I also think that getting adequate funding and permissions for doing this research, even just on animal subjects, within a 5 year time frame, is a substantial hurdle.
Agreed. Hopefully the post I’m working on may catalyze interest among funders.
To get approval for human testing? Whoa.
You can do almost all the human testing necessary to prove this technology in the context of other diseases and mental conditions.
Tier 1 would be pretty simple: find someone with a monogenic brain disease and try to get an editing agent into their brain to fix it.
Tier 2 would be to attempt to modify polygenic risk score. For example, imagine someone has treatment-resistant depression that doesn’t respond to therapy or medication, and they are suicidal as a result. We could potentially modify their genes to reduce the propensity for depression (particularly if their polygenic risk score is already unusually high).
Once you’ve done something like that, pretty much all of the pieces are in place. You will have tested literally everything except the genetic predictor for intelligence.
Agreed. Hopefully the post I’m working on may catalyze interest among funders.
You can do almost all the human testing necessary to prove this technology in the context of other diseases and mental conditions.
Tier 1 would be pretty simple: find someone with a monogenic brain disease and try to get an editing agent into their brain to fix it.
Tier 2 would be to attempt to modify polygenic risk score. For example, imagine someone has treatment-resistant depression that doesn’t respond to therapy or medication, and they are suicidal as a result. We could potentially modify their genes to reduce the propensity for depression (particularly if their polygenic risk score is already unusually high).
Once you’ve done something like that, pretty much all of the pieces are in place. You will have tested literally everything except the genetic predictor for intelligence.
Good luck! Not a horse I’d bet on, but I’m glad you’re in the race. Diversity of approaches buys us micro-alignments! :-)