Does gene therapy only target certain harmful mutations? Why not change everything?
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Humans have tens of thousands of genes. Gene therapy only targets the gene causing the problem. That still leaves tens of thousands of genes which aren’t changed.
And why would they change all of the genes to fix a gene with a problem? On top of that it already costs tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to change a gene. You’d pretty much literally have like $10b people walking around if you changed everything. That and even though it hasn’t been done you would have to assume to a high degree of likelihood that if you changed everything you’d most likely kill the person in the process.
As of June 2021, FDA (USA) has only approved 2 gene therapy products, for specific diseases, so not many people, rich or poor, use gene therapy.
Gene therapy (gene editing for medical purposes) is a lot harder than you may think. Every single cell has its own full copy of your genome, and if you wanted to make some sort of change to a particular gene, you would have to get the editing agent into *every single cell* that expresses that gene. In the age of CRISPR, making the actual edit with good accuracy and limited off-target effects isn’t that difficult… but making it happen in every target cell of an already fully grown human is a completely different story.
So in short, rich people do not use gene therapy. The technology is still in its infancy, only approved for a select few treatments currently. It certainly isn’t possible for a billionaire to decide they want a different eye color and just have it done. Plus, when you get into traits that are governed by more than one gene, both your practical odds of getting several edits right in every cell plummet and there’s also the problem that we just don’t know all the variables involved.
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