yes this also happens naturally in the brain. this is the basis of synaptic plasticity, the mechanism by which we learn. i'm gonna make the distinction though that the electrical potential at which the neuron fires does not change, rather it is the number of receptors on the surface of the cell that changes. these receptors modulate the amount of ions that can flow into/out of the cell and that causes a change in the membrane potential of the cell which leads to it firing.

so changing the electrical potential at which the cell fires is not something we can safely change as it alters way too much about how the cell works in general (and depending on how you do it can kill the organism), but manipulating (with drugs, genetic manipulation) the receptors on the cell surface that modulate the ion flow in/out of the cell is safer and more built for tweaking.

i'm confused, was your question about changing the dna sequence of just one protein, leaving all the rest of the dna unchanged? that's how i interpreted it. but askoemnzviwcasf seems to have interpreted the question as you changed all parts of dna that code for a protein. was their interpretation correct?

i agree with the other comments on genes vs alleles and that it is often more complicated than recessive/dominant as in u/atomfullerene's example with blood types. but if i'm understanding what you meant, i think the question you were getting at is can a rare/generally considered detrimental allele become beneficial and widespread in a population.

if that's what you were asking, the answer is yes. and in terms of time, it would depend on how beneficial the allele is. an example is sickle cell anemia. Whilst it's normally a rare and detrimental mutation, it became pretty widespread in africa because it can be protective against malaria. In this situation the death from malaria was more frequent than the death from sickle cell, at least before the child-bearing ages, so this change was decently fast. here's a link if you're interested in reading more about this: https://sickle-cell.com/clinical/malaria

i watch usually like educational or crafty/diy type of videos and all the comments are wholesome and positive. i once made the mistake of looking at a news video on youtube and saw the types of comments you're talking about. so the type of video does seem to matter.

cool work. got a chuckle out of the "shake hands with" lol.

but human clinical trials are not the clear next step when they've only done ex vivo work lol. you do not go straight from a dish into humans

my guess is because it's not really that novel. organoids, retroviruses, and this type of work in general have been around for a minute now. but also, in my personal opinion, the impact factor of journals is a bunch of bs where famous PIs can submit trash now that they've submitted one good paper they're still riding the coat tails on 20 years later. so as long as the methods look good and the experiments are legit, i wouldn't worry too much about what journal it was published in.