CRISPR-like tools that finally can edit mitochondria DNA
21 comments
·October 14, 2025varispeed
peder
And then when it gets it wrong and you ask why it grew a nose instead of an ear: "You're absolutely right! I can fix this!"
CSMastermind
I've been reading a lot about biochemistry lately and it's actually insane how complicated all of life is. The idea that we can edit genes at all is a miracle and I think most software engineers significantly underestimate how hard it would be to make meaningful changes to our bodies through gene editing.
toasterlovin
Unfortunately biology only does spaghetti code.
testdelacc1
I read a book about the immune system and it’s actually insane how much tech debt there is in there. We have several systems, each one built a hundred million years after the previous one. Each one targets the kind of threats that were prevalent then but are still there because they haven’t completely disappeared. So much complexity, and systems can go haywire so easily - autoimmune diseases, allergic reactions and so on.
And yet, like a startup that found product market fit with a garbage tech stack, this pile of jenga spaghetti is still going strong. Complexity doesn’t matter, people dying because they looked at a peanut doesn’t matter - ultimately this spaghetti works well enough to get humans to where we are today.
BartjeD
We just haven't found God's IDE yet
fragmede
Growing new appendages is clearly much more involved, but a Youtuber was able to give themselves lactose tolerance for a couple of months (they were lactose intolerant before). Assuming it wasn't faked for views, and that we are what we eat, that suggests other modifications to gut bateria aren't inconceivably far off.
throwup238
Considering that there aren’t any mammals that can regrow appendages, chances are adding an appendage would be impossible with gene editing because it would require editing both the mother and offspring to support novel embryonic development.
lanfeust6
Recently have been reading the Gene by Mukherjee. I'm amazed at what had been accomplished in the mid 20th Century. A lot of what still seems crazy now was done already albeit in small scale.
tracker1
I don't like to be alarmist, but some of this is a little scary, IMO. Small changes in a society can have massive impacts over generations. If you look at what happened to experiments with feeding house cats an altered diet in just a few generations. People are already eating a lot of things that wouldn't even be considered food a couple centuries ago, and maybe still shouldn't be.
We have a lot of increasing hormone production issues in western society already, I'm not sure that fiddling with things further is a real solution here without risking a lot of damage to society as a whole.
lazyfanatic42
The amount of change that has happened just because of The Internet, and the speed of those changes is already too fast for us to cope with. We haven't even properly coped with that single change as a society and things are just accelerating...
thwarted
This reminded me of the 1995 The Outer Limits episode "The New Breed".
guluarte
"Hey you #$#@ remove the ear from my anus"
Miaourt
A nice soul have a non-paywalled version to share ?
byrantech
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03307-x.pdf
this should work?
Miaourt
Maybe I'm just stupid, but I'm seeing the typical "fade-out" at the bottom of the article, followed by a subscription-wall, suggesting more of the content is behind this gate. Tho, maybe the "Making the edit" infographic is really the bottom of the article...
bil7
the only current archive on archive.is also has that. Watch this space for a complete archive, hopefully:
https://archive.is/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-02...
null
Imagine the future - vibe coding own DNA.
"Hey ChatGPT, I need third ear. Make it grow in two months."