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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28890 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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(like the recent reports of a family in Ireland with a mutation that gives them 20 IQ points extra but causes blindness in their 20s).

thanks, interesting. Is it possible in principle to make a chimera with mutant allele in one brain hemisphere but normal allele in another?

I did some googling on ablinism and intelligence and there's some publications that say that albinism increases intelligence and/or some educational skills (might be explained by that children with albinism spend more time indoors).

In principle? Why not. Or at least I see nothing that categorically rules it out.

I don't imagine this will be easy. You would need to find a way to ensure chiral gene expression, either as an intervention in an embryo (after a certain point you know which cells are going to remain on one side) , or a more complicated deployment method if you chose to try gene therapy in an adult. Maybe you could selectively loosen the blood brain barrier in one hemisphere when you inject the vectors.

If there's a gene that works that way already that could be co-opted, I haven't heard of one, but I'm not a subject matter expert. My knowledge about mosaicism, at least in gene therapy, is when it's an unwanted consequence arising from an inability to spread the target gene to all cells.

If I had to go about this, I'd prefer finding a separate solution to the blindness or figuring out a way to prevent it from setting in in the first place instead of something so complicated.

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