This failure was foreseeable, as it will be next time.
Marketing evolves in markets--a disaster for science. Competition for jobs, grants and investors rewards deception of self and others. Innovators win by overselling
HT @HeatherEHeying https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611659/turns-out-crispr-editing-can-also-vandalize-genomes/?utm_campaign=social_button&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=2018-07-17 … via @techreview
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Enh overselling would be if a million people died miserable deaths because they didn't test this well enough. They did test it well enough to find this. Everything is working fine.
Sorry, no. This tech beat out competitors that were "less promising". It did so by over-promising. You will never be able to quantify the loss due to hype.
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You are off the mark here. CRISPR is an incredibly important, basically free, tool for inumerable research labs, enabling many discoveries. Competing methods orders of magnitude less efficient. The issue identified in the Nat. Biotech paper doesn't matter for many applications
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My point isn't about its value, it is about the degree to which it has been oversold, which is substantial.
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I think it would be difficult to overstate/oversell its impact in the research lab - where it is genuinely revolutionary. In terms of clinical applications, you may be right. But competing tech was stone-age by comparison. The off target issue is likely fixable - early days.
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It is now fairly commonplace to make targeted (even single nucleotide) changes in germ-lines of mice, and some other animal species using CRISPR. The technical obstacles to doing this in humans are very likely surmountable. Challenging ethical questions follow.
End of conversation
New conversation -
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The hype exploded the market for gene editing solutions of all kinds, I'm certain lots of known rival efforts are funded as a hedge on CRISPR failing, and unimaginable amounts on search for currently unknown superior mechanisms. Ask your brother about what hype does to a market.
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So what is the systemic solution? Some concequence for overselling?
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