> We will cure virus.
It is possible to prevent most viruses by recoding the human genome (requires embryo engineering or pre-embryo engineering) to use alternate codons that existing natty viruses don't use. This wouldn't prevent synthetic viruses from being developed that use the alternate codons, of course. See (1) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2016-05-10/ultr... and (2) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2017-05-09/ultr... and (3) https://x.com/RokoMijic/status/1720875112541364535 for some background.
As for "curing cancer", I suspect that Anthropic or OpenAI will use their high status/reputation to launder the existing solutions (germline, p53, enhanced DNA damage repair pathways, higher tumor-suppressor-to-oncogene copy number, more robust tumor-suppressor networks, more self-anti-cancer apoptosis, CD47 suppression, etc) that society has refused to accept. They might have enough reputation to get people to look at these ideas. It won't cure people with stage 5 turbo-cancer a.k.a the walking dead, but hopefully we won't be moving the goal posts _that_ much on them.
Ignoring the impracticality of trying to deploy this, codon bias exists for a reason, it's a translation-regulation mechanism and you'd wind up having to do a massive amount of protein engineering to not mess up everything.
How would you address the non-interchangeable nature of synonymous codons? Do we know the right replacements?
Well, first, I would have to check and see if the synoynmous codons are important for virus reproduction. Second, this technique requires (AFAIK) lots of cell line viability testing and lots of tweaking. I don't think it's as simple as code swapping all the codons and then all the biology magically works the right way, biology is rarely that simple. Requires effort.
This sounds highly speculative then, i.e., the biology could never work out, no?
It depends on what you consider to be speculative. It's certainly not a product available to the mass consumer market, if that's what you mean. But that's also kind of an uninteresting fact, right?
"Synthetic genomes unveil the effects of synonymous recoding" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.16.599206v1
"Probing the limits of genetic recoding using multi-omics-guided evolution" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74300-9
"Escherichia coli with a 57-codon genetic code" https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.ady4368
Speculative whether it could be done with humans without severe side effects that would make it useless/pointless.
Is it a product available to humans at all?
What could possibly go wrong...
I've seen this episode before
Oo is this the one where barclay becomes a spider?!
could be, or the one where dr pulaski becomes an old lady...
Or the one where Tom Paris and Janeway turn into lizards and have babies.
i forgot about that one, that also reminds me, what janeway did to poor tuvix...
Honestly, the most likely thing is lots and lots of dead fetuses due to developmental abnormalities. I'd be surprised if it ever got to the point of resulting in a dead infant.
Quality control and testing is absolutely essential, yeah. It's hard work and the plan shouldn't be misconstrued as "rewrite the whole genome of an embryo today and go for the first birth immediately" because that would be stupid when we know there is other work to be done. It shouldn't surprise ANYONE that making significant progress against cancer, aging, or other issues, would take lots of work and not doing the immediate obvious broken thing.