Lack of a time machine.
If you travel back in time to the moment of your conception and splice in genes to the single cell that eventually grows into you, then there is a non-zero chance that the changes will result in you growing up to have chimp strength.
There’s also a rather greater chance that it would have unintended effects such as causing deformities or rendering you completely non-viable, but hey, you can’t make a omelette without cracking some eggs.
I don’t think there is anything to be done about the muscle attachment points. I guess I won’t be quite as strong as a chimp. I guess I can live with this as long as I am several times stronger than the strongest man in the world.
Mangetout and Lazybratsche:
Thank you for the specific objections. This is what I was looking for when I started this thread. I scrapped my current research and a rammed my bioreactor than considered what you said. I seem to recall that people are talking about using this CRSPR tool to potentially make gene therapies for cancer, or cut hemophilia. As I understand it, the idea is you modify a virus, say the common cold. You breed that virus selectively until you have a quantity of what you want. You then infect yourself with the virus and it goes through your body, cell by cell modifying your genome. A week later when I get over the sniffles i’ll Have super strength.
The only thing that could go wrong is that I sneeze on somebody else and inadvertently spread the super-strength cold to others. Since everybody eventually gets the cold, I’d give super strength to everyone else which defeats the purpose of making me the strongest man ever. Or, something could go wrong and I accidentally make the cold fatal when I soup it up and then I wind up killing everyone in the world.
To avoid this, I plan on wearing a surgical mask like Michael Jackson or a Japanese girl this weekend when I go to see Star Wars after I inject myself. So, that problem solved.
I can’t comment on whether the gene modifications work as described. However, even if they do, you won’t have super strength. At best you’ll have genes that allow you to build your muscles into super strength. You would still have to develop those muscles on your own.
The genes don’t give you strength. The genes regulate how the muscles develop so that they can grow in such a way as to give you strength.
Since your muscles have already developed, the new musculature would only apply to new muscle mass that you create through exercise.
Well, apparently " Scylla was a beautiful naiad who was claimed by Poseidon, but the jealous Amphitrite turned her into a monster by poisoning the water of the spring where Scylla would bathe." and we see here that she apparently looked like this Naiad, so you could forego the mask and just remove that enormous mushroom from around your head and lash it over your mouth, thus filtering out the bad fungi and allowing the good fungi to escape.
Then again, you probably want to stay away from crowds of strangers if you Do figure out how to assume chimp-like qualities. :eek:
That’s why genetic modification has the potential to cure things like cancer, but not to mutate you into a different shape in a SciFi sort of way.
Your body is consistantly producing new blood cells, and repairing its tissues by cell division - those processes can go wrong (causing cancer, etc), or be wrong since your birth - so gene therapy can possibly fix it.
Your body isn’t constantly developing and growing like it did when you gradually changed from a zygote into an adult human being - so the opportunity is already gone for gene therapy to ‘mutate’ you like it does in so many movies.
Mangetout and Engineer:
Hmm. I see the problem. So, the reality is that if I go through all this trouble and it actually works it still won’t do much. If I work out a lot and build muscle, I might get stronger a little faster than I otherwise would, but that’s it.
Bummer.
Back to the drawing board
This. In addition to the problem that you’ve already developed according to the plan in the genes you were born with, it’s very hard to insert new genes into an adult without triggering an immune response. It would be unfortunate if your immune system wiped out all your muscle cells.
Wait are you saying that Star Trek Voyager lied to me!!??
Say it 'aint so!
I was all set to agree with Broomstick on this one, but surprisingly, the answer may be yes.
The studies indicating chimps are massively (5-8) times stronger used a handful of dynanometer pulls in the 40’s and 50’s, then scaling the weights pulled to the chimp’s size to arrive at the amount chimps are stronger.
Those studies were actually refuted 20 years later, and more recent studies by Umberger and O’Neill have indicated that chimps are really only ~1.35 - 1.5 times stronger than humans. Other sources put this at around 2x stronger.
Speaking as a powerlifter, even at the high end of that range, powerlifters are typically well above 2x stronger than the typical person their height and weight. If you considered an average amateur gym-going male of 6 feet and 180 pounds, they’ll probably total something like ~600 pounds across deadlift, bench, and squat. A powerlifter the same size who competes should total at least 1200, and the elite ones will be pushing 1500+.
Of course, the actual average male in the US is 5’ 9" and 190 pounds (and a lot of that is fat), and would pull less than the average gym-going male, so the effect would be even more pronounced compared to the general population.
So if we’re to believe these more recent studies on chimp “super-strength,” the answer for Scylla may well be to hie to the nearest powerlifting gym, and spend a few years there. Soon he’ll be even stronger than a super-strong chimp!
Haven’t checked yet, but I’m guessing that cite goes to Jeff Goldblum. Who also demonstrated arm wrestling skills of a higher order, which Scylla would need to add to his triumphs.
And if he takes advantage of Barry Bonds Autograph Model illicit strength enhancers, it will take even less time. Honestly, for expected results, direct manipulation of hormone levels are a far, far better option than current genetic modification technologies.
That would only work if he’s already got the genetic potential to develop massive explosive strength through resistance training, which seems to be closely tied to the muscle fiber type ratio your have. There doesn’t seem to be much (or any) ability for people to change slow twitch fibers to fast twitch, only to maximize the strength of those you already have.
So not everyone has the ability to develop massive strength, nor super endurance just by dedicating to a specific training program. Training regimes for sports favoring extreme types of muscular development like power lifting, body building, or marathon running tend to select for individuals with the pre-existing aptitude for this kind of development rather than create it out of average people.
Wouldn’t it be easier to acquire a chimp and bend it to your will? A trained attack chimp at your beck and call is intimidating as all get out. Certainly you’ll face the risk of a rebellious minion, but that kind of comes with the whole evil overlord business.
Chimp strength? No
As the others above point out, there’s no simple gene edit you can make that will make your muscle fibers produce more power output than before. And you can’t change where the tendons attach or make your bones or joints different with just editing a few genes. (well, you could if you were a deity and could make billions of edits, basically turning part of your body into a sort of biological cocoon and rebuilding your limbs from scratch…)
Bodybuilder strength (and looks), though? Totally achievable. There’s a dozen tweaks you could make that would make the muscle you injected the gene edits into hypertrophy to their max size. You could mess with myostatin. Add more insulin receptors. Add more steroid receptors. Dozens of ways that would work.
The problems essentially are :
a. CRISPR is an early tool and it makes mistakes. Those mistakes, if you edit a few million cells in each muscle group you want to boost on your body, will possibly cause a mutation that leads to the cell becoming precancerous and then eventually mutating until it kills you.
b. There are regulatory mechanisms nature has in place to cannibalize muscles to provide protein to more important organs in the rest of the body. (like your brain). Gene edits to hypertrophy your muscles might cause you to suffer damage to those organs the next time you run out of protein powder to guzzle at each meal.
c. Nature did a shitty job on the human heart. It’s already the most failure prone organ and the most likely one to kill you by failing. Adding more tissues for it to pump blood to doesn’t help.
Your body is already built. Rewriting the blueprints won’t rebuild it.
DNA isn’t a blueprint. It just codes for proteins that do things. Rewriting it can have profound consequences and it’s not impossible to come up with a set of changes that would rebuild someone’s body, it just would be very difficult to not, well, kill them or turn them into goo.
Think of it more like a ticker tape that tells the construction workers what to do. You could order them to tear a whole wing down and remake it. Sorta. Though they’d have a tough time doing it without the scaffolding (human body being embryo sized and floating in liquid). So you’d have to come up with a sequence of steps to create the scaffolding needed to make the changes.
The answer is, obviously, to use CHIMPSR, not CRISPR. I’m surprised no one mentioned that. 
Worth a thread. Which forum?
Adult chimps don’t take to training all that well and would just as likely rebel against you as someone else. You could train very a young chimp, but then you don’t get the adult strength.
But chimps don’t work out. Sure, they use their arms for locomotion, but they don’t do focused exercises yet still develop super strength.
