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Comment by cryoshon | Hacker News Reader

Sure, it's an ethical quandry to play with an unborn child's genes, but keep in mind, these children will be born to the same parents who elect to modify them. A parent who wants to genetically modify their child is a parent who has plenty of resources to raise a child, and plenty of good-will toward their child to the point where they are trying to intervene even before the child is born. These children who are genetically modified would likely grow up being sent to piano lessons, math tutors, and little league.

So what if they're genetically modified to be good at these things? That's a child who will grow up with a leg up on the world already. This is the next step of our species evolution.

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> This is the next step of our species evolution.

The ethical problem isn't necessarily with the individual or even the family.

Genetic engineering isn't so simple. Genes frequently have multiple functions. You might edit a few genes and give someone a high IQ, but those same set of genes now make them socially inept.

So let's say tons of parents do this. You now have a generation that can't effectively socialize and communicate. How does that affect our species as a whole?

Most of humanity's accomplishments are a direct result of our ability to work together. We may worship the individual, but it's groups of people that actually get things done. So by tweaking that one little tidbit to increase IQ, you completely threw the delicate balance out of whack and sent everybody back to the stone age.

That's just one hypothetical example.

By bringing gene selection purely to the parent level, you're excluding millions of years of evolutionary pressure for the sake of whatever happens to be fashionable in that moment.

The good news is that most genetic modifications will have immediate and nasty consequences. You can dick around with corn and have fields upon fields that go bad and simply pick out the winners ... try doing that with human beings and there will be a huge outcry, very quickly.

>You now have a generation that can't effectively socialize and communicate.

Not just one generation -- Crispr changes are passed down inter-generationally.

Only if you are editing the germ line, as with any other method.

There is room for evil, but also for some good.

How about they start by testing parents for matching recessives that cause genetic disorders so they can know to have an Amniocentesis to make a decision on the child's viability?

Being able to edit out the bits for hemophilia, Downs Syndrome, Parkinson's, or <the genetic disorder you're familiar with here>?

It isn't all about trying to create some designer super race. Some parents knowing that they both carry dangerous recessive genes decide it isn't worth the risk of creating a child only to watch it suffer. More testing is good and IMHO ought to be strongly advised.

Actually you'd have to edit in genes to fix most of those things, as they're caused by missing/broken dna.

I think Gp means not carrying the recessive genes to term. Setting aside the ethics, we have the tech to do this right now.

Ummm... Me?

I had thought to mention it, but didn't want the thread to deviate to a morals discussion ;-)

Yeah, a later look had me wondering if I was reading too hard.

The whole discussion invites similar moralizing though, at least until the techniques are known to be very precise and safe.

Personally, I think aborting an embryo that will be born to live with serious defects or illnesses is the first answer, at least until embryonic genetic editing is viable in all cases.

> Being able to edit out the bits for hemophilia, Downs Syndrome, Parkinson's, or <the genetic disorder you're familiar with here>?

Don't misunderstand, I'm totally for this. In the cases you mention we have a proper baseline. We know exactly what will happen when we do the edits, on average. We are returning to the norm, not deviating from it.

The issue is all this super race talk that crops up around these discussions. It's just stupid.

I agree, but the super human stuff is anathema to the majority. I think it is only because of the conditioning they've had from reading novels (or from someone else's opinion after they read such a novel) where editing resulted in disaster and war.

It'll take time to defeat the bad publicity from fiction.

Evolutionary pressure has adapted us to an outdoor agrarian life. Few of us live that life. Its entirely possible to deliberately design people who fit into modern cities. Evolution just got a jet engine.

> Evolutionary pressure has adapted us to an outdoor agrarian life.

If that was the case, you would still be poking some rock with a stick covered in mud growing some wheat instead of typing on a keyboard, talking to somebody over the internet.

Evolutionary pressure adapted you to have a malleable brain capable of whatever is needed at the moment.

> Its entirely possible to deliberately design people who fit into modern cities.

Sure it is. Because we already fit into modern cities just fine. They're designed to our nature, by definition, since we designed them.

> Evolution just got a jet engine.

Fueled by synergy?

That's ridiculous. We're designed for cities, because we built cities? Ignoring chronic depression, the homeless, bad nutrition, epidemic diseases?

Our brain is good at adapting, sure, but not endlessly. Depression, drug use, crime all point to maladaptation.

Shrug, if we have a new generation that can't socialize but is super smart then that's the next wave of humanity and it's our job to get support them and make sure they succeed. The alternative is trying to beat the genetics out of them, which won't work.

You might feel less positively disposed towards a new generation that's super smart but sociopathic, especially if they have a superiority complex over the genetically normal...

In practice, I'd be more worried about well-intentioned mass modifications having more mundane negative consequence, like creating generations whose unusual metabolism means they're very unlikely to become overweight but highly likely to die very painfully in their early forties.

Its only the 'mass' part of that which is different from the status quo. Already maladaptive genes are laced throughout our population. Tinkering has the risk of producing large numbers of identical modifications. Its debatable whether that means more, or fewer, or the same number of folks will suffer compared to how its done now (random chance).

> Its only the 'mass' part of that which is different from the status quo.

That's pretty important though. The status quo is that maladaptive traits tend to spread very slowly, if at all, in populations. Random chance might give somebody a mutation which gives them an unusually fast metabolism and disproportionate chance of an painful early death, but its not going to spread the mutation across a generation in the way that a marketing campaign for SlimKids(TM) could.

Whether more folks will suffer than before in the long term is less a matter of debate and more a case of how restrictive the use cases are.

For context, we live in a world where despite serious worries about antimicrobial-resistant pathogens, the most common uses of antibiotics are as chicken feed and placebos for the common cold.

Even if popular human genetic modifications are entirely benign there's reason to be concerned about the effect on genetic diversity if certain combinations become near-universal in a population.

The reality is that most progress sits on the recklessness (or even callousness) of those willing to achieve it, and then carries over in the ensuing generations and we take all progress for granted as as inherently good. Probably the Chinese or somesuch government will start messing with generations (and not even in secret) and any outcry won't be much effective. Then, later, science will absorb the consolidated knowledge.

> ... and plenty of good-will toward their child to the point where they are trying to intervene even before the child is born.

Sure they do - right up until it goes wrong. How many of those parents are prepared to unconditionally love their children if they are born crippled, say? It seems to me that the parents who want their children to be "better" are less likely to love them as they need if they come out "wrong".

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