Stakeholder #2

What’s that smell? The smell of rotting eggs and greasy McDonald’s hamburgers fills the air. Oh, that’s just Mike! He just spent the past twenty hours in the lab with no breaks but to eat.

            Mike is a very interesting character. His tourist faded t-shirts always seem to have holes somewhere in them. His pants don’t quite fit him and his shoelaces are always untied. Mike wears a wristwatch that seems to be more for computing numbers than for telling the time.

            You see, Mike does not get out very much. His hair is greasy and his scalp, oily. He does not care enough to go and by himself a new pair of glasses that actually fit him and stay on his face.

            Mike is someone who, let us say, walks with a purpose. He always seems to be in a rush to get somewhere. He will weave through whoever he needs to in order to get where he’s going the fastest. Why you may ask? Because Mike is not a very punctual person. He doesn’t seem to care about much other than his research.

Jeremy. "Ah, chemistry" March 2011 via flickr
Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic

            You know when Mike is present because of the way he talks. His voice is somewhat high pitched, but it has a little bit of a rasp to it. His voice sometimes squeaks like he is didn’t quite make it through puberty. Mike is also very hard to talk to. He will give you short and direct answers without making any attempt to progress the conversation.

    A.    “Molecular biologist here - CRISPR has spread through the field like wildfire. I’m pretty sure there isn’t a single lab in my building, and no more than a handful on the whole campus, that aren’t using CRISPR for something or another. That said, the scenario presented above, with single-step biallelic mutations, is an ideal case, and there’s usually a lot of screening required to find the desired embryos. Still, very exciting times!”

B.    “Basically. Cas9 is an enzyme that makes a cut in a DNA sequence defined by a short guide RNA. Cells have ways to repair broken DNA. If you inject a DNA sequence that is highly similar to the cut region, the cell’s DNA repair mechanisms may fill in the cut with the injected DNA sequence. This is how you can potentially replace a defective gene with a working gene. This process is fairly inefficient, though.

If you introduce a cut but don’t inject a complementary DNA sequence, the cell will delete or insert random bases at the cut site and stitch the DNA together with errors, generally disrupting the gene sequence and leading to a non-functional product. This is how you can inactivate an unwanted gene (like a gene that predisposes to a disease, or the gene for brown hair if you want a blond kid, etc.).” 

   C.    I think the majority of a person’s health is determined by their body’s expression of cystathionine beta synthase (CBS). A large portion of the population have CBS down regulations but can speed them up via supplements like b6, turmeric, and various sulfur foods and supplements. Unfortunately, some people like myself have up-regulations which constantly leave your body deficient in necessary cbs cofactors, which in turn leaves you with poor H2S compartmentalization that causes immediate symptomatic issues like stiffness or just causes overall accelerated aging and disease in general. I can’t touch any vegetables because the sulfur reacts so badly, so a healthy diet isn’t exactly straight forward for me as well as others. I wonder how long it will be before doctors take cbs issues seriously and start thinking about gene therapy as a viable treatment. So far, 95% of doctors don’t pay any attention to cbs as a big factor in aging and disease. I hope things get better. Maybe when cbs becomes mainstream, I can look back at this post and say I told you so.

The first comment (A) holds quite a bit of validity. The individual (as they claim) is a molecular biologist. This makes the person’s comment more valid and trust worthy. They state that there is essentially a lot of preparation that needs to be done before any advancements with CRISPR actually occur. This is certainly true because the protein is still a rather recent discovery. This author uses objective and unbiased information in their comment.

The next comment also seems to hold some merit. Although the individual does no establish him/herself as a credible person, one can see that the information presented is based off of fact and not emotion. The person discusses the limitations that we are going to have with this enzyme by using factual information.

The next person leaves an interesting comment. They appear to have some credentials and establish merit by using factual information. The comment is concerning an enzyme called CBS. This enzyme, as noted, is responsible for a person’s health. However, the comment quickly turns in to an emotional piece when the author applies the situation to themselves. This decreases the overall validity of the statement.

These stakeholders (the researches and doctors) are extremely different than the biased conservatives mentioned in the previous blog post. The scientists really (for the most part) on factual information. They usually keep the emotional side of the argument out because it only complicates things and usually reduces the validity that your idea carries. The researchers are the ones who merely discuss the different possibilities/limitations with CRISPR rather than discussing the ethics of it.

They are very similar in the topics that may be discussed by other people interested in CRISPR such as farmers, pharmaceutical companies, and people with illnesses. They are also different from some stakeholders in the sense that they (mostly) only use factual information to prove an idea. Some stakeholders, that are still scientists but not necessarily researchers, often incorporate emotion in to the factual information. The researchers are also different from the Christians, government, and religious figures.