this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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CRISPR is profoundly difficult and expensive, and gets more difficult and expensive the more chromosomes are at play. Modifying mosquitos is much easier, and with the short generations (days or weeks instead of decades for humans) it's much easier to get the genetic changes to stick and observe their efficacy. We might get around to modifying humans someday, but it will likely be centuries before it is available for anything besides fixing lethal anomalies (and even then, it'll be a long time until that becomes consistently successful).
As a widely available, cost-effective treatment? Almost certainly not. We have yet to successfully genetically modify a human being and there's a metric ton of legal and ethical red tape to deal with before we can even try.
Not necessarily, but the advancement of the technology and refinement of the technique are not progressing very quickly and since it's so far away from human application, there's not a lot of money/investment in it.
Gene therapy is not the same thing as CRISPR. CRISPR is modifying the genome before the organism makes it past 1 cell.
While that gene therapy does exist, it is not the same as what is being done here. The offspring of these mosquitos will have this same modified gene. The offspring of the recipients of the Sickle Cell gene therapy will not have the modified gene. We have the ability to alter a single human for their lifespan, but we do not have the ability to alter a human in such a way that their offspring will carry the same modification.