Geneticists Are Concerned Transhumanists Will Use CRISPR on Themselves
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The point is, you can't just "take CRISPR" and "chop up some cool new genes" then "use it on yourself". I mean, I shouldn't have to say this at all, but only with a childlike understanding is such a sequence of events remotely conceivable. Each of those items within quotation marks entail a deeply complicated series of planning actions and laboratory manipulations within different scientific paradigms, executed without mishap.
Even if it WAS that simple, who cares? People unambiguously have the right to experiment on themselves and alter their bodies however they wish without unwanted external interference.
There are a few cases were experiments on themselves using CRISPR may be at best morally "wrong". Changing your genes that may introduce defects to your offspring, for example. Another (probably less likely but more interesting to me) example is altering yourself in a way that invites a communicable disease to take hold, optionally mutate, and begin infecting others.
> Changing your genes that may introduce defects to your offspring
Is it wrong for someone who has a genetic disorder to breed? What about cases where both parents are carriers of a recessive genetic disorder, which gives the child a 25% chance of expressing the disease and a 50% chance of being a carrier themselves?
> altering yourself in a way that invites a communicable disease to take hold, optionally mutate, and begin infecting others.
Again, this isn't something we consider morally wrong. Is it morally wrong to let your basement be damp and grow mold? Sure, it's stupid, but is it morally wrong? Is it morally wrong to have unprotected sex?
We generally consider an action's morality based on the intent. If your intent is to spread disease, it's wrong. If you had a different intent, but didn't realize the consequences you're not considered to be wrong.
I think the more compelling argument is, what happens to people who don't want to alter their DNA if this actually works? If this is allowed in sports, much like steroids, other athletes will be compelled to undergo treatment just to remain competitive. If we can make people smarter, then people who won't undergo treatment could be relegated to doing menial tasks simply because they won't edit their own DNA.
To add another interesting corollary to that, what about people that won't do it for religious reasons? I know some people who oppose any kind of genetic alterations for whatever reason because it violates "God's design". I'm sure someone will call it discrimination when they have to flip burgers because they haven't undergone treatment to have an Einstein level IQ like the rest of the workforce.
> Again, this isn't something we consider morally wrong
"we" who? I suspect that it something quite a lot of people who consider to be morally wrong (whether they would consider it the kind of moral wrong that it would be desirable to formally sanction, as through legal prohibition on doing it or legal restriction on public interaction if you do it, is a separate consideration, but consider the issue of mandatory vaccination which involves legal restrictions if you fail to take active steps, involving treatment of your own body, to protect yourself and, through herd immunity, others from communicable disease -- its not implausible that many would consider active steps, even involving modifying your own body, that increase the risk of communicable disease sufficiently to not only be abstractly morally wrong, but the kind of moral wrong for which legal sanction is appropriate.)
> We generally consider an action's morality based on the intent. If your intent is to spread disease, it's wrong. If you had a different intent, but didn't realize the consequences you're not considered to be wrong.
In morality, as in law, while intent is usually important, actions taken without intent to cause harm but in which known risks of harms to others exist and are ignored, or even cases where risks of harm exist which would have been discovered with due care and are unknown to the actor due to their lack of concern, are often also considered wrong despite the absence of specific ill intent.
> in which known risks of harms to others exist and are ignored
What level of possible risk defines an immoral action? If we compare it to driving, there's a known risk that I'm going to kill someone while driving. With genetic modification, there's a very low assumed risk because we honestly haven't the faintest idea what's going to happen. The assumption of benefit is about the same as the assumption of detriment.
> cases where risks of harm exist which would have been discovered with due care and are unknown to the actor due to their lack of concern, are often also considered wrong despite the absence of specific ill intent.
This is a more nuanced area, especially in medicine. We have a lot of medical research that was enabled, or greatly hastened, by experiments undertaken with little knowledge of what the outcome would be. This would have the advantage of the subjects providing consent, since they seem to be acutely aware that there could be serious side effects. How far can we go without actually applying this research to people? How long will it take to get there, and how much time will trying the research on people save? How many lives could be saved by trying it on people now?
> due care
I also disagree with the use of this term. What is "due care", and at what point have you satisfied it? It seems to me that if you get to the point where you know all of the potential outcomes, the value of actually doing the experiment is greatly diminished. From my understanding, it seems highly unlikely for this gene splicing to have a radical effect either way. The two most likely outcomes, I think, are that no noticeable change in expression occurs, or the patient dies.
Considering that even today intelligence isn't that important as far as what limited natural selection we might still be experiencing it might not be such an easy task to accomplish.
Also because natural selection has considerably become less effective as we became a technological species gene editing might be our only way to continue our evolution.
That said widespread gene editing also decreases the genetic diversity so don't expect anyone to promote it anytime soon until controlled mutation can be successfully added to the process.
And while this is an interesting philosophical exercise we are probably at least 5 decades away from it becoming a reality and by then the overall standing of society will change drastically.
I am not a geneticist, and I imagine the state of the art of CRISPR wouldnt even be close to something like this now, but couldnt conceptually someone create an environment in their body that causes problems with unengineered people? (and then call into question whether bioengineering yourself is actually something we should protect)
For instance, comparing what is effectively "natural engineering" of people's immune systems living in cities and close proximity decimating native populations by bringing their diseases to the new world. Their resistance allowed them to breed a whole new set of horrible things.
However, do you think the ethical considerations of eugenics and vaccines are the same? I think that would be a disingenuous claim.
Furthermore, some victims of eugenics programs were considered mentally inferior to the those who were sterilizing them, and generally considered not intelligent enough to make their own decisions in this matter or to know any better. That also has some echoes in the vaccination vs anti-vaccination debate today, with the latter being accused of being stupid, uneducated, misled, ignorant of or unjustly fearful of modern science and the vaccines that some propose forcing on them for their own good or the greater good.
I am saying this is a false equivalence, and frankly, I am simply not swayed that vaccination = hitler.
My experience is different: One has a 'right' to do something as long as the observers (i.e. the authority) agrees that the right exists. In other words: if you want a right, you have to fight for it, first.
(Personally, I agree with your sentiment - but I'm a little frustrated with our current generation. Lots of rhetoric, too little action.)
You can get a tattoo without repercussions from the law; you can amputate your arm without repercussions from the law. In special situations where you are pregnant, the law may cause repercussions to you under certain circumstances. From this, you can assume that you have an unlimited right to self-modification, though you do not have an unlimited right to modify fetuses, which law does not understand as being a part of your self. This right is not explicitly codified anywhere, though we implicitly understand it to be the case, even in extreme cases such as heavily pierced or tattooed people. I am not equating cosmetic actions with genetic modification, but the fundamental right of self modification is the same for both.
If people experiment on themselves, then it seems the worst that could happen is they injure themselves to such an extent they require expensive ongoing medical treatment paid for by the rest of society (if they die, they just win a Darwin Award).
There will be charlatans (as with stem cell treatments) who try and sell this to desperate people with terminal diseases, but that's already covered by fraud statutes.
The upsides from human enhancement are pretty limitless and exciting in the long run.
It took about 40 years for psychedlic research to start up again, and even now the handful of studies that make up the "psychedelic renaissance" are almost all on compounds other than LSD, because of the stigma LSD still has attached to it.
“We have seen it in movies before: When a new technology comes along, of any type, people tend to get very, very excited about it and it stimulates lots of thinking and ideas. But the danger is that there is a race to do something that the field isn’t really ready for, or that causes either perceived or real danger to the community in some way, or something unethical,” she said. “That creates a backlash that can really set a field back.”
“Gene therapy is a great example of that,” she added. “There was a race into the clinic, with lots of excitement, and then when patients died there was a backlash that destroyed the field for more than a decade. We would really love to avoid that here.”
Recent news: http://news.berkeley.edu/2015/12/01/crispr-inventor-calls-fo...
> A three-day international summit on the ethics of making permanent, hereditary changes in the human genome begins today in Washington, D.C., the fruit of an informal discussion organized in January by Jennifer Doudna, the inventor of the CRISPR-Cas9 technology that makes such changes cheap and easy.
AFIAK this should only come up if people are messing with sperm/eggs, but it's definitely something to be aware of. Can CRISPER change existing DNA that would alter future sperm production? (am not a biologist)
(Even if CRISPR itself is not that expensive, the computational power to determine effective scenarios likely will be. Not to mention IP "rights" and lawyers as an additional bludgeon.)
(Additionally, we appear to be just beginning to really understand folding and DNA/RNA 3D and 4D geometry. I'm uncertain we can really determine the full scope of such scenarios, yet. Including perhaps transmissible negative repercussions.)
They pass it on to the fetus, which does not have the same rights as a human even if it may eventually become such. This touches on a number of issues, include eugenics. For example, if it is wrong to pass on unknown quality genes to your children, what about passing on known bad genes? Look into the rare cases of the genetically deaf ensuring their children have the same condition, which is legal even though it would be illegal to permanently deafen a child.
Also, if a person's right to do what they want with their own body can be limited due to the rights of possible future children (who may never even happen), what does this say of issues such as abortion or birth control (especially permanent methods). We should be very careful before assigning any duties people have to persons who don't yet exist.
Getting my genes sequenced for $100 revealed I'm a carrier of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay%E2%80%93Sachs_disease It would be highly irresponsible of me to breed with another carrier due to the 25% chance of an offspring with the disease, which all but guarantees early death. If one of us parents has the gene edited away, or it is edited away in the womb, this is a good thing.
I don't think that's a justifiable conclusion.
> This may be naive, I don't know to what extent a gene variant would be fine in an adult but not fine in a child.
There are lots of genes that have wildly varying effects at different developmental stages (and even under different environmental conditions at similar developmental stages.)
There are also genes that have different effects in homozygous, heterozygous, and hemizygous arrangements, on which a parent and child might differ.
The fear could be that society would come to view gene editing as a dangerous, subversive or crank activity and so impose regulations that would be so stringent even scientists couldn't use it.
Whatever one thinks of LSD, it's notable that it went from an "exciting exploration" to a thing that had to be suppressed at all costs fairly quickly in the 1960s.
Despite this society presenting itself as a capitalist meritocracy, numerous examples show it doesn't generally follow the paradigm of "it's your body and you can do what you want with it".
Thanks for reminding me that CRISPR should be able to cure HIV in short order. There is a gene variant that can make one immune if you've got two copies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Berlin_Patient
Not "inheritable and may eventually die out" inheritable, but "inheritable and all future generations from that point on would have it" inheritable. Usually, a genetic change in one organism takes a long time to spread through a population. But in this case, we have what is called a 'gene drive', where the trait can rapidly spread after a number of generations.
http://www.genetics.org/content/201/2/425.full
Any mistake will persist in the population even against selection pressure.
Unfortunate for those afflicted but then they are just waiting for another CRISPR to come along and knock out the offending change.
Human embryo gene editing was reported in May 2015 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13238-015-0153-5). It's reasonable to assume that the editing took place significantly before the submission date, especially given reports that the paper was first rejected from several other journals on ethical grounds (http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-scientists-genetically-mo...). I'm not trying to suggest that these particular scientists have performed experiments on viable embryos also, but I'd be very surprised if someone hasn't.
I think it's probably a good idea to keep in mind that we don't know nearly as much about editing DNA as we'd generally like to think.
Anyways - the label fits. If I want to tinker with my own genes, it is downright regressive to suggest that I don't own my own body enough to do precisely that.
Questions about passing those modifications into the gene pool are a separate from the question from the freedom of a person to do whatever they wish to themselves. I'd be willing to put up money on a bet that we will eventually have restrictive laws against self genetic modification along the same lines as the War On Drugs, and that those laws will not have exceptions for people who are unable to reproduce.
If I genetically engineered myself to produce an STD that selectively mutated into a deadly virus when it comes into contact with certain groups of people selected by genetic markers, well... that's not justifiable under the guise of "owning my own body" -- which is a vague concept anyway. I only own it insofar as everyone else allows me to control it. Ownership is negotiated, it is not assumed.
Your scenario is not a thing people are actually doing, or will actually do, and in a universe where it was, it's immune to the kind of regulation I was discussing anyways, so it's pointless to talk about.
Everything you do comes down to you controlling and manipulating your own body
We both know what we're discussing here. Stop it.
Who is harmed or even impacted in any way if I, say, make myself immune to malaria? Or give myself red hair or blue eyes? And don't have kids?
>Who is harmed or even impacted in any way if I, say, make myself immune to malaria? Or give myself red hair or blue eyes? And don't have kids?
When your experiment goes wrong, and you find yourself needing expensive hospital visits that you can't afford, who is going to pay for it?
And what do you mean "immune to regulation?" Is that like a "murder laws can't physically stop murderers, so why make it illegal" kind of thing?
The insurance that everyone in this country is required to have. And I meant "immune to regulation" in the same way that the war on drugs is a complete and total failure at its goals.
Most laws come into play when it involves OTHER people, not just yourself. Laws are to protect people from each other, not themselves.
EDIT: s/strange and nonsensical/clunky/
Like the people claiming that we're, "playing god," weren't going to be against this shit regardless. The best defense against bullshit regulations by busy bodies is to get ordinary people excited about this, not to grovel and cower in fear. Bring on the future!
Strawman. For better or worse, far more things are on the table than that, if gene manipulation becomes practical. We have to live with the results of the genetic tinkering, and not all the things that could be done are anywhere near that neutral.
With their help someday we may be able to eliminate genetic conditions like [color] blindness, aging, deafness, homosexuality, blackness, and your less preferred gender.
Where do you get uncomfortable with this list? Technology has benefits and risks. It's not too early to start the discussion. It's even relevant to what society and people today categorize as "healthy" vs "disease".
Many in the deaf community argue that they are not diseased. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/3ocsbi/ama_my_n...
BioViva is a small group that recently announced they have moved ahead with a human test of telomerase and myostatin-related gene therapies as a potential method to modestly slow the effects of the aging process. Their initial goals are to get things moving in this part of the field by taking this step forward, observing the results, and raising funding for further development efforts to try to lower the costs of this sort of approach. The BioViva CEO Liz Parrish, who is also the initial test subject, recently hosted an AMA (ask me anything) event at Reddit's /r/futurology community. Her comments below are lightly edited for continuity, since they are pulled from numerous distinct answers to questions posted by the community
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I am patient zero. I will be 45 in January. I have aging as a disease. To take on this role myself was the only ethical choice. I am happy to step up. I do feel we can use these therapies in compassionate care scenarios now but we will have to work them back into healthier people as we see they work as preventive medicine.
The genes targeted are human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) and follistatin (FST). In animal models neither FST nor hTERT have increased the risk of cancer. We expect to see the same result on myself, and to that effect we are measuring all known cancer biomarkers. The gene therapies on my body are to measure the effects on humans. There is plenty of animal research to support these gene therapies but no one was conducting human tests. We are using both visual biomarkers, MRI and a panel of blood and tissue testing including work on telomere length and epigenetic testing. We are collecting as much data as we can, but unfortunately we currently don't have the coverage rate for this therapy, how much of the tissue of the body is affected. Depending on the tissue and vector used we ultimately expect to see similar rates of transfection as seen in mice, which is somewhere between 5 to 60%.
We are working as hard as we can to bring it to the world as quickly and safely as possible. We will will evaluate monthly and within 12 months we will have more data. If the results are good we hope to have something to the general public, that is cost acceptable, in 3-5 years. Our goal is to build laboratories that will have the mission of a gene therapy product at a reduced cost. Gene therapy technology is much like computing technology. We had to build the super computer which cost $8 million in 1960. Now everyone has technologies that work predictably and at a cost the average person can afford. We need to do the same with these therapies. What you will get in 3-5 years will be vastly more predictable and effective that what we are doing today and at a cost you or your insurance can cover .
We need a lab that works solely to bringing those costs down. We would need about $1 - 1.5 million to build one lab to focus on this. We can expand as needed. I would love to crowdfund this project but I do not know how to get good results at that scale - I think the price tag is high for that modality. We are raising investment to do offshore clinical trials. Many USA companies do this. If we can cut costs we will be able to bring back a treatment that people can afford.
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If you're using it on unwilling/unknowing participants alive today, that's criminal assault (up to murder, depending how reckless you are).
Yet people are concerned about possible problems due to a now experimental technique.
We need early adopters and "early failers". Godspeed to those intrepid pioneers!