Correct me if I’m wrong, but generally it’s not one gene one trait. So altering genes to, say eliminate a specific type of birth defect, might also eliminate something else. Making this up, but say, sense of taste or maybe resistance to some other illness. This change will now be in the gene make-up and therefore propagate through future generations. Since they interact in complex ways, it can be challenging or even dangerous to make these adjustments.
I’m a biologist so I see experiments and results from gene editing somewhat often in presentations and papers. It’s not quite the hot thing that it was 10 years ago, but it’s still very relevant.
Most discoveries that come out of this sort of work are quite niche, and often discovered using non-human models. Some of that may only now be getting into human models, but I’m not aware of any (I’m not “that” kind of biologist).
Depends on your news sources. If you are subscribed to biotech sources it’s every other day. There’s breakthroughs, or at least novel applications, all the time. Routine at this point.
If you mean mass media, well, just look at the brainrot that gets shoveled at the ‘frontpage’. Everything is optimized for broadest appeal with the most clicks.
A few decades ago when the human genome was first being sequenced, it was assumed that most genes would have a straightforward 1:1 relationship with specific associated traits (so you’d find a “gene for X” and a “gene for Y”). And while there are a few genes like that, it turns out that most genes are part of complex gene regulatory networks that resemble neural networks in that there are complex non-linear relationships between the inputs and outputs. So if you want to make a specific change to a specific trait, you have to edit multiple genes, and each of those genes affects multiple other traits you weren’t intending to change, etc.
Yeah this is actually one of the main things fueling this massive anti transgender wave we’re seeing now across the world. People were taught there’s xx and xy and that’s it. That’s what makes you one sex or another when that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Turns out nothing in nature is black and white. Literally nothing.
There’s a lot of news about gene editing. Anything that references CRISPR is gene editing. CRISPR in particular has become such a common and useful tool, usually in the earlier phases of research, that it’s less and less likely to get top booking in the headline. And when it does it’s often buried in another term like “GMO”.
We’re too busy dealing with Terminator right now; we don’t have the capacity to deal with GATTACA too!
After Dolly was cloned China enacted stricter ethical guidelines for researchers. Then they didn’t clone anymore. I can imagine the same happening in advance now with other ethically challenging topics around this.
And they are probably still working with bacteria or similar, but that makes for less impressive of a headline.
Edit: right, and in polo you can use cloned horses nowadays. It’s kind of a rich people thing. Possible also that that makes it more of a quiet topic, because the rich like to stick to each other.
IIRC the first attempts at it went poorly so they tend to be a bit more discreet with the PR nowadays (I’m not a scientist tho)
As another poster said there are indeed some advances that are happening
