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- A team of scientists led by Joshua Rosenthal at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Eli Eisenberg at Tel Aviv University have shown that octopuses and their relatives—the cephalopods—practice a type of genetic alteration called RNA editing that’s very rare in the rest of the animal kingdom. They use it to fine-tune the information encoded by their genes without altering the genes themselves. And they do so extensively, to a far greater degree than any other animal group.
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And those changes wouldn't be passed on to the next generation, right? Depending on how the change was made. From my limited understanding of the mechanics behind this, we could (in theory)introduce changes in fully developed adults that allow them to neuro-adapt better than baseline, without passing those changes on down the germ line. It certainly adds a new dimension to the designer baby debate. Why alter your child when they are a few cells in a petri dish, when they could choose certain modifications as an adult of their own free will?
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