Two-thirds of Americans approve of editing human DNA to treat disease

For instance:

> Scheufele also found that very religious people were less likely to support either type of gene editing (for therapy or enhancement) compared to less religious people. That could be because altering the human genome — perhaps permanently — could be seen as "playing God."

I think the "playing God" aspect might certainly factor into it, especially when you move beyond merely treating disease/disorders. But perhaps a bigger reason is the ethics around the research itself, which involves manipulating human embryos and then essentially discarding them once the research is over.

And then the survey questions themselves have some ambiguity:

> The scientific community is capable of guiding development of new technologies in a responsible way

There are several ways to interpret this. Are they talking about a morally responsible way? A scientifically responsible way? One might have full confidence that a scientist can pursue research in a scientifically sound, responsible way, but one may have far less confidence that the scientist will make choices that accord with one's morality. That may not mean violating Ethics Boards guidelines, but a more fundamental disagreement about what the Ethics Boards consider to be ethical.

What is the downside of increasing the number of geniuses? What is the downside of saving someone from dealing with severe teenage acne? Why should some men have to worry about their genitalia being well below average in size? Why should some women never experience an orgasm?

I get the instinctual revulsion to the idea of playing God or reducing our diversity, but I try to model my ethics as if I didn't know who I was going to be in the simulation before hand. These are changes that we should be advocating for if they are possible.

On one hand, society will be far better off with having smarter people (imagine what society would be like where everyone had an IQ of 120 - I’d be very curious). On the other hand, you’ll probably get a Gattaca-like situation. Interesting times...

See also https://www.nature.com/news/china-s-embrace-of-embryo-select... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15039941

This will play out over the next decade or two.

Look at, e.g. gene therapy for inherited disorders (lysosomal storage diseases, DNA repair deficiencies, etc, etc) versus myostatin / follistatin gene therapy that increases muscle mass, reduces fat tissue, and generally adjusts metabolism into a better direction.

The first companies to commercialize the former will be successful mid-sized biotech concerns. The first companies to commercialize the latter will be behemoths.

The state of development in this field is dependent on methods of delivering genes that are reliable, tissue specific, and achieve high degrees of cell coverage. Once that happens, which seems fairly close at hand, then we'll see a very interesting expansion of the medical tourism marketplace into enhancement technologies, a market hundreds of times as large as therapies for sick people.

Very few people are going to say that those people with cancer should die because we shouldn't do something to save them.

Of course there is nothing inherently wrong about doing experiments on humans but the problem is you now need to justify that gene editing is good and eugenics is bad, that the test subjects do not need basic human rights and therefore can be disposed when convenient.

Also, its not clear to me how many therapeutic paths this opens up versus simply screening preimplantation embryos.

I would like a DNA modification to make my metabolism return to age 19.