China's Bold Push into Genetically Customized Animals | Hacker News Reader

China's Bold Push into Genetically Customized Animals

scientificamerican.com

28 pointsAmorymeltzer10 comments

Now that we have crispr:

China: the birthplace of the next eugenics revolution.

Mark my words.

Welcome to the gene race, just like the space race to keep creating more and more intelligent humans. Other countries will be forced to start their own research or fall behind economically, unless we end the race by inventing strong AI.

A recent attempt by Chinese scientists to modify human embryos showed serious problems with that strategy. From the paper [1]:

"...the efficiency of homologous recombination directed repair...was low and the edited embryos were mosaic. Off-target cleavage was also apparent... Furthermore, the endogenous delta-globin gene (HBD), which is homologous to HBB, competed with exogenous donor oligos to act as the repair template, leading to untoward mutations. Our data also indicated that repair of the HBB locus in these embryos occurred preferentially through the non-crossover HDR pathway. Taken together, our work highlights the pressing need to further improve the fidelity and specificity of the CRISPR/Cas9 platform, a prerequisite for any clinical applications of CRSIPR/Cas9-mediated editing."

Maybe we'll find a system that's better or we'll modify Cas9 somehow to stop these off-target effects, but for now it's not really viable.

[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13238-015-0153-5

I always figured it would be North Korea. But it is going to happen. Hand wringing and moral concerns aside.

My biggest fear for genetic engineering isn't the making of super soldiers via increases in strength, intelligence, and beauty. It's breeding well-behaved children. I think most parents want well-behaved children that listen to their parents. I also believe that many times society has leapt forward because of revolutions spurred on by deviants and trouble makers who were probably not model kids.

This is one of several areas where scruples would put the West at a significant competitive disadvantage in the years to come. I'm not sure whether there's any palatable solution. Can we see to it that we do not become monsters in the process of fighting them? I have doubts.

I think concern for ethics in scientific research will fall by the wayside in the face of a serious challenge to the current distribution of global power. If the Chinese begin engineering genetically superior soldiers (assuming such a thing remains sensible in an era of drones and robotic ground forces), the West will do the same. What an unfortunate vision of the future.

I am sure China is already doing it... and the West is not that far behind.

They will more likely than not justify it by creating a hybrid animal that won't quite be a human and therefore deal with the concerns that way.

They'll call them Gorilla Guerrillas or 大猩猩游击队

Unfortunately, as the article states, China has these ethical issues too. When I hear all the fear mongering around these new technologies it just reminds me of puritans and witch burnings. There is so much potential here to make the world a better place, and we still let "fear of god" hold us back.

I think, It is good news for disease like Marfan syndrome.

Splicing from Batman may one day be real...but in the process lots of things will probably go wrong when you try to play God.

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