Babies from Skin Cells? Prospect Is Unsettling to Some Experts
mobile.nytimes.com
mobile.nytimes.com
This is currently meet with reservations in much of the Western world due to history, but it is doubtful that will China or India will show the same hesitation. On the contrary their population might view it entirely positive, who doesn't want to have a tall light-skinned son performing well in school. In such a scenario we will be forced to partake or be overtaken.
This isn't really a technological question but a socioeconomic one. Gestation is hard enough, but the much longer work of child-rearing: who pays for that?
Similarly with artificial generation: who is going to pay for it? The very rich who've already exhausted conventional infertility treatment?
The fully artificial person raises a possibility from cyberpunk dystopia: corporate-owned persons. After all, if someone is built out of artificial DNA and has no direct link to human parentage, could they be made liable for their own existence? Kind of like college loans, only starting from birth.
No, because minors can't enter into a contract. Not to mention that they didn't even consent to it.
I've been thinking about this, and I have a thought for a stable social system with some historical precedent. Basically, the current educational/career trajectory of most first-worlders (which, in general, I think is a pretty good idea) basically rules out having kids until you've graduated college. Beyond that, most people in their 20s right now don't want to have kids until they're financially stable, which can easily take another 5-10 years. So you have a lot of women who start having children in their 30s, if at all. Basically all research indicates that there are non-negligible risks to both mother and child associated with waiting this long. Genetic defect rates and physical complications from pregnancy are vastly lower in the late teens/early 20s.
So, what if instead, we did kind of a generation-skip thing where (financially stable) grandparents were the ones who actually raised their children's children? This would be a bit of a throw-back to multi-generational households where the elderly (by historical standards) assisted with child rearing. It seems like this would simplify a lot of things economically and career-wise.
Pretty sure the population went from 1 billion to 9 billion in a short time.
Want to survive long term? Perhaps people having children later in life might just be the thing to do it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/opinion/overpopulation-is-...
There is absolutely no hard evidence that world overpopulation should be seen as a serious concern, because we do not know the actual food production capacity limit of the earth, and clearly we are already wasting quite a bit of whatever's there (such as eating meats instead of plants).
Most people fall between the extremes of a moral bar they are trying to measure human behavior by or you accept that everything that happens in the universe is defacto natural.
With or without humans (ie when Yellowstone pops), the environment will change drastically over many human lifetimes. Creatures (maybe humans one day) will change, disappear, and wipe out other species. I worry about that day, more than the possibility the california delta smelt have a right to exist.
http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/Wor...
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-africa-ana...
We're past one limit already. We couldn't feed current population were it not for the invention industrial fertilizers.
Gamete cells have special mechanisms to control transposon activity that skin cells lack. The child won't be getting a clean genome.
Besides, it has numerous benefits too. I feel like the argument against it is an example of the slippery slope fallacy[1].
Do you mean to imply that if something exists, it is likely that it will never be used?
- reprogram cells (could be any cells, here they are considering skin cells as they are easy to get) to become embryonic stem cells capable of growing into different kinds of cells
- use signaling factors that occur in nature to guide those stem cells to become eggs or sperm
This has been done with mice
That would be great, however the backlash from the more... conservative population will be equally huge, I guess :)
Eugenics is, very specifically, the application of husbandry to humans. I'm all for anything that has similar benefits without the associated human rights violations.
Then there's the social consequences worthy of a Black Mirror season.
It's a slippery slope me thinks.
Why not indeed?
We have taken, or are trying really hard to take, natural selection out of the equation for ourselves. Doing so without an alternative way to bring out desirable traits and reduce undesirable ones condemns our descendants to lifetimes of treatment for ever more exotic and complicated genetic diseases. I don't think that's ethical, and I don't think stopping medical research is either, leaving us with gene editing of embryos (and hopefully someday fully developed humans) as the only way to ensure the health of coming generations.
Of course, you're right that this will have profound social effects. But so will doing nothing while continuing medical advances.
No one is saying that curing diseases is bad. But the fact is our lives will always be blighted with something, if not Disease A then it's Disease B and if not Accident C.
Nature has a wonderful way of intervening, somehow or another. If you find one, then it'll just get more creative. And by the way, I would argue that most of the current ailments are human-generated - like climate change and lung cancer caused by smoking.
The only leeway I can sort of accept is serious hereditary diseases like madness passed down through generations - but even then I'm cautious that it'll open the floodgates.
No. The risk is too much - a new human race with a clearly defined code of what's good and what's not good for them? What about those who can't "make it"? What about the rest of us who can't afford fancy genes?
Geez, this is Darwinian struggle taken to the extreme.
But our entire history has seen us making it safer to be alive. From cooking to antibiotics to now immunotherapy, we have reduced the risk of death at every turn. This even extends to mobility: we have reduced the ways in which we move (what is a road but a disincentive to use any other path?) in exchange for making them massively safer. Safety hasn't monotonously increased, but the pattern is clear. And successful. Saying that it can't be perfect isn't an argument against continuing.
> No. The risk is too much - a new human race with a clearly defined code of what's good and what's not good for them? What about those who can't "make it"? What about the rest of us who can't afford fancy genes?
This is a very valid ethical concern, and I agree that getting it wrong is a scary prospect. But I don't think that getting it wrong is inevitable, nor do I think that inaction is better.
In particular, the "never" position relies instead on blind chance. It may seem seductive because, hey, after all, blind chance is how we got here in the first place, but we suffer from tremendous survivor bias; our fitness to our environment is built on billions upon billions of failed experiments that resulted in death for each of the test subjects. I think it's perfectly fine to look for better models.
The societal problems you're worried about are very real, but I think the solution is to talk about them and work them out.
Hey you're right, and I appreciate that you're open about your thoughts. But my position differs in that I think there isn't anything to "work out", because it's a non-essential technology. Sure it might eradicate diseases, it might. But there are other ways to tackle them that have far less controversial impact.
> But I don't think that getting it wrong is inevitable, nor do I think that inaction is better.
With tools that have greater potential to be massively destructive, they inevitably end up like that.
Look how we shot ourselves in the foot with the inventions of dynamite and nuclear fission. Yes they did open doors, but arguably we've upped our own risk of self-destruction too.
"Inactive" here just means rejecting this path and taking up another instead. And, the latter may well open doors more beneficial to us.
Look, I have to say that I dislike looking at society and social issues from the Darwinian perspective. It's just too cynical, and kinda missing the point of living. We're not just here to survive. Whatever age we live to, every one has a chance to witness the wonder of just existing. We keep passing the torch of enlightenment, but we're not supposed to fall in the trap that we have control and therefore power. Trust me, Nature will laugh right back at us.
And you can't compare this issue with our rich history of wit and innovation. For a start, the generations before were trying to change the world, and this is radically different to creating a new "breed" of humans, where going down this path is not only superficial, it's most likely very painful for a lot of us.
Let's shift perspective a bit here: with this new "species", ours can get wiped out.
Because every dog breed we created is super healthy and doesn't come with list of diseases that are caused by small number of breeding pairs.
There is a related risk in the form of reducing genetic diversity, which can increase population-level vulnerability to infectious diseases. However, it's unlikely that the kind of modifications people will first use (strength boost, intelligence boost, better heart health, etc.) will pose a serious risk in this respect. I would advocate extreme caution for large-scale modification of immune system-related genes.