper, I decided to do CRISPR. The research is technical and I need help finding research in the last 5 years to present some cons. Here's what I have come up with as pros and cons. If you guys could link some research papers, you'd be my besties. Don't worry about paywalls, I'll find the full articles on sci-hub.

Pros: immunotherapy, reduction of genetic disease

Cons: bioweaponery, reduced genetic diversity, safety

Ambiguous: designer babies

[Psion]

i dunno...those cons sound mostly speculative. like... bioweaponry is pretty much a given, but i don't know if there's any such weapons developed yet, and i don't know how one would go about predicting how much of a danger it would be. reduced genetic diversity also sounds like fearmongering - i mean, have you SEEN the things people find attractive on the internet? if anything we'd probably have a second cambrian explosion. designer babies... see above (and the few things we probably would mostly agree on for good design, would be excellent for the gene pool anyways - such as easily gained muscles, disease resistance, etc. those designer babies would have to grow up sometime, and they'd just spread the good gene love around, so even people too poor to afford it would eventually get some benefit after several generations.)

the only one i can think of that might be an issue is safety, and the only thing i can think of that might be an issue was potential leukemia? i can't remember if that was an issue with stem cells, gene therapy, or both. but i think you might want to check up on that.

[Tyche]

Well, it's all speculative. CRISPR, as far as the human genome, is still in its infancy.

The reduced genetic diversity could result in a deadly virus or bioweaponery wiping out a massive portion of a genetically stagnant population. That's what I mean about a lack of genetic diversity.

[Tyche]

I could go on for probably 50 pages on ramifications for genetic modifications resulting in a widening economic class system, but I am constrained to three pages here. It's gonna be a tough paper for that reason alone.

[mallister]

here are a couple of recent articles that showed up on my feed. shouldn't be hard to track down something you can use from them.

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-r...py-CTX001.html

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019...edium=Facebook

[Byrthnoth]

One of the CRISPR cons is that it requires viral delivery if you want to get it into non-stem cells ( https://blog.addgene.org/crispr-101-...livery-methods ). Two problems with that:
1) Our virus transfection rates are pretty shit for most types of cells. I would be surprised to learn that current therapies successfully transfect 10% of the target cell population.
2) Past gene therapy has resulted in cancers. In the past this was interpreted as being caused by a lack of gene editing fidelity, which CRISPR addresses, but it also could have been due to the viral delivery method, as some retroviruses cause cancer.

I don't have citations and need to go to work. Good luck!

[Salodin]

If you only have 3 pages, then under ambiguous/cons I'd add designer babies passing on the designer genes to offspring and/or unintended consequences of that. That Chinese scientist made a designer baby, according to him, and China started investigating him but idk if he put out his research before that.

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[BerenTebogo]

3 pages is not enough to write anything of substance on CRISPR. Do an intro on sequencing the genome, some cocktail party level introduction to genetic modification pre-CRISPR, same for how CRISPR works. Give 1-2 poorly described pros and cons from your list already.

3 pages is nothing. This sounds like a middle school assignment tbh, it should write itself from references on wiki.

[Salodin]

Yeah seems like busy work if the grad level class is asked to make a 3 page presentation on a topic. Get that easy A lol.

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[Tyche]

I did a very generic 5 sentence intro into what crispr does without diving into the science. As for the pro's of this technology, I discussed using it to enhance T cell replication, fighting genetic diseases (I used genetic hearing loss as an example), and using gene drives to wipe out invasive species (mosquitoes spreading malaria). As for the Con's, I discussed the safety concerns of off-target effects in complex genomes, how gain-of-function research could lead to a new age of bioterrorism (this was admittedly a stretch), and potentially widening the socioeconomic gap by creating designer babies. Sorry, I wanted to use the phrase designer babies in this paper, so it had to go somewhere.

Also, this is pretty much busy work. Year one of graduate school is understanding research and writing papers, year two is advanced pathophysiology and assessment, year three (for me) is psychiatry, mental health, and psychopharmacology. FWIW, I'm doing a psychiatric and mental health nurse practitioner track.