Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos

nytimes.com

200 pointstysone168 comments

> They injected a synthetic healthy DNA sequence into the fertilized egg, expecting that the male genome would copy that sequence into the cut portion ... Instead, the male gene copied the healthy sequence from the female gene. The authors don’t know why it happened.

This seems like the most remarkable part of this entire article. It sounds like a huge discovery. There's a lot of ethical concerns that can be laid aside if the embryo is simply replacing genes from the other parent. That's still just a healthy baby, not a "designer" baby.

It almost sounds like there's an anti-tampering (i.e. counter-mutagenic) system in place we don't understand. Makes sense. Not only is meiosis more error-prone than mitosis, there's also a wide difference in error rates between the sexes (40 to 60% for women and 3% for men) [1].

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=I1ACBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA9&lpg=PA...

I went through a human neural development class in grad school and the most interesting thing I learned is that we have no/little idea what is going on. We know that rostralization/posteriorization is set up at initial fertilization in most vertebrates, but we have no what causes it (utube-spindles? actin responses to puncture?). Same with dorsal/ventralization. The way we know this small bit? Toads' (xenopus) have a dark/light side to their eggs and we can track that, but other 'clear' egged species are assumed to be like that, as we can't 'tattoo' a cell membrane reliably yet.

In general, I was really stunned at the insane complexity and fervor of development. I mean, you go from one tiny little cell and one tiny little sperm, and then you end up with a trillion little cells all different and all really specialized in under a year. And it mostly all works! Some of those cell migrate a very long way (from a baby elephant's head to it's toes with some nerves) almost perfectly. Some of the time, tons of cells are born, shepherd other cells about, and then die off in about a day (like apoptosis in breast-feeding). Why? No clue. Maybe evolutionary 'holdovers', dunno, more funding please. Really, the shear complexity and energy of the system, with things crashing into each other, traffic jams of cells in a neural cleft, all going about all at once, it is stunning. I can understand a lot of researchers that are in that field and how deeply religious they are, seeing and 'understanding' it all can be moving.

On the other hand, being completely unfamiliar with genetic imprinting as we are, we have no idea what the effects that this kind of single-gender inheritance may be.

Isn't this called crossing over and a common thing in gametes?

This happens frequently with this genome editing technique. It is one of the most common failure modes.

That is pretty interesting... I've hit a wall on figuring out what they did here but maybe have missed the info.[1]

1a) One male who was heterozygous for a certain mutation donated his sperm:

-"only three adult heterozygous patients were identified by OHSU Knight Cardiovascular Institute physicians and referred to the research team, one of whom agreed to participate in the study."

1b) X females donated Y amount of eggs:

- I didn't see these numbers discussed anywhere

2) One sperm each was matched to each of Y eggs for Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). It isn't clear whether any selection for sperm went on here:

-"Oocytes were fertilized by ICSI using frozen and thawed sperm. Fertilization was determined approximately 18 h after ICSI by noting the presence of two pronuclei and second polar body extrusion."

3) Z zygotes were found at the end of the above 18 hours:

-"zygotes were collected 18 h after ICSI and placed in a micromanipulation drop...Injected zygotes were cultured...for up to 3 days to the 4–8-cell stage"

4) 131 embryos formed from those Z zygotes that got injected with CRISPR-Cas9, consisting of 830 cells total:

-"A total of 830 blastomeres were isolated from 131 embryos, including 19 from control, 54 from zygote-injected and 58 from M-phase-injected groups."

5) A sequence was attained for 730 of those 830 cells:

-"Of 830 blastomeres, 730 (88%) resulted in successful libraries and produced PCR products for MYBPC3 while the remaining 100 blastomeres (12%) failed to generate PCR products and were excluded from the study."[2]

I mostly wanted to know Z, how many and what percent of zygotes survived the CRISPR/Cas-9 treatment. It seems to be missing. I would also like to know X and Y (initial number of women and eggs donated) though.

[1] http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature23305

[2] Elsewhere (the reporting summary) they say "no data were excluded"

>and is sure to renew ethical concerns that some might try to design babies with certain traits, like greater intelligence or athleticism.

If America doesn't do it, China will, and in a generation will be swollen with a population so much more fit as to make the question of the US standing toe-to-toe laughable. If China doesn't, Russia will.

I want genetic engineering because it's logical that as humans learn to exert control over their environment, it's inevitable that we also learn to control our own evolution. Rejecting this seems like tying our hands behind our backs unnecessarily. But I get that huge swathes of the population reject it for religious reasons or what have you. I argue that the "arms race" argument could work well to sway these people, and then before we can send super-soldiers into battle, our much more intelligent children will realize total species improvement is a better investment than squabbling over arbitrary borders, and carry on the race without these disputes.

Actually, the take away from this experiment is not that 'designer babies' are becoming more likely. In fact, when the researchers tried to genetically add synthetic DNA to the male genome it ended up rejecting it and took the copy from the female genome.

>> They injected a synthetic healthy DNA sequence into the fertilized egg, expecting that the male genome would copy that sequence into the cut portion. That is how this gene-editing process works in other cells in the body, and in mouse embryos, Dr. Mitalipov said. Instead, the male gene copied the healthy sequence from the female gene. The authors don’t know why it happened.

That would be incredibly interesting if there is some unknown molecular self-defense mechanism sort of thing in place.

I don't like it, but I have to admit you're most certainly correct that it's only a matter of time before human genetic-enhancement is commonplace. Best case, we'll be living in a Gattaca-esque world before the end of the century.

You do realize Gattaca was a dystopia right? That Ethan Hawke's entire character arc was proving that an unmodified human is just as capable as a modified one?

That best case is still a horrible future.

Gattaca was a supremely unrealistic plot because Ethan Hawke's character had any chance to compete with enhanced humans.

They filled that hole by only using screening; they didn't enhance anyone, they just picked the best embryos. You could claim that it is unrealistic that they would be able to do advanced screening but not able to do any changes.

And then the next thing to debate is whether he really had a heart condition or not. People come down on both sides.

Actually it was proving that being clever you can cheat the system. He showed, several time, why he wasn't as capable and probably put everyone on the mission in jeopardy because of it (Do they have contact lens replacements in space when no one else needs them? Probably not.)

That is one of the reasons why I love that movie, Ethan is the bad guy. Though that's probably not what the director was going for.

Do you have a hot take on Harrison Bergeron?

He was a 14 year old with a god complex who was arrested under suspicion of planning to overthrow the government, and proved them right when he attempted exactly that after escaping custody.

He and his compatriots were dealt with as any other traitors would have been while being caught in mid coup.

Ethan's character bothered me, too. The guy was hiding a serious heart defect, and while the viewer was meant to sympathize with his drive, it's not going to be much fun for his fellow crew members when a sudden infarc renders him unconscious and useless during some touch-and-go orbital emergency on the far side of Titan.

I don't see why that has to be best case. My best case scenario is that humankind has overcome tribal instincts, united around common causes, overcome arbitrary prejudices, and... well basically Star Trek.

Unfortunately though, tribal or not, there isn't much unity; people have fundamentally different ideas of how the world works. On the left we see our society as a class society, others see it as merely a society of free association. It is hard to achieve a post-scarcity society because of the way in which materials are located in the earth. There are many problems to be addressed, ecological ones not least. As much as I would like a Star Trek, I think it is a more remote goal than even the Communists and anarchists who are frequently ridiculed for utopian ideology.

In Star Trek the genetically enhanced humans started a massive world war that almost wiped out humanity. That's what Khan was. In the Star Trek universe, genetic enhancement is illegal because of it (caused some problems for one of the characters in DS9).

I'm kind of shooting my own desires in the foot here, but that was a fiction.

We don't really have evidence for what happens when a generation of much-stronger, much-smarter than average humans are born, and subsequently give birth to another generation of even stronger even smarter kids. I'm hoping it's not a bunch of sociopathic Khans and that if we can figure out how to make smarter babies, we can also avoid making sociopathic murderous ones.

EDIT: On the other hand, I'm seeing the fear now - we create 100 of these superkids, and it turns out sociopathy is simply more fit than non sociopathy. They use their superior intelligence to out-perform "normal" humans, breed more of themselves, take over the world, and "normal" humans are gone.

Bad for normal humans, good for... whatever humans are after?

I guess it comes down to whether you're willing to accept that the continuance of some version of the human race is better than the potential extinction of all of the human race (which I believe is inevitable if we don't start making changes like this).

You realize that enhanced alleles are going to spread into the gene pool the old-fashioned way, right? No society has ever managed to prevent the upper classes from fucking the lower classes.

Well, you'll have to wait for the genetics to catch up -- we know nearly nothing about the effects of variation on complex traits like intelligence or athletic performance. Even in known 'cancer genes' like BRCA1, we know what only a few of the thousands of single-base changes do. Without this information, things are going to be limited to known disease variants (a good thing)

So what? How are we going to learn unless we experiment? I detest the precautionary principle. If we'd followed it in prehistory, we'd have never left the trees: who knows what might be down there?

It is fair that caution is needed - otherwise we're just a bunch of Qyburns, right?

GRRM framed Qyburn negatively. You could view him from a positive angle instead: he's a brilliant scientist who left the scientific community so he could pursue groundbreaking research without being slowed by obsolete and conventional ideas. That's a heroic narrative, not a sinister one.

ASOIF is fiction. We live in reality. The problem is far more often that we're held by obsolete and suffocating rules than that we're moving too fast. I'd rather try new things than hunker down in fear of the unknown.

> GRRM framed Qyburn negatively. You could view him from a positive angle instead: he's a brilliant scientist who left the scientific community so he could pursue groundbreaking research without being slowed by obsolete and conventional ideas.

I think GRRM very carefully made by both the positive and negative parts key to the framing of Qyburn; he's quite clearly both a brilliant scientist who rebelled against obsolete and conventional ideas which did not work, and, a monster who is utterly indifferent (or so nearly so as makes no difference in practice) to the suffering inflicted on the pursuit of his research, either directly or in his efforts to maintain the support he needs to continue his work.

GRRM tends not to make unidimensionally good or evil characters in ASOIAF (there's a few that seem that way on the evil side, but they are mostly also ones we don't know as much about.)

There are multiple ways to interpret fiction. I'm reminded of that Russian fanfic that cast Sauron as a heroic industrialist doing his best to drag Middle Earth into an industrial revolution, all the while being hampered by superstitious people from the steppes constantly raiding his cities.

The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Eskov in case anyone's interested.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer

It's easy to say you'd like to "try new things" when you're not the one being experimented on.

How would you like to be born a mistake in such experimentation. That's why the ethical issues are serious. If it's not safe, the mistakes will be paid for by utterly innocent and unwilling participants.

How would you like to be born with Huntington's disease, knowing that your parents could have taken an unknown risk to save you from it?

We are all utterly innocent and unwilling participants in being born. You can either take the random cards that nature deals you, or we can try to act to have better outcomes. Just because you refuse to take action doesn't absolve you from taking a suboptimal action.

This could also easily turn into a larger discussion about the ethical considerations of procreation when one is not in a favorable position (e.g. poor, homeless, addicted to drugs, mentally ill). What's OK and what's not? Who decides for everyone? Is that the best way? Should people be allowed to decide for their future children?

That larger topic is indeed a touchy one. I tend to have a controversial stance in that discussion, so I do get plenty of down votes on it. Somehow, people feel very strongly about about adults' "rights" to procreate. Even if that right results in the involvement of an unwitting participant who then leads a very short life of struggling.

It's actually very saddening to watch a completely avoidable & preventable problem, whose N-amount of obvious solutions end up being shoved under the rug because we refuse to draw the line.

the end goal in this is a class of priest-like experts to decide, obviously. I'm surprised no one realizes the tyranny of being forced to justify your right to procreate at all, let alone unguided by scientific experts with their own clear ideals of what should be done with your child.

Very few people are honest with themselves and admit the end goal is not making better, its making more controllable/more in aim with how the rulers want their population to be.

Experiment on who, exactly? How do you get consent from an embryo for the life it will have to live as a result of what you're about to do to it?

"I detest the precautionary principle."

Sometimes, a little bit of caution is what keeps someone alive long enough to reproduce. Plenty of Darwin Award winners could have used a little more caution.

It will start off very slowly. I'd argue we're already doing "genetic engineering" on a small scale with IVF. At some point, the IVF clinics will start offering "screening" for incrementally less harmful diseases, disorders and traits. And then it's a small step from that to simply picking "the best" embryos. E.g. They'll "filter-out" all the embryos that will end up being very short. Then they'll filter out all the embryos that are "most-likely" to be below-average in intelligence, or most-likely to be mentally challenged, etc.

Even if it isn't down-right engineering/splicing/etc, and using only the parents' egg/sperm combinations, they can still offer to "move our society" forward at a snail pace.

I personally see no reason to be against it, as it's the logical extension of natural evolution. It's just more refined, scientific, guided, and devoid of some of the randomness or trial-by-error properties that are inherent with natural evolution.

I completely agree that a little bit of caution is important. That's not at all what the precautionary principle is. It says that before you do something, you must first prove that it's harmless.

This kind of proof is of course impossible, and in practice it means "never do anything".

The fun thing about is that people only advocate applying it to things they don't want to do, never on their own favorite projects

I'm pretty sure that if we threw a lot of genomes, healthy and defective, to a neural network, and then showed it a genome and told "make it healthy", it would.

So it happens that genetics doesn't have to catch up - we can have this knowledge without knowing it.

And also. People will question genetists' judgement. Some of the changes they're proposing have never passed statistically significant testing. But nobody ever questions neural network.

That's an interesting idea, but with my limited knowledge of neural networks and deep learning, don't these things usually need to know when they are "successful?" (i.e. the distance gone right in a mario game or something). How do they not only suss out various options for genomes, then test the effects?

Dear lord, this is exactly why everyone thinks neural networks are AGI about to take over the world. Neural networks are not magic.

> I'm pretty sure that if we threw a lot of genomes, healthy and defective, to a neural network, and then showed it a genome and told "make it healthy", it would.

It's not quite that simple.

I'm sure that machine learning will come into play at some point, but we aren't able to model complex organic molecules in order to understand or evaluate "healthy" on silicon.

In order to use ML on actual organisms, you'd need a way to try a lot of different modifications and then evaluate them after actual growth.

Doing that kind of experimentation with human embryos, fetuses, and beyond has huge ethical minefields as well as many biological engineering challenges.

Sorry, but this is kind of laughable and shows a lack of familiarity. The data and existing knowledge base in biology is nowhere near sufficient to train a model like the one you described. Our genomes and the molecular biology it powers is astoundingly complex and small, it will take decades still to begin to understand how all the pieces work together.

This is an active research area that one of my former professors is involved in. Things are not as simple as you hope they would be.

You're optimizing in a space of millions of discrete dimensions (one for each base pair), with little knowledge about independencies. This is in contrast to tasks like image recognition, where we can make use of the spacial structure of the pixels to build effective models like convnets.

Additionally, medical datasets, especially ones with genetic data, rarely contain more than a few hundred datapoints, which is not where you want to be for deep learning.

Machine learning is still useful in this area, especially to find genes or gene combinations with high correlation to certain diseases. But we are very far away from having a model that maps genome -> healthiness.

I don't think you are wrong in principle but in practice this simply wouldn't work. We don't have enough sequenced genomes in the world to train such a network and even if we did there is no guarantee that a network-produced genome would stay in the manifold of healthy humans when trying to change an existing defective genome to a healthy one. Either way it would be to expensive to find out if a new genome actually works. Finally with a sequenced genome going for a couple gigabytes I don't see us having a large enough usable data set of these any time soon.

> we know nearly nothing about the effects of variation on complex traits like intelligence

This is changing at an astonishing rate, though. The development of GWAS combined with huge genetic datasets and associated IQ test information has opened the floodgates to finding more and more genes that predict the variation in IQ. Of course, it's still an open question whether these have other effects, and whether their effects are additive (linear), but the field does seem to be making extremely rapid progress...

'gwern has put together some links on genetic associations with IQ:

https://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#intelligence

+1. There are unlimited possibilities. This may even allow us to survive on Mars or any other places if we actually know how to edit the gene. Like anything, technology can also be used in the wrong way and we must guard against.

"This may even allow us to survive on Mars or any other places if we actually know how to edit the gene."

How in the world did you make that leap? What's the one gene we can edit that reconfigures human physiology to run off of CO2?

It's not just one gene, it's two. I toggle them back and forth all the time. A third one gives me gills.

Seriously? Why wouldn't you make that leap? and why would you assume they would presume to know what gene or if it was even one gene?

I'm not seeing the consistency in your arms race argument. I don't have a lot of hope that the more intelligent children will decide that war sucks - odds are at least 1 country in this hypothetical arms race would spend significant resources on more aggressive, order-following soldiers to do the bidding of people who still want war.

It's nothing to do with religious reasons for me - I just categorically reject the idea that many of the categories of "disorder" are things that humanity would just be better off without. Is life harder with, say, Down's syndrome? Sure. Is life harder as, say, a homosexual? In many places, sure. Would the world be a better place if we managed to eliminate these traits? You really wanna make that statement? I'm really curious to know where you see a completely objective line to draw here.

Down's syndrome usually isn't a trait, it usually is a result of a second copy of a chromosome being included in a sperm or egg cell.

I don't see how the ethics of "fixing" that defect is any different from the therapy discussed in the article.

Okay, I was just saying that it usually arises for no predictable reason during pregnancies involving parents that do not have trisomy. Most of the time it isn't a trait as such (even though it can be passed from parent to child and is a trait in those circumstances).

I suppose one difference with the article is that pregnancies are actively being terminated based on the presence of Down's Syndrome in the fetus.

This is all about the ethics of future applications of technology. I'm talking about "fixing" an embryo with trisomy so that it doesn't have trisomy. We don't have to get into the particulars of current technology or little differences in various genomic anomalies. Or we can pick pretty much any other disability, and one that is a mutation in a DNA sequence. My question stands. What is the objective, non-religious thing that the parent thinks we should optimize for, or what determines what things we should and shouldn't be messing with in the genome that won't result in a Gattaca-like dystopia where vain people have eliminated diversity from our species for shorter-term competitiveness by some metric at the expense of all sorts of good stuff about humanity.

As I alluded to in my other response, I'm not sure getting rid of legitimate disabilities like Down's is optimizing for "shorter-term competitiveness." Your argument is basically a slippery slope argument. If we fix Down's, what's next? When does everyone become a 6'4" blonde haired blue eyed Adonis? If you'd rather say that we need to keep having folks with preventable disabilities because it represents "all sorts of good stuff," feel free to tell that to their parents.

... I am one of their parents - and I can assure you the happiness anyone gets from associating with my children or the happiness they get from experiencing their life is independent of their capacity to become a scientist or an athlete. I'm not talking about not preventing diseases. Gene therapy as announced in the article? Sounds good. Eugenics beyond that? I think we need to have a big discussion about what we're actually trying to achieve as a society, because beyond actual lethal diseases there's a lot of big costs to society that come with it.

Well for one, Down's syndrome naturally limits what one can do with their life. How many scientists are there with Down's? Any limits placed on someone for being homosexual are placed there by other humans and not a natural limitation.

It's a little dangerous to think gene-editing is the cure to human-ills, and that it is "natural" progress for the human race. Considering everything currently known in the human sciences, I think what you're asking for is asking too much of gene-editing alone.

I prefer the Star Trek view of gene-editing, for genetic diseases, ok. Otherwise, no. Arguably, there is nothing to make better, or faster than what evolution is naturally doing.

Haven't we effectively halted evolution, though? Strength doesn't really matter when you can become wildly "fit" in this world via brains alone, brains don't really matter when you live in a society that isn't ok with (generally) letting people die on the streets of hunger, etc. Seems the traits being selected for is a total crapshoot - anything goes.

Do we not compete in sports? Or win Nobel prizes? Aren't we free to do what we want? Every one isn't a sports person or what have you.

Unchecked genetic engineering is what will bring about mono-cultures, fads, and me-too traits. Does any parent want to put their child through something like that through their entire life? Is it better to build a hab on Mars and breath air, or to genetically engineer yourself to possibly breath what is in the martian atmosphere/ground? What genetic trait trade-offs are you going to make when you can't have certain traits and are at the limits of biology? What trade-offs is the population going to make? I think the answer to all of these questions leads to less freedom for the individual, and a worse society. The parent doesn't have the right to take away or add traits, however benign or meaningful they seem, unless fixing a genetic disease.

But it doesn't increase the chance of survival, which is what he probably means when he says we halted evolution.

Genetic engineering isn't about to give anyone an "increased chance of survival." Unless you have a genetic disease, then it's ok. The population of earth isn't going to start decreasing anytime soon. Unchecked genetic engineering reducing natural genetic diversity might actually reduce the population of earth.

I don't understand what "halting" evolution means. Evolution as a process, through natural selection, is at work and will still be working when you have or don't have genetic engineering.

Also, trading personal and societal freedom for some notion of "increased chance of survival" isn't a trade-off you want to be making. Would you rather be free or live longer?

Halting evolution insofar as "organisms that possess heritable traits that enable them to better adapt to their environment compared with other members of their species will be more likely to survive, reproduce, and pass more of their genes on to the next generation." no longer applies where "organisms" = humans in developed countries. You can now be less fit for your environment and still survive just as well as someone who is more fit. You can reproduce the same as or more than someone who is more fit, and pass on more of your less-fit genes. Your random mutations don't matter much since we've solved survival pretty well for the vast majority of people. One finger being half an inch longer won't help you much in modern society.

This is just wrong. Do bears not make homes in caves? Do monkeys not use tools? Parasites co-evolve with who ever they're leeching from. Plants, insects, and bacteria are still evolving in greenhouses and petri dishes. Natural selection is determined in many ways, you can go read about it (most definitely not just with "random mutations"). None of those reasons exclude humans on earth just because we live in concrete walls. A lot of animals and whole species are "less fit" by your definition and still pass on their genes just fine. Or are "fit" by your definition and don't.

Once again, I have no idea what you mean by halting, or "less fit" or anything else in your rambling comment. The fact that you focus on the traits you think matter, makes the comment even more idiotic. People who have no fucking clue what evolution is, should not be a part of this conversation and should be ridiculed and ignored.

Evolution is not survival of the fittest, it's natural selection. It is working on earth, on humans, and will continue to work with or without genetic engineering. Like I said, the decrease in natural genetic diversity from unchecked genetic engineering will hurt every species on earth. What we've done to cultivated plants in reducing biodiversity, should be more than enough evidence of what will happen with genetically engineered humans if we ever get there.

Well, not quite in that way. Survival of the fittest doesn't literally mean 'survival of those with the most physical strength'. It means survival of those most well adapted to their environment, intelligence included.

And evolution hasn't effectively halted either. It's hard to tell that sure (because evolution on a massively noticeable level is a slow process and human history is short) but the whole process of genetic mutations arising and people doing better because those mutations make them slightly better for their environment is still going on.

And the traits selected for aren't random nor a crapshoot, they're just kind of overshadowed by social situations and hierarchies. If there were two kids from the exact same background and one was 'more intelligent' than the other, the more intelligent one might do better. But it's very rarely that simple in society now.

> If America doesn't do it, China will, and in a generation will be swollen with a population so much more fit as to make the question of the US standing toe-to-toe laughable. If China doesn't, Russia will.

So what? They win more Olympic medals? Or what, they invade like in Red Dawn? Or they take all the places in our elite colleges?

While its not an argument against, fear-mongering a ludicrous, purely hypothetical bioengineering arms race is not a particularly good argument for.

> I want genetic engineering because it's logical that as humans learn to exert control over their environment, it's inevitable that we also learn to control our own evolution.

If something is inevitable, it's irrelevant whether you want it or not.

> But I get that huge swathes of the population reject it for religious reasons or what have you.

I honestly don't think you do get it. I think you accept your own moral imperative naively and uncritically without even a casual attempt to understand the thought of those who are a little more circumspect.

>without even a casual attempt to understand the thought of those who are a little more circumspect.

As someone more circumspect, can you illuminate me?

The country with more capable populace will produce more valuable goods and services. If free trade is allowed, trade imbalance will accumulate to an extent that might tip the scales in other domains, including global standing.

Technological and military power also fundamentally depend on the quality of people.

Full-scale war is not likely in the near future, but will people accept being an underdog after a century of dominance?

Wait, yanks are worried about a trade deficit with China? Take a seat, i have some news...

Really this post is what is already happening. Nothing to do with genetic engineering, everything to do with neoliberalism.

Comparative advantage?

I like how you portray the US to have a higher moral standard for this subject matter. I wonder if there's a Chinese guy who read the article and said:

If China doesn't do it, USA will, and in a generation will be swollen with a population so much more fit as to make the question of the Chinese standing toe-to-toe laughable. If USA doesn't, Russia will.

Maybe it is time to start thinking about an international agreement to limit unethical genetic engineering. A "Paris Accord" for "Genetic Engineering" if you will...

Apologies, I'll need to re-read my comment and account for that perhaps in an edit. I don't mean to cast any country in a "better" light - I'm only speaking from the perspective of an American. Basically I'm saying if "we" don't do it, "they" will.

The endgame of my argument is that I hope EVERYONE will do it, and I frame it as "us" vs "them" as an attempt to find a way to overcome typical ethical concerns about genetic engineering, most of which I disagree with (so I myself don't need convincing).

My objective is a united human race. Whoever takes us there is fine by me.

It's not moral standards we have, it is ridiculously parochial notions of purity and natural-is-better attitudes. If we fail to free our children from stupidity and ill health, we are the moral imbeciles. If Asian nations increase health, IQ, and happiness through genetic selection and engineering, this will speak of higher moral sophistication. We have right-wing religious conservatives on one side and on the left a sort of Lysenkoism that pertains to all mental traits. I fear this will prevent us from implementing this technology.

If you outlaw genetic engineering, only outlaws will be genetically engineered. Then they'll take over the world.

That's a paradox since a genetically improved species would abhor violence. They would have no ability to take over the world. They would become subservient like the Eloi in The Time Machine.

> That's a paradox since a genetically improved species would abhor violence.

Bold claim.

> a genetically improved species would abhor violence.

On the other hand, humans are the apex predator of the known universe, the output of 4.5 billion years of evolution driven by relentless, unceasing violence. It's not clear that a genetically improved species would abhor violence.

I share some of your frustration about the irrational preference for "natural" things. Too often these attitudes result in the rejection of critical advances like GMOs and vaccines.

But I also have to preach some caution about meddling with human genetics. At this point we have what I think you can agree is a relatively poor understanding of the potential consequences of splicing DNA in a human zygote. Crashing headlong into an age of careless modifications could be disastrous for the survival of the species.

I just finished reading the Firefall duology by Peter Watts (http://rifters.com/) and one of the themes in the second book is that "baseline" humans are in some ways hardier than modified transhumans. Natural selection has fixed a lot of the bugs in us baselines over millions of years, and that's a hard-won legacy that we shouldn't be too quick to discard for barely-understood alterations.

America, historically, has been defined by a Protestant culture which places a lot of religious and moral significance on conceiving human life, and on God's role in creation. Chinese culture does not, as far as I know, have the same stigma against genetic engineering (I admit that while I have traveled for some time in China, I am relatively unfamiliar with any moral, religious, or cultural issues they may have on this topic).

It's natural for the GP to assume that his or her morals are the most correct. How could they behave be otherwise? If they believed that Chinese morals were a higher standard, they would adopt them. Everyone reads the article from their own perspective.

What Chinese Govt. says is much more important than Chinese morals and culture.

> a Protestant culture which places a lot of religious and moral significance on conceiving human life

Er, that would be more characteristic of Catholicism. There's a reason for this Monty Python skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifgHHhw_6g8.

Francis Galton, a product of a thoroughly Protestant society, was already worrying about the negative correlation between socioeconomic status and fertility very shortly after the Industrial Revolution.

It's not necessarily just about moral standards. China's government has a recent history of strong policy on matters of population and birth, the One Child Act being the most well-known. There are still regulations on reproduction in the name of population control, such as making it illegal for unmarried women to freeze their eggs:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/31/world/asia/china-us-women...

> According to the National Health and Family Planning Commission of China, assisted reproductive technologies are denied to “single women and couples who are not in line with the nation’s population and family planning regulations.” Even married women must provide proof of marriage, a license to give birth and evidence either of infertility or of medical treatments that could impair fertility, such as chemotherapy.

> I like how you portray the US to have a higher moral standard for this subject matter. I wonder if there's a Chinese guy who read the article and said:

It's just the nature of where we live and our propaganda.

We have been told over and over that we are the light of the world and we represent good. China/Russia/Muslims/others represent bad.

> If China doesn't do it, USA will, and in a generation will be swollen with a population so much more fit as to make the question of the Chinese standing toe-to-toe laughable. If USA doesn't, Russia will.

I'm sure there is. Human beings are human beings.

In the future, maybe instead of national/racial demarcations, we'll have "valid" and "invalid" demarcations a la "Gattaca".

Or maybe those countries will fuck up their population's genetic makeups in unforeseen ways, and we can be fortunate for having dodged that bullet.

Do you honestly believe there is a single "intelligence" gene we can edit to turn up intelligence like a knob, without impacting anything else about the person? Do you want your baby to be the first one its tried out on?

Who said it was a single gene? Do you believe that because there is a risk, no study of these methods or this idea in general should continue?

Did you just volunteer to be the first experimental subject to get your genes edited with these techniques?

There are several problems.

First, what is intelligence? Is it simply math & science? What if we lose other hard-to-measure, essential traits?

How much happiness is "better"? Should we "switch on" a gene that makes someone perpetually happier, given the option?

What happens when a set of traits becomes popular? Will diversity be lost? Will everyone choose lighter shades of skin?

Those are fantastic questions. Aren't they worth exploring with further research?

Yes, so long as you're not playing with human lives while researching it.

"But I prefer here to stick to a strictly logical line of distinction, and insist that whereas in all previous persecutions the violence was used to end our indecision, the whole point here is that the violence is used to end the indecision of the persecutors. This is what the honest Eugenists really mean, so far as they mean anything. They mean that the public is to be given up, not as a heathen land for conversion, but simply as a pabulum for experiment. That is the real, rude, barbaric sense behind this Eugenic legislation. The Eugenist doctors are not such fools as they look in the light of any logical inquiry about what they want. They do not know what they want, except that they want your soul and body and mine in order to find out. They are quite seriously, as they themselves might say, the first religion to be experimental instead of doctrinal. All other established Churches have been based on somebody having found the truth. This is the first Church that was ever based on not having found it.

There is in them a perfectly sincere hope and enthusiasm; but it is not for us, but for what they might learn from us, if they could rule us as they can rabbits. They cannot tell us anything about heredity, because they do not know anything about it. But they do quite honestly believe that they would know something about it, when they had married and mismarried us for a few hundred years. They cannot tell us who is fit to wield such authority, for they know that nobody is; but they do quite honestly believe that when that authority has been abused for a very long time, somebody somehow will be evolved who is fit for the job. I am no Puritan, and no one who knows my opinions will consider it a mere criminal charge if I say that they are simply gambling. The reckless gambler has no money in his pockets; he has only the ideas in his head. These gamblers have no ideas in their heads; they have only the money in their pockets. But they think that if they could use the money to buy a big society to experiment on, something like an idea might come to them at last. That is Eugenics."

G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and other Evils.

I recommend reading this book, as Chesterton was one of the few voices against Eugenics in its prime, and the arguments still are good.

the arguments may be good in some rhetorical sense, but their inapplicability to modern biology means they aren't very good in the only sense that counts for this discussion. the fear is amusing, though

How are they inapplicable to modern biology?

Here's one I find interesting. There is always talk of choosing for white, or lighter, skin, but what about the other side of the coin. Tanning is a huge business. Large numbers of white skinned people try to get a tan whilst on holiday, or use tanning salons. Large numbers of white people bemoan their inability to get a decent tan. What if lots of white people were to choose to have light brown children so that they would find it much easier to get a decent tan?

Another point of discussion: in the article there was talk of de-valuing disabled people. But surely the point of all this is to eliminate disability - if possible. Can anyone give any reason why this would be considered a bad thing? I'm not talking about devaluing existing disabled people (although evidence seems to suggest that we barely value them as people at the moment, though things are gradually improving). But surely anyone given the choice of being born with a disability or being born without the disability would choose the latter?

>we barely value them as people at the moment

I don't agree with that, violating ADA specifications is a sure fire way to be slapped across the face with massive fines and lawsuits, and every school I've attended bent over backwards to facilitate the disabled. Were there some cases or general biases you meant that I can read about?

Regarding your light vs dark skin, it would be an interesting question - if the laws allowed for "form" choices rather than purely "function," what sort of different kinds of children would we see from different cultures? Taller, tanner, blonder women from Sweden? Stouter, tanner, thicker men from America? Thinner, whiter, effeminate men from Taiwan? It'd be interesting if nothing else.

> Or maybe those countries will fuck up their population's genetic makeups in unforeseen ways

This is why diversity is important.

I think you're right, but I think this doesn't address what I suppose is a reasonable fear: engineer a significant enough advantage to out-compete a rival population, and then only later rediscover the need for diversity. That doesn't work out well in the long term for either population, but that doesn't mean that, given the choice, it wouldn't happen.

Given the Chinese example, I'm immediately reminded of the folly of The Great Leap Forward and Chinese steel production quotas, and their results.

Enough people living today will have their genome sequence that if that's true you can just edit in the 'diversity' later in the future if that's needed.

That would miss part of the initial issue, which is: what if there's something wrong introduced as part of any editing process?

Reasonablish, although we do (and I feel a bit monstrous saying some of this) already have existing models in the form of NA reservations and the Amish.

Both of these are (massively?) out-competing groups (one of them through "no fault of their own") who are maintaining existence.

Even a bit more of a deliberate effort on the part of the competitive majority to support any (and again, feel a bit monstrous) "baseline reserve population" would probably succeed enough.

> If America doesn't do it, China will, and in a generation will be swollen with a population so much more fit as to make the question of the US standing toe-to-toe laughable.

Or, in a generation they'll be suffering under the crushing burden of unintentional side effects of to-early mass adoption of a novel technology.

More likely, in a generation, they'll have a slight lead in research.

It seems inevitable. I always think of the doctor visit in Gattaca.... that's a pretty appealing sales pitch he gives:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYJNv8wZvDk

His sales pitch makes me nauseous.

>If America doesn't do it, China will, and in a generation will be swollen with a population so much more fit as to make the question of the US standing toe-to-toe laughable. If China doesn't, Russia will.

or rich americans will even if the general public doesn't

External tools will still provide orders of magnitude more advantage than any gene-edited maximum human body.

Your soldiers can bench press a hundred more pounds than us? Big deal, ours can just press a button and launch a nuke.

An entire population with 10 extra IQ points on average? That's just background noise against a cloud of supercomputers grinding calculations 24/7.

The Soviets and others have tried this with things like steroids and regimented schooling, and it didn't make much of a difference.

Other powers have nukes too, so using it is out of the question. If nukes are not used, technology and economic capacity will determine the results.

Russia has a lot of good engineers and scientists but they don't have the industrial capacity to compete with the US. China's current capacity may already be double that of the US but its technology is still catching up (fast).

Winning wars requires intelligence not raw calculations. A nation with 10 extra IQ points on average would have many times more people with 130+ IQ needed to build and improve on advanced robots.

Btw, have you checked the list of top supercomputers in the world? The top two are in China. The top one has 4-5 times the power of the top American machine, which is #4. It also uses Chinese built microprocessors.

https://www.top500.org/lists/2017/06/

AMD uses GlobalFoundries.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries ) The firm manufactures integrated circuits in high volume mostly for semiconductor companies such as AMD, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and STMicroelectronics. It has five 200 mm wafer fabrication plants in Singapore, one 300 mm fabrication plant in each of Germany and Singapore, and three fabrication plants in the United States: one 200 mm fabrication plant in Vermont (where it is the largest private employer) and two 300 mm fabrication plants in New York.

Fab 8, located in Luther Forest Technology Campus, Saratoga County, New York, United States is a new 300 mm fab. This fabrication plant was constructed by GF as a green field fab for advanced technologies. It is capable of manufacturing 14 nm node technology. The plant's construction began in July 2009 and the company started mass production in 2012.[5][10] It has a maximum manufacturing capacity of 60,000 of 300 mm wafers/month, or the equivalent of over 135,000 of 200 mm wafers/month. In September 2016, GlobalFoundries announced it would make a multibillion-dollar investment to refit Fab 8 to produce 7 nm FinFET parts starting in the second half of 2018.[11] The process is planned to initially use deep ultraviolet lithography, and eventually transition to extreme ultraviolet lithography.[12] Technology: 28 nm and 14 nm. 7 nm planned.

Fab 9,[13] located in the village of Essex Junction, Vermont, United States, near Vermont's largest city of Burlington, became part of GlobalFoundries operations with the acquisition of IBM Microelectronics. The fab manufactures technologies down to the 90 nm node and is the largest private employer within the state of Vermont. The site also hosts a captive mask shop, with development efforts down to the 7 nanometer node.

They are building a fab in China, but not for AMD stuff.

( http://www.anandtech.com/show/11117/globalfoundries-to-expan... )

GlobalFoundries operates 10 fabs worldwide with four of them processing 300 mm wafers. The company’s most advanced fab is the Fab 8 located in Luther Forest Technology Campus (Saratoga County, New York) where the chipmaker produces flagship processors for AMD and some other leading developers of chips. To keep the Fab 8 up-to-date, GlobalFoundries spends billions of dollars on development of new manufacturing technologies and production equipment. Back in September, the company already announced plans to invest several billion in new tools to produce ICs (integrated circuits) using its 7 nm fabrication process and this week GlobalFoundries said it would invest in the expansion of the Fab 8’s manufacturing capacity.

Also, re: the Intel-using sites in the Top500 (the vast majority are using Intel or AMD processors, see https://www.top500.org/statistics/list/ ) those are largely made in the USA too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...

If the only thing we care about is an IQ arms race between countries then the end result will be brains in jars instead of superhumans. There is no free lunch.

People care about many things. But if they get one good thing like intelligence without losing others, they will go for it.

In China, they do not have religious reasons against improving humans. And parents rely on kids to take care of them when they are old. Intelligence often predicts earnings. So if it's safe, they will do it.

China already spent a generation letting people shoot themselves in the foot with specifying genetic preferences in children. Don’t know what I mean? I’m talking about the gender trait. This is something determined by genetics and something that genetic engineering can allow people to specify, albeit China’s previous method of discarding female newborns is a bit of a low tech way of accomplishing it,

The great thing is we have a clear example of the dangers of unchecked genetic manupulation. Mobs are stupid, and also tend to reduce diversity as everyone wants to pick the obvious good traits. They thought being male was a better trait, and giving people the power to choose the trait let them shoot themselves in the foot as a society. You end up with the massive gender imbalance and that’s the least worrisome of repercussions if we get rid of diversity in the gene pool.

That's been vastly over reported, the default M:F ratio is actually ~1.03-1.05 men to 1 women. Men are however significantly more likely to die every year (other than 10-12), and the age gap at marriage means even more men die before finding a spouse. Add on women are more likely to remarry than men and you can have large gender gaps without destroying society.

PS: China M:F ratio is 106 to 100. By comparison India is 108 to 100 but 90 to 100 over 65 the population is simply young. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio

> our much more intelligent children will realize total species improvement is a better investment

I view this as a fallacy which is close kin to the "algorithms are neutral" fallacy. Scenario: we, with our incredibly poor understanding of genetics vs. the total impact of those on a fully-developed organism do this:

1. Make more "intelligent" humans, but oops the genetic modification we make reduces empathy. E.g. the "high-functioning autistic" stereotype. Now we have "bright" humans who are less capable of understanding and mirroring emotional impacts on others.

2. Second oops: the empathy reduction above doesn't also reduce instincts governing human tribalism.

3. Coup de grace: now we have a "race" of perfect little fascists, capable of incredible feats of rationalization to cover for their poorly-understood desires, a stronger than ever in-group vs out-group anathema, and with barely a twinge for the others their actions are now crushing.

Society crumbles due to lack of social cohesion and mass genocide. Thanks for playing! Please enter 25￠ to continue.

I've realized that I have an even deeper problem with the whole notion of eugenics-for-"intelligence" here. It's mired in the better-living-through-[TECH THING] mentality.

I'll digress with an example from medicine: humanity made amazing, world-changing strides in health care on two important fronts: antibiotics and trauma surgery. These areas, the pill and the scalpel, then grew to encompass the vast part of the mindshare of modern Western-style medicine. But at some point the model fails to meet with the real world: pharmaceutical companies spend vast resources trying to create pills that alleviate symptoms, but don't address root causes. Surgeons invent surgeries we don't need, which have no effect on end outcomes. Here, the slowly growing field of "functional medicine" is seeking to move forward with rigorous, evidence-based approaches to diagnosing and addressing many previously intractable (or only superficially treated) conditions by tackling underlying root causes.

Back to the eugenics thing. It presumptively answers the question of "why, as a society, aren't we a whole lot smarter than we are?" with a generic "Better genetics FTW!" I have a counter-hypothesis: humanity is currently terrible at maximizing the potential of the members of society we have right now. I'd go so far as to say that the idea that eugenics-for-smarts is even useful is built on little more than a whole bunch of terrible classist, racist belief systems. Worse, it's like some junior dev ratholing for weeks optimizing the heck some function which uses .001% of the app's resources. There are bigger problems to solve, start with those.

A breadcrumb in that direction: we've now had multiple examples of fantastic high-school level math instructors who pop up, take an underserved student body that an "honors" class series wouldn't touch, and turns them into star math students, knocking down AP Calculus exams with aplomb. Yet the school districts they're in invariably end up fighting these teachers tooth-and-nail. We should be sending in people like field anthropologists to understand and document the personal, social, and pedagogical methods at play here, and figure out how to train teachers and build schools to make these wins fully replicable.

I am fully on board with tackling the social issues that prevent equalizing education. I guess my hope is that a spread of smarter kids will find a solution, when we've spent the last 2,000 years failing to find solutions to unequal classes.

So basically deus ex machina :P

Nah, we'll just put them in to stasis and send them out on a space ship. There's no way future generations would wake them up for their own gains.

Sounds like a great slide deck for a funding round from the Illuminati

>"If America doesn't do it, China will, and in a generation will be swollen with a population so much more fit as to make the question of the US standing toe-to-toe laughable. If China doesn't, Russia will."

Any country that does widespread "gene editing" anytime soon will either:

1) See no difference at all, since it doesn't actually do anything more than selecting for sperm/eggs.

2) Have an insane onslaught of health problems that appear in 10+ years due to unforeseen consequences.

Our understanding of the human body is so rudimentary that your claim really is laughable.

Or 3) have a massively reduced healthcare bill and a healthier happier population thanks to the elimination of heritable ailments like Huntingtons, sickle cell anemia, hemophilia or most kinds of diabetes.

Like you say, your understanding of the human body as a software developer is rudimentary. Luckily there are a vast number of people whose understanding of the body is less limited than yours.

There are only people who think they understand the body because they don't know what a p-value means. As indicated by the replication crisis, where over 50% of results are not even repeatable, the majority of this info is incorrect. And that is the tip of the iceberg because even if an experiment/observation is consistent that does not mean you interpreted the results correctly.

Actually, I bet there are very few people who actually have a better understanding of the human body than me, just because I have the appropriate skepticism.

This assumes that mass genentic engineering will be 100% successful in designing supermen, when it could very well doom a generation of Chinese children to higher risks of autism, infertility, or unseen consequences.

The idea we can control evolution is fairly ridiculous, when we barely even understand it. Most humane people don't want to experiment on generations in the hopes to see that we can.

This comment comes across as kind of paranoid and delusional.

There is no way that gene editing will give you "control over the environment" or that we need to start interfering with embryos to win some kind of non-existent arms race. Where is the evidence to suggest that these "super intelligent" children will grow up to ignore borders etc?

One doesn't have to be religious to feel as if some of these ideas are ethically questionable.

There is nothing wrong with the children we have today, we just don't look after them or their environment properly. Super smart children won't do much good with us for role models.

> it's inevitable that we also learn to control our own evolution.

The problem here is the pronoun "we" and "our". It isn't "we" who are going to control evolution. It is a select group of wealthy elites.

Also, just because china and russia might do it doesn't mean that we necessarily should do it. After all, the pioneers of illegal human experimentation was the US and britain but most of the world didn't follow along.

I agree with you that genetic engineering ( controlled evolution? ) is inevitable. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the ethical concerns and other such pitfalls.

This is really exciting news.

However, a big challenge that makes this work extremely difficult to bring to fruition is that you have to let an embryo develop fully to figure out to determine if the therapy actually produces a healthy human. At which point the consequences of failed experiments become increasingly difficult to work with for obvious ethical and moral reasons.

They did let them grow for 5 days which should have provided some data. Though what I don't get is why were they destroyed after 5 days? If it's considered ethical to allow abortions for periods up to 20+ weeks, then it should be considered ethical for science as well.

The issue would be abortions for periods up to 20+ weeks considered ethical by whom?

There's nowhere near consensus on that issue in society. Also the ethics of abortion wouldn't be the same as the ethics of such experiments; in abortion the rights of the mother are at play, minimally, and there are reasonable discussions about when an embryo obtains rights as well as whose rights reign supreme.

Even if considered legal, given that law != ethics, the balance of rights is not the same as abortion.

I would also expect the scientists to deal with this pretty conservatively because if they push those limits, the likely cries to stop funding, etc, etc, would become much more pronounced and the likelihood of the work hitting a political wall much higher.

Uh no? Pregnancy is usually not an elective experiment. Standards are much higher for experiments, c.f. standards applied to human subject studies vs. medical treatment.

Currently there's limits on how long you can keep embryos going -- the '14-day rule':

http://www.nature.com/news/embryology-policy-revisit-the-14-...

Will be interesting to see the moral and ethical debate on any change here.

There is a Radiolab episode about this too. They talk about all of the things that we don't know about that happen between days 14 and ~30 (working from memory), and also how the person who came up with the 14 day rule chose that number at least in part because, at the time, it was way out of reach and did not seem like it would ever be achievable.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/primitive-streak/

The practical reason is it's not clear how long they would survive. These embryos are in a petri dish, unless they were to implant them in a women's uterus I'm not sure how long they would be able to develop.

You might be able to develop them longer than five days, but then you hit the ethical issues. The entire moral argument for abortions is based on bodily autonomy of women, and that those rights trump the rights of an unborn fetus. But for raising a fetus in an artificial environment there is no body autonomy argument.

Another issue is murkier, and is based on the circumstances. Generally abortions are used by women who did not intend to get pregnant as a last resort form of birth control. When you're performing abortions for scientific purposes it's different, and there are different ethical standards to consider.

I think i would put the same importance on the well-being of a women and scientific progress.

One shouldn't trump the other.

There's a huge difference between eliminating known mutations and somehow engineering for enhanced positive traits. The latter requires knowledge that we simply don't have.

Even if we did obtain it, it doesn't follow that Jo Slow would be worse off. We're all of us already better off living in a world with smart people in it. We're obviously better off living in a world with healthier people in it (reduced healthcare costs)

Futhermore it doesn't make sense to be personally jealous of smart people. It seems that being smart can be a significant burden; you're an outsider at best or you veer into mental disorder at worst. Only rarely do smart people flower into creative geniuses, the kind of people who contribute to progress. Most people use their smarts to be more normal than the norm...

Healthier people don't reduce costs, they just delay them.

What? Maybe if you only count the costs of someone on their deathbed. Someone who requires Care their whole life definitively costs more than someone who doesn't

The particular fix done in this study prevents hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a genetic disorder that I have.

I cannot explain how weird it feels to read front page headlines that scientists have "fixed" me, that its a huge breakthrough that scientists will be able to remove part of what makes me ME from future generations.

I'm all for it, of course. HCM, most frequently diagnosed in people by their sudden death, is bad. But at a personal level, this feels unnerving.

Now imagine when we can "cure" things like autism, nonstandard genders, race, etc.

A lot of tolerance is predicated on things being out of our hands, practically. That goes away if we can change them.

I can't claim to represent the last two, but I would gladly trade a great deal less tolerance of autistic people for no one to ever be born with autism ever again, even if I didn't personally benefit at all.

I can't wait until this technology matures and I can fly in to a clinic somewhere in the world to have this work completed so my future children will never have to suffer from debilitating diseases.

Baby Designer... DNA Architect... Genes Coder... they will sound very good in Linkedin.

"Led the effort to clean up the genetic debt introduced by previous teams and refactored for efficiency. Offspring eats less and no longer randomly shits everywhere."

I've often wondered about Cystic Fibrosis and DNA editing. For people with two copies of the variant gene, they get the disease. But there are indications that having one copy of it can bring benefits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterozygote_advantage).

So what if the optimum for humans is to have both variants? It would seem appropriate to move the newer CF gene variant to a different place on the chromosome so that doesn't need to displace the original gene. I imagine nature may eventually figure this out, but embryonic DNA editing could bring it about sooner. Of course this is speculative on my part and people would obviously debate taking such action even if the science really suggests it's a good idea.

It would be nice if we could figure out a way to encode knowledge in the genotype (serialization) to be extracted by the phenotype (deserialization). Injecting Wikipedia into an embryo...

I think it's unethical for us to not pursue gene editing. Why bring children into this world with greater susceptibilities to disease? Also, if people want to go a step further and alter traits like appearance and athletic ability that should be their choice. It is their genetic material.

The issue I think is one of accessibility and availablity. If you're poor, and can't afford this, you are literally priced out of the gene pool. There has to be regulation to make sure that the tech is not out of reach of the poor.

One step closer to the 'master race', I guess my decendants will end up as pets, slaves or killed off.

Good! For too long, we've been hampered by the limitations of a human nature evolved millions of years ago for a very different environment. All previous attempts at changing human nature have failed. Activism does not work. Grand social movements do not work. Policing language does not work. We now have a chance to succeed in improving ourselves using tools that actually work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaver_(Firefly)#Origin

Fallacy of Fictional Evidence.

What's the gene for racism you plan on editing?

The human body isn't a config file

Yes it is. We're not born blank slates! What we call human nature is largely determined by the physical architecture of our minds. Guess where that comes from.

Choices, the answer is people choose to behave as they do, when they do and how they do.

What is choice? I don't believe that "free will" exists. The concept isn't even meaningfully defined for non-dualists. In reality, we're Turing machines. We have certain inputs, a memory, and certain outputs.

You're forgetting that DNA is far from the only input. There's also environment. And you're underestimating the chaotic, nonlinear system that is the material world. We can't accurately predict the weather a month in advance, what makes you think you can accurately predict the life of a human being?

I don't think it's worth the time to argue with these people who conceive of the human body as a "turing machine" and that genes are as simple as "config file".

This is also the guy who says that "Activism does not work. Grand social movements do not work." But I guess the Civil Rights Movement, women's liberation, and the LGBTQ movement don't count?

This is a serious problem I see with many tech / CS inclined people: in which useful abstractions become the map in which they see the territory.

Yeah sure you might find low hanging fruit and get free increases in "performance" by 10%-30% and bugfixes by simply optimizing the turing machine without any tradeoffs but most of the value is in optimizing the programs and data that are available to the machine. The best part: It doesn't require any modification to the turing machine, the effects appear very quickly within roughly two decades after birth and very often they can be upgraded later which means we don't have to deal with obsolete or buggy turing machines and even if they installed a suboptimal program and can't or don't want to remove it then next generation will still install new programs from a clean slate which is still more desirable than turing machine optimization that requires multiple generations to take effect. Heck by the time the turing machine optimization becomes available it might not even be optimal anymore because it was based around our needs X generations ago instead of what we need now.

the evidence is pretty clear that many facets of our personality are heritable. the notion that we choose our behavior reduces to blank-slatism, and only ascientific social theorists believe in that.

I think we should be very very careful about messing around with human nature, especially in the face of the extreme power that genetic engineering offers. It's not just about the dangers of messing up, but the dangers of which things we decide to change. I hate to link a comic to make a point, but http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/eugenics-is-a-great-idea raises an interesting, if humorous, argument.

But this is just not true.

I know it doesn't feel like it when you get on Twitter or turn on the news, but human beings are far nicer to each other today than they have ever been in history.

Violence, poverty, and bigotry are all on gargantuan, multi-century downward trends.

The evidence is clear that human behavior can change.

Every period claims they are better than before. Only future generations can truly determine the actual degrees objectively.

we are capable of making measurements now, and they show undeniable, massive improvement. i'm not even sure what your objection is, it's like questioning what addition means when someone tells you 2+2=4

> She doubts a flood of couples will have “edited children.”

And one person's gut check should be ok, right?

A lot of people will be talking about ethics. But I'm thinking more along the lines of economics.

Rich people having expensive gene edited kids. They're stronger, smarter, more driven, and healthier than your kids. They are better looking. They'll be more advanced than kids their age. They'll have all sorts of built in advantages.

The social and economic gap will widen. Opportunities come easier to the people who look great, are crazy smart, and are driven to attain them. So the rich kids become richer and more powerful.

It's one thing to get a head start in life because your parents give you money. It's a much bigger advantage when your parents can also afford to give you built in physical and mental advantages far beyond other people.

Imagine being the kid who realizes he's slower than his classmates because his parents are poor, and that it's too late to ever change that.

I don't see any alternative here. You could theoretically make the gene-editing a standard benefit paid for by the government, but the US at least can't even agree on how to provide basic healthcare, so it's unlikely we would agree on this. You could outlaw gene-editing, but as long as it's medically possible some people will still do it, and at best you get the same result at a slower rate.

You know what's funny? That it already is as you describe - due to environmental reasons. Better food. Better rearing. Better access to developmental aids. And all this without any needless expensive gene editing.

As someone with a genetic disease that involves my spine disintegrating and my heart basically being a time bomb, I have a really hard time seeing a problem with this.

Limit it to diseases and genetic anomalies so it doesn't become a race thing and voila. Why would getting rid of things like my disease be a bad thing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com