China’s embrace of embryo selection raises thorny questions
nature.com
nature.com
It's interesting how there's such a wide culture gap between China and the west. We spend so much time worrying ourselves sick with every possible downside, debating in circles and not getting anywhere, while China is bravely pushing ahead with a bet that's 90% likely to pay off.
The arguments in the paragraph above are a perfect example. We should continue giving birth to babies with genetic diseases, because this will supposedly make the current patients feel better? We should continue subjecting our children to illnesses, because "eugenics"? How can people seriously believe in these things? Getting rid of disease is good. Polio eradication was a great step forward for humanity, and the sooner we can replicate this success with other diseases, the better.
There was only one good argument raised, which is ensuring egalitarian accessibility to such procedures. And I'm sure this is a solvable problem. If we can afford universal healthcare, we can afford universal genetic screening.
When I look at the can-do attitude in places like China, and the endless cynicism and paralysis-by-analysis in more developed countries, Jeff Bezos' quote comes to mind. It seems clear that we've become a Day-2 country, while China is still very much a Day-1 country.
I think this difference is primarily due to free speech. You will have to sacrifice fast, decisive action if you allow anyone to jump in and muddle the waters.
https://www.recode.net/2017/4/12/15274220/jeff-bezos-amazon-...
Are we not a product of our experiences, or do you really think every zygote is endowed with some kind or unique soul?
So when it hits traits that are more sensitive, protected, and similar, is where people are afraid to go. What is parents decide they want their children to favor one parents race to the exclusion of the other? It will be solvable. What is someone comes up for a hetero test if such a thing is even possible? What about selection for a known disability on purpose, the article stated that a deaf couple used the process to produce a child with just that trait.
So yes it is an awesome step forward to creating a healthy society but we must recognize that somewhere limits will need to be established and allow society to mature to accept broadening of the limits
I hadn't heard that term before. Here's what I found: https://www.quora.com/What-is-Jeff-Bezos-%E2%80%9CDay-1%E2%8...
This is one reason on why we tread cautiously. I'm sure others can provide more examples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoultella_planticola
"In the early 1990s a biotech company set out to solve a problem: how to destroy crop residue safely. Some crops' residues harbor plant pathogens. Burning is occasionally used to destroy the residue and pathogens, but this is a fire hazard and can be dangerous for the environment. This company realized that, because R. planticola is an aggressive and abundant soil bacterium, it could be genetically modified to destroy crop residue and also create ethanol. Testing of this process, however, was limited to sterile soil. Ph.D. research conducted at Oregon State University, supervised by Elaine Ingham, obtained a sample of the genetically modified organism for assessing ecological effects through the German Institut für Biotechnologie and, testing it in non-sterile (ordinary) soil, found that the modified bacteria caused mass plant death from the ethanol production. R. planticola is ubiquitous, found growing in the root systems of all kinds of plants everywhere. Therefore, some have speculated that without the independent test, the genetically modified bacteria might have been introduced in nature and then could have spread to contaminate the biosphere where it would cause worldwide plant death."
We need to know as much as possible about the wide ranging effects of anything non-trivial that we are introducing into the world. Yes it will slow down progress and innovation but it's also nice to avoid potentially world ending disasters as well. This is definitely not an area where you want to have a 'cha bu duo' attitude.
If I wasn't clear in my other comment: other scientists. Cultural sensitivity wasn't a factor in my comment.
Especially in America, where the right to life movement still holds a lot of political and religious/cultural sway, this will be an especially hard sell...
And I worry because once you start erasing variation in what a human is, you lose the opportunity to have a discussion about it. Once there are no more autistic children, you can't say "we shouldn't abort autistic embryos actually", because there are no more autistic people to point at and say "hey, that's a normal person, we shouldn't be aborting those". Additionally, even if we don't eradicate autism, plenty of people would choose to screen for it, so fewer autistic children would be born, so treatments will be much slower to develop.
What worries me even more though, is that we could start selecting for economic incentives. China already have a problem with too many males and too few females due to the years of the one-child policy, which led to people aborting female babies. What if people can start selecting for "sociopathic jerk" genes? It's a fact, or at least an accepted truth (which in this case is the same thing, since it's people making decisions), that sociopathic jerks do much better in life than others. But can you imagine a world where every single CEO is a sociopathic non-cooperative jerk?
I worry, in short, that the slope might turn out a bit too slippery.
It's interesting because if you essentially condemn a disease as non-treatable then you'll naturally not exert the resources to discover cures and the root cause will never be directly addressed.
China - "China’s embrace of embryo selection raises thorny questions"
Iceland - "Iceland close to becoming first country where no Down's syndrome children are born" (https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...)
Both countries are basically trying to eliminate genetic disease via testing embryos/fetuses, but the perception of their actions seems very different.
However I suspect even they don't want to do it oneself, rather view it as a kind of community work awarded by lottery. They would like "somebody out there" having Down syndrome child so they can feel good about themself as not-eugenics-supporters.
I would say, Down syndrome elimination is anti-eugenics, because people with genetic predisposition for Down syndrome will provide more non-Down offspring.
Anyway, I've never seen any discussion about eugenics, except "the Bogeyman did it!" Eugenics aversion is something forced on the society from above.
Edit: I'm just going to leave you this because of your bogeyman comment. This is my hometown around the time my father was born. It's not about bogeymen. https://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/NH/NH.html You're in your own for the rest though.
I don't think it's "being reported as though a cure for Down syndrome has been found". That's the spin the National Review article puts on it. Here are the first two paragraphs of the quoted CBS article:
> With the rise of prenatal screening tests across Europe and the United States, the number of babies born with Down syndrome has significantly decreased, but few countries have come as close to eradicating Down syndrome births as Iceland.
> Since prenatal screening tests were introduced in Iceland in the early 2000s, the vast majority of women -- close to 100 percent -- who received a positive test for Down syndrome terminated their pregnancy.
It's pretty clear that they're not talking about a cure. How is this a bad thing at all? How is this "eugenics"? Down syndrome is a serious, debilitating genetic disorder with no benefits in any sense. Why do we want it to exist? I'm not really seeing an argument against this besides the usual pro-life positions.
I don't know who would be against some kind of treatment to disable or delete the extra chromosome.
They could solve the problem with money. They don't, instead they're trying to solve it with spin. Which will also won't work but at least some journalists get to feel self-righteous.
I guess if you screen every embryo it wouldn't matter how they developed the bad gene they'd terminate that life anyways.
They certainly are. Consider Down's syndrome: almost no one with Down's reproduces because it is a physically/socially crippling disorder. If Down's was not spontaneously generated, with considerable probability, it would not be an issue because it would've disappeared within a generation or two at most. This applies to a lot of genetic diseases: they are 'de novo mutations', not inherited, because they are sufficiently harmful that their sufferers do not reproduce for there to be anyone to inherit the disease. This is why you hear of so many recessive genetic disorders: being recessive means it won't usually have any fitness effect, so it has a chance of persisting for a long time, only occasionally hurting or killing someone. (Brand new mutations are quite common in humans on an absolute basis: I think the estimate is ~70 per person. It would be even higher except that many of them are so fatal that the sperm or egg or embryo spontaneously abort or die along the way.) There are many thousands of distinct genetic disorders, some of which can be caused by many different mutations, cumulatively affecting something like 1% of births. How specific the mutations have to be is the 'mutational cross-section' of the disease. For example, intellectual disabilities can be caused by just about anything, and the genetic cause has to be diagnosed by whole-genome sequencing of parents/child to find the new mutations and try to guess which one is responsible.
> does it reduce the probability to a very low number?
Yes. Unless you made everyone do IVF PGD, there will always be a 1-in-thousands chance of this or that genetic disorder, along with the ones popping up from two carriers mating. The only reason Down's is disappearing is because most of the affected fetuses are being constantly aborted, but this is not affecting the root cause (increasing maternal age) and so it will be a problem indefinitely.
People with Down's are almost always infertile.
Regarding how 'crippling' it is, it actually varies dramatically. Down's is associated with a whole host of additional physical and mental issues, such as heart problems, sleep apnea, low muscle tone, behavioural issues, autism and dementia. But not everyone with Down's has all of these issues, and the severity of them varies. IQ levels so vary greatly. Even the degree of facial features typically associated with Down's varies - for some people with Down's(especially children) it would not be immediately obvious to others, if they could tell at all.
How societies deal with people with Down's has also changed greatly over the past few decades. In most Western countries a lot of help is now available (speech and language therapy, occupational therapy etc), and life expectancy, prospects and opportunities for people with Down's have all increased.
What the fuck?
We finally have the capability to extract the best possible sample of a couple's genetics - to, over generations, actively remove unfit traits from our genome without having to kill any living people - and this is how we greet the future? How ungrateful and utterly disgusting!
> In the West, PGD still raises fears about the creation of an elite genetic class,
Oh, boo fucking hoo. We make all kinds of investments whose payoff is self-improvement; running shoes, education, internships. This is no different! And in this particular case, the effect is slow enough that "I can't afford it; perhaps my children could, but they'll just be outcompeted by superhumans." is fucking bullshit.
> and critics talk of a slippery slope towards eugenics, a word that elicits thoughts of Nazi Germany and racial cleansing.
This insinuates that we would murder living people over having non-artificially-selected genes. Why would this be considered necessary? We don't have any deontological directive that all of humanity must have the best genes immediately. (The Nazis might have; or at least, such a directive would produce Nazi-like behavior.)
On the other hand, if, to avoid having "genetic inequality", our nanny state decides that everyone should use IVF with their embryo pre-selected if they wish to reproduce at all ... that specific policy could be interpreted as "eugenic". So ... pick your poison, I guess? (Personally, I prefer the one that favors individuals' freedom to choose what they want.)
Rendering them economically noncompetitive in a market system with, as in the US, a fairly weak social safety net is a fairly grave result, even without active murder.
But, in any case, many people find the idea that the less-genetically-fortunate should suffer to avoid “holding back” genetic superiors to be morally repugnant even when dealing with natural variations, much less when dealing with advantages available only to offspring of pre-existing economic elites.
How is all this related to anything I said in my top-level comment?
Otherwise, countries which embrace "eugenics" (not sure if the word actually has expanded to mean what you think it means) most certainly do deserve to outperform countries which don't: the next generation of people in the pro-"eugenics" countries will literally be better humans.
For myself it'd be nice to join the superhuman future directly (CRISPR? Mind emulation? Cyborg replacements?), but I'd settle for them being nice to me like present society is nice to its retired elders.
Don't worry, you still have at least a decade and half to start saving up & investing in global stock indexes. A rising tide lifts global equity indexes!
It seems the only real option is follow along or hope you don't get exterminated once the gap is big enough in case they feel lesser people are not worth the resources they take up (or decide to enslave them maybe). Not saying China would do this, but who knows how that situation could evolve, particularly as resources get more and more scarce.
Whats the difference between embryo selection and Harvard undergraduate class selection?
I'm just not convinced that we know enough yet about all the genetic interactions involved in developing a human being to actually be capable of breeding a super race, instead of say, a race with a single genetic point of failure.
High intelligence tends to come with higher incidences of other mental disorders [EDIT: this actually appears to be incorrect, per a reply](and we certainly haven't isolated all the genes involved in intelligence, let alone reliably quantify it).
Sure, eliminating known debilitating genetic disorders seems like a reasonable thing to do - but what if we're throwing the baby out with the bath water? What if that debilitating disorder is a base pair switch away from a genetic superpower, that we'd never discover because we eliminated that gene from future generations?
Personally I think we should take our sweet time with this stuff until we can ethically figure out as many of the ins and outs and consequences as we can. The consequences of making a significant mistake could be species ending.
No, lower, with the single exception of perhaps autism spectrum traits: see the signs in the papers reported in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_correlation#Intelligen...
> (and we certainly haven't isolated all the genes involved in intelligence, let alone reliably quantify it).
You don't need to, many have been, and the quantification is reliable enough.
Do you think we're currently equipped to breed a super race?
State of the art embryo selection is something like +0.5 IQ points, which might be profitable but can only be charitably described as 'subtle'. Regular embryo selection is currently too weak because you have only a few eggs to choose from, most of which will not lead to a live birth, so even with the great GWAS results coming over the next few years, the gains will be small. Similarly, CRISPR is not that great because while we have identified lots of SNPs which allow prediction of intelligence, few of them are causal, so you would need hundreds of successful edits to get a truly noticeable boost like 10 IQ points.
What is necessary for large gains like +10 is one of: ability to create scores or hundreds of eggs to do embryo selection allowing picking best embryo out of hundreds rather than out of 5 or less (perhaps using egg->stem-cell->egg induced pluripotency & specialization techniques, currently doable in mice/rats but not humans); iterated embryo synthesis using the same induced pluripotency to coax a set of stem cells through many generations of sperm/egg->embryo->selection->egg/sperm for a cumulative gain; CRISPR scaling to hundreds of edits plus better identification of causal variants; and whole genome synthesis to create a single hyper-optimized genome from scratch without bothering with selection/editing. The timelines I would hazard guesses at something like 5-10/10/5?/15 years respectively.
So embryo selection right now is a curiosity, but with the right breakthrough, it could become important, and even if it doesn't, at some point CRISPR and genome synthesis will allow for big gains.