First gene-edited babies claimed in China
mainichi.jp
mainichi.jp
edit: I'll also amend the statement, as the gene is implicated in responses to other viruses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#Potential_costs
Take height: Height is extremely heritable. If your parents are both tall, you are very likely to be tall as well. But height is influenced by thousands of genes, and each individual gene has only a minuscule influence. And each of those genes is also responsible for many other unknown things.
It's not at all a reasonable assumption that genetic modification will allow us to influence a complex trait like intelligence. That's just wishful thinking.
But that's very different from designing an embryo by direct genetic modification.
The trouble here is that we can't see those consequences until they end up hurting someone.
Imagine trying with million or tens of million year code.
- it's been written for billions of years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Earliest_biologica...)
- without any sort of upfront architecture or planning
- the development methodology can be summarized as "change characters randomly and see if it compiles"
- incredibly bloated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA)
- contains random snippets copy/pasted from other codebases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_viral_element)
- the only success criteria is that the "program" shouldn't "crash" before it can make a copy of itself
>The vertebrate retina is inverted in the sense that the light sensing cells are in back of the retina, so that light has to pass through layers of neurons and capillaries before it reaches the rods and cones. In contrast, in the cephalopod retina the photoreceptors are in front, with processing neurons and capillaries behind them. Because of this, cephalopods do not have a blind spot.
This would actually be preferable to how DNA seems to evolve. In most systems, there's actually quite an acute constraint to genome length due to the Error Threshold; when a genome gets too large, it has too many mutations and therefore the 'fittest' genome, often called the 'master' genome, cannot be sustained in the population. Therefore, there's quite a lot of evolution where the genome becomes essentially minified. Most often, this is done by overlapping genes on the DNA, (mostly by shifting the reading frame by one or two nucleotides for one of the two genes).
It's ethically black as far as I am concerned but it has already happened so we must see where this takes us. IVF born edited zygotes might have serious complications but ideally its a healthy human being. (for everyone's sake)
What does that mean?
this is not a medical procedure, which is what makes it unethical to perform. its an experiment with unknown outcome which is why current ethics dictates it is not okay to do this.
Well, if they "evolve to accommodate advances in science" either they weren't that moral or ethical based in the first place, or moral and ethics gave in for what's technologically possible.
Do you think parents can consent to this sort of experiment on behalf of an unborn child?
In other words, taking action to make changes is a crucial difference when compared to inaction, even if the outcomes are similar.
Also this is not a case of arbitrary experimentation, the parents ARE preventing an inherited genetic issue, which is something that so far has been ethically acceptable so far, for embryo selection.
The parents THINK they ARE preventing an inherited genetic issue. I would not dare mess with "god's creation" /evolution. Too many unknowns once you start mix and matching and there's no going back. We know very little...
Nope, whatever happens it's the natural way: mistakes, mix, match and all.
If you believe in the possibility of trait selection in this manner to an advanced level, it is vital that this happens. A tyrannical father may demand his children may be atheists, and prevent them from going to church now. A tyrannical father in the future may have the ability to edit the God gene (assuming one exists for the sake of argument) right out before birth, never allowing the chance of it.
And this is the best case, in which the effort to design doesn't saddle the child with a host of other conditions.
If it’s highly effective our descendants will think we were barbarians for ever questioning its use.
And if the treatment is only effective on infants or children then there's no way to get informed consent. Your options are to experiment the best you can and accept the risk or forgo the opportunity (or more likely let China do it and accept both the risks and the rewards, as they seem willing to do).
Did the future kids consent?
It's in the article:
> "Even if editing worked perfectly, people without normal CCR5 genes face higher risks of getting certain other viruses, such as West Nile, and of dying from the flu. Since there are many ways to prevent HIV infection and it's very treatable if it occurs, those other medical risks are a concern, Musunuru said."
Surely it is a bit of a stretch.
So unless "very treatable" is medical jargon with a different meaning from the how the laity use it, calling HIV "very treatable" does seem to be a stretch.
Chlamydia is a curable bacteria infection (antibiotics). There is no known cure for HIV.
HIV tests are still not included in routine bloodwork, even though other diseases like hepatitis are.
I have had two high deductible plans in the last two year (work changed providers) and here were the things I remember:
Old Insurance:
Deductible: $3,000
Tier: 2
Price: 100%/$60
New Insurance:
Deductible: $3,000
Tier: 3 (maybe 4, I can't remember)
Price: 100%/25%
It was effectively free to me on my old insurance with the copay card (covered $3600) because I would hit my deductible and then have enough to cover the co-pays after. On my new insurance it's not feasible for me to pay ~$400/mo until I hit my OOP ($6000). You might be asking why I didn't look at a PPO plan instead of high deductible, because of the drug tier there was no difference in the price.
The biggest problem is modern medicines aren't available to everyone across the world. So it's still a much more serious problem in developing nations.
Most mouse models don't replicate in other animals either.
https://www.mdmag.com/medical-news/breakthrough-discovery-in...
I agree, super memory is not necessarily a good thing
What if it makes people more scared, because they can remember past experiences better. This could lead to less procreation and thus inverse selection pressure.
Only because a trait is superficially good it doesn't mean nature would select for it.
There's a psychological phenomenon:
Additionally, nothing has to be selected (evolutionarily speaking). It's a stochastic process. We could be one base-pair swap away from perpetual youth, and never see it because it just doesn't happen (or when it did happen they died from other circumstances before reproducing sufficiently to spread the genes wide enough to be useful).
Additionally, most cognitive traits come with tradeoffs, so increasing ability in one area may decrease it in another. For instance, some nootropics (modafinil) temporarily improve cognitive performance on complex tasks, at the expense of speed. I don't remember the specifics, but I've also read about similar tradeoffs regarding memory, where boosts in short-term memory may reduce the ability to form new long-term memories. The brain is pretty well-optimized on average, when you consider the unique properties and limitations of its constituent parts/materials.
One thing to consider is that via crispr and stem cell treatments, genetic changes can be affected in adults as well, you just need to wait for the kinks to be worked out now and apply large sums of money. Our definition of 'haves and have nots' is potentially going to change in ways we have never imagined.
The future? Compared to 1900 we already live in a widely different world, more diff today - 1900 than diff 1900 - 1000 B.C.
If I was a 1900’s citizen transported to 1000 BC? holy.. are you kidding me? I would be shell shocked.
Technology wise, 1900 cities more like 1000 BC than today. 1000 BC wasn't some cavemen running around, we had established civilizations, with writing, education, math, literature, laws, etc already in place.
On the one hand, hurray for them for trying to eliminate a couple of quite serious diseases.
On the other hand, we have very little clue what the long term effects of not having CCR5 will be for these children. Furthermore, do we really trust China to start messing with people's DNA? I could think up several uses for this that are downright dangerous in the hands of a country like China.
Some of them:
- Remove a key gene in a metabolic pathway which can be mitigated by dietary supplements, creating a biological dead man's switch in order to make it easier to control the population.
- Inserting a viral genome into the host genome (preferably also under some deadman's switch), creating in effect a biological weapon
And in most Western countries you don't get imprisoned for speaking out against the government, or being a journalist without government permissions.
And most Western don't feel they have to ban innocuous search terms, such as "Big yellow duck", or "Square", or the letter 'n'.
If it is highly effective moral arguments are moot. Genetic engineering will be like nuclear weapons. A nation that desires to be competitive or have economic dominance won’t have any choice, it will be forced to adopt its usage (or be left behind).
Even agreements to control nuclear weapons that could cause human extinction still leave nuclear weapons in the hands of many major nations (and a handful of tiny ones) so international agreements have little chance of curtailing genetic engineering.
I'm just trying to point out that the Gattaca situation people seem to be afraid of is not even in the top 10 of worst scenario's.
The issue is more the genomics. We can tinker with genetic code quite effectively these days, however we can't reliably predict which developmental processes will be affected by our tinkering; in short, we are far behind in our understanding of the array of specific roles of genes beyond the narrowly defined disease pathways we want to affect.
Just as an example, say you want to change the encoding for one of the dopamine receptors to discourage dopaminergic activity, hoping to lessen the risk of addiction and reward-based activity. Well, dopamine is also involved in dozens of other processes, including movement, executive function, and more. Who's to say what effects will occur in a fully grown human?
This is 100% correct.
(COI: Kiran was my postdoc while I was a student in the lab a decade ago.)
What is the relevance of "Asian nations?" to this conversation?
Also, we're talking about a specific experiment that was allegedly conducted in human beings with (good but error-prone) genome editing mechanisms, outside of the purview of peer review or, from what I can tell, an IRB.
Gene editing is mandatory, if only because we've managed to turn many previously lethal mutations into livable, and reproducible, ones.
I would assume it's because the article describes genetically-engineered babies in China, so obviously it's not outlawed there (or if it is, the law is not enforced). Grandparent poster is pointing out that if genetic engineering gives survival or competitive benefits to those who do it, it doesn't matter what your personal ethical, moral, and legal standards are, because your whole society will be outcompeted by societies without those strictures.
Or maybe a cozy cage in a zoo, with a little sign next to the bars which reads: "homo sapiens inferior".
Evolution is blind to such concerns. Those who "experiment" might be wiped out because of their experiments gone wrong, and evolution wont care at all.
A creature inventing tools might have an evolutionary advantage over others. A creature inventing e.g. biological warfare and nuclear weapons might have less an advantage, it can easily wipe most of its own kind and even collapse its civilization (losing even more advantages).
(1) IQ is very polygenetic - a big IQ gene might be 0.1 IQ, and there aren't a lot even that large, if I recall the large genome wide association studies done on this. As GWAS studies get larger we find more, but they're all super small effects.
(2) Having an extra 0.1 IQ point is easy to lose in the noise of other effects on having offspring.
So even if we assumed IQ was perfectly correlated with more surviving offspring in modern societies, it might take an extremely long time (even longer than a whole planet and a thousand years) to make a detectable difference.
(Note I am not advocating for gene editing)
Also I don't think we have reached a local maximum, human society kind of fucks with natural selection so I imagine there is room for improvement.
I didn't do good at school but i had many friends! I never felt i was less intelligent than my friends which make me question the IQ score thing.
My Dad has high IQ (135) and he's a mathematician.
So how did i inhert low IQ? My mom's score is average at best, 102.
I've sold 3 companies, i am married and I've managed to be quite wealthy.
You don't need to posses high intelligence to survive and reproduce in this world that's why it's not selected for.
We don't walk out of womb and given a puzzle to solve where if we fail, we are instantly killed.
https://www.gwern.net/Drug-heuristics
Here’s a brief snippet
> the intervention may be simple, give major enhancements, but result in a net loss of reproductive fitness The famous Ashkenazi theory of intelligence comes to mind. According to this theory, the Ashkenazi were forced into occupations demanding intelligence, and micro-selected for high intelligence. Except the high IQ genes were not previously prevalent among either Jews or gentiles because - like sickle-cell anemia - when they became too prevalent, they result in horrible diseases like Tay-Sachs. In 2007, a unique mutation in a Scottish family was found to increase verbal IQ in afflicted family members vs non by something like 25 points; this would be great for them - except for how that mutation starts causing blindness in one’s 20s or later. (In general, it’s much easier to find mutations or other genetic changes breaking intelligence than helping in cases of retardation26 and autism27.)
Based on all the GWASes and additional studies which have been done since 2007 and a continued absence of confirmed examples of IQ-boosting variants with negative pleiotropic effects, I now would explain the lack of optimization of intelligence as being an example of 'too complex for evolution because too many little changes to do simultaneously', that is, mutation load: essentially, there are too many little effects (which sum up to make us far stupider than we have to be), which have been created & maintained by too many demographic bottlenecks and genetic drift and other effects, too much background selection, and too much selection on other traits (plus some level of dysgenics), for the various harmful variants to have been meaningfully selected against over the past 50kya. And that's why we could boost intelligence a lot with few harmful and many beneficial side effects.
> The average human genome appears to be close to a local maximum.
Absolutely, but it's maximized for the environment we lived in 10-100 generations ago.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bad-news-for-the-...
You join Mensa if your IQ is a large part of your identity. Individuals who have a high IQ but also have a lot of other things going on in their lives (like career success or fulfilling personal relationships) tend to concentrate on those things rather than join Mensa. Therefore, membership in Mensa tends to overselect for individuals whose self-conception is both narrow and focused on their intelligence. There's a lot of other evidence in psychology that a narrow self-conception correlates highly with mood & anxiety disorders. You can also get correlations with physical ailments like environmental allergies and asthma as well, because someone who doesn't have these physical ailments is more able to get outside or pick up sports rather than go to meetings of a high-IQ society.
So the way they designed their experiment, they introduced tons of conflating factors that may or may not actually have anything to do with IQ. It's certainly possible that high IQs are associated with mental and physical disorders - but what the experiment shows is that membership in Mensa is associated with mental and physical disorders.
In a population that got carefully selected traits for high IQ, these tradeoffs could over time be understood and the effects minimized.
IQ predicts health and longevity.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0963-7214.200...
Intelligence Predicts Health and Longevity, but Why? Linda S. Gottfredson1, Ian J. Deary
Low iq is a risk factor for several mental health disorders.
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/appi.ajp.20...
> Results: Lower childhood IQ was associated with increased risk of developing schizophrenia spectrum disorder, adult depression, and adult anxiety. Lower childhood IQ was also associated with greater comorbidity and with persistence of depression; the association with persistence of generalized anxiety disorder was nearly significant. Higher childhood IQ predicted increased risk of adult mania.
Childhood IQ and adult mental disorders: a test of the cognitive reserve hypothesis
Karestan C Koenen
Some problem areas are no longer as such because today's environment is much better at compensating for them than the environment that we actually evolved-for.
Energy efficiency comes to mind prominently: we've never been better at producing human-consumable energy in our entire history, yet we can't actually use the stuff because our bodies still interact with energy much like children-of-the-Depression interact with money.
Editing hundreds of alleles may sound incredible to you now, but I don’t think it will sound so incredible for long.
Even ignoring GM, embryo selection can get us pretty far with current technology: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection
That paper does not imply what you think it implies: that editing all these variants in an individual embryo would have a small effect.
An individual with the top 200 IQ-enhancing variants edited in (and an otherwise normal genome) would be far, far smarter than than than you seem to think, even though the variants edited only explain 5.2% of the differences within the population.
Since they have an average effect size of ~0.05-0.1 IQ points or so, a few hundred of those would in fact be many SDs. You can download the PGS, grab the top few hundred or thousand betas, and sum them if you don't believe me. (I show this with Benyamin et al 2014 in that section above, but no reason one couldn't redo it with a better PGS; the results won't change much.)
And yes, Hsu really does believe this, he is quite explicit in that 2014 paper that that is how it would work (in addition to countless places on his blog & Twitter) and I've discussed it with him in the past.
(As other comments point out, the real problem with this logic is that the hits are usually not causal but tag the causal variant, even if you had some magic CRISPR which could make hundreds of arbitrary edits. That's soluble, but not easily. It is, however, not a problem for selection procedures.)
This could change if the tech improves, but it would need to improve A LOT.
This looks totally unlikely.
Not to mention generally undesirable (people with IQ over 150 or so often have severe problems in their social life, and a lot of them don't ever even create or discover much, not to mention the insufferable part whose main accomplishment is to be members of MENSA).
So in this case experimentation is a first step in preventing disease.
(The answer is none.)
You and I could very well find arguments for defending it, even while fitting the current morale.
Clearly those moral and ethical frameworks are not shared by at least one Chinese scientist.
You can show with empirical evidence that climate change is true.
However no matter how hard you try you can't show with evidence that your moral framework or ethics are somehow the "one true moral/ethical truth".
Is that a fact, or an opinion? :-)
(Straight question, that really isn't obvious to me at all.)
Seriously why? We do so many unnatural things to us through technology. The article discusses editing genes to try and prevent viruses.
Ethicists are experts in talking about ethics. They have no special expertise in acting ethically, compared to other philosophers[1].
Ethicists have expertise in what amounts to a body of administrative law, like rabbis, imams or canon lawyers.
And we have strong evidence of actual harm caused by them. If bioethicists can’t get their shit together enough to defend compensated kidney or gamete donation they aren’t even broadly neutral. There are people being paid to argue against saving lives, and against helping to bring into the world new lives that are actively wanted. There are ethicists who argue that poor people can’t really consent because the offer of some good to sufficiently poor person qualifies as duress.
The Nuremberg Code is good. The system of IRBs and bioethicists built up around it is not just bad, it’s genuinely awful.
[1]The moral behavior of ethics professors: Relationships among self-reported behavior, expressed normative attitude, and directly observed behavior Eric Schwitzgebel & Joshua Rust
If your point is that "IRBs could be improved in various ways", I'd be happy to agree in many cases. But also, there are some shining examples of enlightened IRBs that make human research at scale quite practical.
http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=7193
https://kiej.georgetown.edu/carl-e-schneider-the-censors-han...
IRBs do not have a problem. They are a problem. If we must have IRBs they should be deprofessionalised to the fullest extent possible rather than staffed by people whose job and motivation is to find problems where none exist and add more bureaucracy to prove they are actually doing some work. IRB as jury service seems like it could be acceptable. Twelve people, a three hour course on the Nuremberg code and the scientist presenting their application. And absolutely no bioethicists.
If you’re interested in the book put it on an Amazon wish list and email me the link at barrypcotter at iCloud. I’ll buy it because more doctors and scientists should know IRBs are a cancer on society and science.
If you had to live your entire life with a painful deformity because someone experimented on your genes, do you think you’d find this argument convincing?
Sure, that won't stop progress by people who do not follow your flavor of morality or ethics, though.
It's a very real threat and believing that The West has a head start and is more intelligent/better funded/other excuse is not going to end well for us.
China achieves goals though brute force with very little regard for ethics or norms.
Also note the differences in culture: the chinese parents consented to it. I m not sure how easy it would be to find this in the west.
Some theists believe that we shouldn't tamper with God's perfect creation, because everything happens for a reason (including miscarriages, birth defects, and genetic diseases.) Atheists might believe that natural selection has got us this far, so it must be a pretty good process. A scientist shouldn't change anything, because they will be adding unnecessary risk to the natural process of evolution.
But you have to think about the "baseline". Natural selection is actually a brutal and horrific process where genes are just mutated at random. 50% of all pregnancies end in a miscarriage. Birth defects occur in 3% of all live births, and they account for 21% of all infant deaths. Nature is already a mad scientist that runs random experiments on babies.
I read that humans have about 30 genetic mutations per generation [1]. So imagine if a scientist picks 1 gene at random, and they use CRISPR to randomly change that gene. Now the embryo has around ~31 random mutations. Isn't that basically the same result as natural selection? You probably wouldn't even be able to tell that the scientist had changed anything.
Is that an accurate way of looking at it, or am I missing something?
We already know a lot about certain genes and what they do. For example, mutations in the HBB gene cause sickle cell anemia. Removing the mutation in that HBB gene is a good idea 100% of the time. You can just look at the 99% (?) of healthy people who have an HBB gene without that mutation.
Maybe the CRISPR process is risky and can cause lots of unexpected mutations. In that case it's not so black-and-white. But if you can edit a gene to prevent a disease, and it can be done in a safe way, then I don't think it's inherently unethical. (Although you could argue that it might be more ethical for parents to adopt a baby and donate money to charity, instead of spending a lot of money on gene-editing and IVF.)
If you can reach a high certainty level through other kinds of tests, then that would be another story.
I didn't realize that CRISPR gene editing can cause damage to other genes [1], so it might not worth it yet. If there was a perfect CRISPR procedure that had no other side effects, then it would be hard to argue against that.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180719165032.h...
I sure hope you are pro-life, otherwise making "consent" and "individual rights" a foundation of your view would be pretty hypocritical.
In my view, if you aren't even a fetus yet, you can't possibly have any rights. You're not a human being. During IVF, you select the embryo with the best health prospects - the rest may be destroyed.
Keep in mind I only disagree with the foundation, I still think the procedure is unethical because the scientific basis is poor.
That does not imply that a doctor or researcher has the right to risk causing debilitating life-long symptoms to another human being at any stage of development without a clear medical justification.
By your reasoning, because an embryo has no rights whatsoever, it would be fine to experiment wantonly for the sake of producing circus attractions. I presume you wouldn’t actually support this?
I also fail to see how the scientific basis is relevant to the ethical question. Whether the science is good or not, we’re talking about unnecessary procedures with inherent failure rates that can have brutal life-long consequences. I can’t see how someone can support this unless they are fundamentally lacking in empathy. As I asked another poster elsewhere in the thread, do you really think you would feel the same if something like this had been done to you and caused you to live with a painful deformity? Would you care then whether the science was good?
> That does not imply that a doctor or researcher has the right to risk causing debilitating life-long symptoms to another human being at any stage of development without a clear medical justification.
It's not the doctor making the decision to go ahead with this procedure, it's the mother. So, according to you, a mother has the right to kill an unborn child in the womb because it's the wrong gender (not uncommon in China) and that's "agency over her body" but then she can't attempt to mitigate the HIV risk it has given her child by procreating with an HIV-positive male. This is absurd.
> I also fail to see how the scientific basis is relevant to the ethical question. Whether the science is good or not, we’re talking about unnecessary procedures with inherent failure rates that can have brutal life-long consequences.
Nobody knows if there will be "inherent failure rates that can have brutal life-long consequences". That's why the science is bad. If the science was good, you'd know if the procedure is really that risky or not. If the procedure was 100% safe and effective, it would be unethical not to perform it.
Good or bad science has nothing to do with the outcomes--that's good or bad medicine. There's plenty of 'good science' practiced on lab rats that would immediately become horrifyingly unethical if practiced on humans, but that has nothing to do with how well the scientific method is being applied and what can be learned.
Anyway, this discussion doesn't seem to be going anywhere productive, so I will bid you good day.
No, I am not arguing that. That's an embarrassingly absurd conclusion to draw.
These babies have a risk of life-long HIV impairment. This intervention may prevent this. With any medical intervention, you need to trade off risk and reward. Obviously, for an unborn child, there can not be any consent here.
It would be unethical to not give the babies the treatment if there wasn't any risk associated. What makes it unethical is that the risk profile isn't even known. The scientific foundation is poor.
> Anyway, this discussion doesn't seem to be going anywhere productive, so I will bid you good day.
I agree and let me say this: You're by far the worst discussion partner I have ever had on HN.
Woe is me!
I somehow doubt you're very high on anyone's list yourself :-/
You're assuming it's riskier, in terms of lives, to try this technology. But it could be -- and obviously it's up in the air, which is my point -- that without such technology many more people will end up dying.
The status quo is never neutral with respect to risks.
What if it was used to provide immunity to malaria, as a hypothetical example?
Steady with the generalisations there. Your polarised US and various other places might be home to fewer liberal religionists, but that is not necessarily an accurate statement.
Excellent way of putting it. I'm adding that quote to my arsenal..
There is strong evidence that high mutation rates are selected against, to the point that some have speculated that driving down mutation rate is one of the key functions of selection[1].
Point being that increasing the number of germline variants is an extremely important consideration. The fact that the underlying biological replication mechanisms are not 100% perfect does not alter this point, and certainly doesn't mean that when you artificially increase the number of mutations that "this isn't a worse situation".
Maybe if you were seriously ill because of a genetic experiment we did on you (and that you did not need) as you were an embryo, then you would not hold the same view.
I don't think you get where the morality problem is... It's not about being Amish that say "we shouldn't temper with God's perfect creation".
It's about a country doing human experimentation on innocent people that do not need it, it's not to cure them from an heridetary problem but to breed a stronger race. China will only show the success of their experiments and will hide from the eyes of the world all the failures, handicapped babies, secondary effects of their human experiments. They'll make experiments on babies with lots of failure (it's science, you never get it right at the first experiment) and once in a while they'll put a video on YouTube like they just did saying "Aw look how healthy they are". But behind there going to be a lot of guinea pig children with serious secondary effects. And the worth part is how they'll make sure the rest of the world never see those "failed" children. This might be Nazi-level stuff that's going to happen and this is what people with a glimpse of ethics left are concerned about, it's not about "not tempering with God's perfect creation"
I'm not arguing for that, and I don't think it's the only possible situation.
> "it's science, you never get it right at the first experiment"
> "there is going to be a lot of guinea pig children with serious secondary effects"
I don't think so. If this does happen then it would be extremely sad, but I don't think it's very likely. Scientists are far more careful than that. A new drug has to go through many stages before it is ever tested in clinical trials, and these human trials are generally very safe. So I'm just trying to say that if this is done properly and with a lot of safeguards, then gene-editing is not inherently unethical.
But you're probably right about China. They have a horrible history of human-rights abuses, and I think they are much more likely to get this wrong. Even if it's not a government program, Chinese companies don't have a great track record [1]. I wouldn't be surprised if they were already performing some reckless experiments, and all of these people should locked up.
[1] https://qz.com/1323471/ten-years-after-chinas-melamine-laced...
I'd also argue that non-natural selection can be worse. We have crude forms of it through pet breeding, and cats come to mind. The Scottish Fold in particular:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Fold
I worry non-natural selection could follow the path of the fold and various toy breeds.
Also pet breeding is a great example. But I think that's one of the advantage of CRISPR over selective breeding. Selective breeding results in lots of genetic problems like hip dysplasia, arthritis, etc. because the gene pool is too small. But I think CRISPR could probably fix most of these issues by splicing in the healthy genes from other dog breeds.
Although I just found this article: https://splinternews.com/meet-the-guy-biohacking-puppies-to-...
I didn't realize there was a DIY bio-hacking community just playing around with CRISPR in their backyard shed. This is concerning.
please, spare us the "100% correct" and certified ethical positions
Based on whose ethics and morals? Eventually a country is going to go all in on robotics and genetic engineering, ethics be damned, and the rest of the world is going to be left in the dust -- economically and militarily.
It's not black and white.
> He said the parents involved declined to be identified or interviewed, and he would not say where they live or where the work was done.
> There is no independent confirmation of He's claim, and it has not been published in a journal, where it would be vetted by other experts. He revealed it Monday in Hong Kong to one of the organizers of an international conference on gene editing that is set to begin Tuesday, and earlier in exclusive interviews with The Associated Press.
To be honest, _if this is true_ it sounds like he modified them without the parents knowledge or consent. Usually, I'm super skeptical of any "research" coming out of China. However, I've suspected that China has been doing this for a while anyway (without sharing it). So I'm left with three possibilities in my mind:
1. Government is releasing this to see how the world will react
2. The doctor excited to share their work, shared it - but did the work without the parents consent
3. Parents did this knowingly and in a controlled way
Of those options I'm betting #2 followed by #1. Highly doubt even if the parents consented this was entered into with the knowledge of the risks. Seriously if they are using Cas9 who knows what else could go wrong.
See article: Potential DNA damage from CRISPR has been ‘seriously underestimated,’ study finds
https://www.statnews.com/2018/07/16/crispr-potential-dna-dam...
The results come hard on the heels of two studies that identified a related issue: Some CRISPR’d cells might be missing a key anti-cancer mechanism and therefore be able to initiate tumors.
> Several scientists reviewed materials that He provided to the AP and said tests so far are insufficient to say the editing worked or to rule out harm.
> They also noted evidence that the editing was incomplete and that at least one twin appears to be a patchwork of cells with various changes.
As a programmer, I know how hard it is to modify a ball of code without having unexpected consequences. We barely know how the human genome functions. I hope we don't do too much damage.
Tailbones, for instance.
> Even if editing worked perfectly, people without normal CCR5 genes face higher risks of getting certain other viruses, such as West Nile, and of dying from the flu. Since there are many ways to prevent HIV infection and it's very treatable if it occurs, those other medical risks are a concern, Musunuru said.
Our ethics will be our downfall.
We are taking the Chinese route for surveillance, data, AI. It's going to be the same for genetics. Maybe even faster because people don't want to be spied on but want to have stronger/resistant/smarter children, especially when they'll see other people getting those advantages.
I myself think it was certainly no coincidence that Stanford picked him up.
I'm afraid calling up some of his opinions, and in particularly on the topic of race, as they will be a ten megaton flamewar bomb. Google him yourself if you know Chinese.
Looks pretty bad.
i had thought this wouldnt happen for another few decades
this is bad news for tibetans since their high altitude gene is known even the andes high alt adaptations are being discovered which is really one of the closest things to a genetic super ability you can get
so it will only be a few decades more until this last barrier to han colonization of tibet falls
deep sea diving is another such genetic ability recently investigated
People are genuinely concerned about the unknown effects on the babies, and questioning the authors and the hospital's motivation of applying such techniques to human this early without fully understanding its consequences.
2. HIV would make a terrible bioweapon. It's difficult to spread, takes a very long time to incapacitate people, and there are generally effective treatments.
Disclaimers: I do not have the expertise to evaluate its veracity but if true it will affect everyone in the world in some important ways within a few decades (the effects might already start to appear as we see how fast China has developed technologically. Yes, technology transfer is clearly a factor but few developing nations can absorb and adopt advanced technologies so rapidly). I also have not pondered deeply enough to have a strong position on the complicated ethical implications alluded to in the article and expressed with concerns elsewhere.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838
> ...
> Deng also encouraged assortative mating through promoting urbanization and higher education, so bright, hard-working young people could meet each other more easily, increasing the proportion of children who would be at the upper extremes of intelligence and conscientiousness. ...
> But crucially, Comprehensive National Power also includes "biopower": creating the world's highest-quality human capital in terms of the Chinese population's genes, health, and education ...
> The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness. ...
> My real worry is the Western response. The most likely response, given Euro-American ideological biases, would be a bioethical panic that leads to criticism of Chinese population policy with the same self-righteous hypocrisy that we have shown in criticizing various Chinese socio-cultural policies. But the global stakes are too high for us to act that stupidly and short-sightedly. A more mature response would be based on mutual civilizational respect, asking—what can we learn from what the Chinese are doing, how can we help them, and how can they help us to keep up as they create their brave new world?
Thankfully we might be safe for the time being. IIRC the BGI IQ sequencing initiative did not lead to any meaningful discoveries since it's not yet obvious or fully proven yet that IQ is that heritable.
My 50c is that we as a population have currently stopped evolving regions of our genome that can keep resulting in progressively higher intelligence, for two possible reasons: 1. there's some evidence at least from my view that any further increase in intelligence will cause other side effects like depression and autism (or perhaps a more intelligent version of us cannot unsee the futility of our lives?); 2. It's not in the interests of the population as a whole to continue having a fight between individuals having heritably different IQs, i.e. we have evolved into a local minima so that all IQ differences are stochastic and it's really hard to leave this minima through mutations.
I think the second possibility makes sense because intelligence is such a huge evolutionary advantage that a population with high instability in this trait might be doomed (more intelligent people can cheat more easily for short term personal benefit at the expense of long term population benefit). I really think that one of the first things modern humans evolved was the genetic ability to make sure that intelligence was completely randomized among the population, and I now hope that's true also because of all these efforts because if it's true none of these efforts would succeed for a long time.
Some of the most intelligent people in history including renowned philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians did not seem to focus on using their intelligence to acquire as much power or wealth as possible. They seemed to enjoy contemplating more universal and deeper questions than immersing themselves too much on worldly matters. A majority of powerful people did seem to have above or well-above average intelligence but they were probably not in the same league, intelligence-wise, as those famous thinkers. Their other traits were also important to their rise to power.
Environment and population intelligence likely have co-evolved and very high intelligence did not confer much advantage over an above average one for most common professions before the 21st century. The technology and level of economy-of-scale available in the past meant that social graciousness and other personality traits could have been better predictors of career and economic success than intelligence above a certain point.
To have a great engineering or scientific career developing some of our increasingly advanced technologies, very high intelligence seems to present certain advantages over a more balanced group of traits. So a shift in global technological landscape could also mean that the optimal collection of population intelligence and other traits change as well.
As concrete examples, the founders of the largest American tech empires all seem to have/had an IQ at least 3-4 SD above mean based on their academic records.
PS. Your 1) seems possible in some cases and I would add that traits like non-extreme autism-spectrum condition may not be a handicap, but rather an advantage, in a certain environment and career path.
Oddly enough this reminds me of a clip from the show Young Sheldon where the twins display extremely different, yet equally admoyable manifestations of intelligence: https://youtu.be/nvQkKS75M2o
My point above was regarding the difference between say 2SD above mean vs 4SD. It did not help much and perhaps hurt in a few ways, like getting bored more easily, to have a +4SD IQ in the past. Most businesses and jobs were not very complicated. So having a +2SD intelligence could be optimal in the past in most parts of the world.
Work at today’s multinationals and globe-spanning empires, in many fields, benefit a lot more from +4SD intelligence and the stimulation from complexity helps mitigate some of the drawbacks. The optimal level for career success in many regions/careers might have shifted to +3SD or even +4SD instead.
More significantly, they tend to not have children.
"Men of the highest genius who were childless include Newton, Faraday, and Mendel; Vivaldi, Handel, and Beethoven; Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle; Plato, Aquinas, Bacon, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant and Mill. Anyone who thinks he can frame a list of comparable individuals who had on the average enough children to counter-balance the childlessness of these, is welcome to try; but he will not succeed. ...Just below the very highest level, and average number of children is again far below the average for people of no intellectual or artistic distinction. And it is, again, spectacularly depressed by the huge contribution of the childless: Copernicus, Swift, Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Haydn, Dalton, Francis Galton himself - to mention a few examples at random." (David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales)
BGI found no common genes of large effect. That means intelligence is more like height than skin colour. There are lots of genes that have a small effect. We know there are rare genes of large effect because Ashkenazim have at least two, the ones that lead to torsion dystonia and Tay-Sachs disease lead to greater IQ in heterozygotes.
We know evolution in intelligence has not stopped because human populations differ in intellectual productivity to absurd degrees of that wasn’t true. Evolution requires heritability, variation and selection and all those clearly exist.
Do you have any references to it? I'd like to learn more...
As to evolution and its necessary precursors it’s all in Darwin, or shorter on the Wikipedia page for evolution.
SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE IN RECESSIVELY INHERITED TORSION DYSTONIA
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067367...
NATURAL HISTORY OF ASHKENAZI INTELLIGENCE GREGORY COCHRAN, JASON HARDY, HENRY HARPENDING
http://plancksconstant.org/blog1/pdfs/ashkiq.webpub.pdf
>Ever since torsion dystonia among the Ashkenazim was first recognized, observers have commented on the unusual intelligence of patients. Flatau and Sterling (Eldridge, 1976) describe their first patient as showing ‘an intellectual development far exceeding his age’, and their second patient as showing ‘extraordinary mental development for his age’. At least ten other reports in the literature have made similar comments. Eldridge (1970, 1976) studied fourteen Jewish torison dystonia patients:
The BGI initiative led to no meaningful discoveries because of internal disarray & politics & strategic missteps meant that it was never completed; if it had, it probably wouldn't've reported much because they made a failed bet that common variation would be unimportant and it would be more efficient to look for rarer variants which boosted IQ a lot in a few thousand high-IQ participants rather than the 100,000+ that would be necessary using normal people.
We now know that there appear to be no such variants. Common variants with n>100k yielded the first successful IQ GWAS with Rietveld et al 2013 (0.3% variance). GWASes kept getting bigger and better, and the latest one, Allegrini et al 2018 (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/09/17/418210), can now predict 11% of variance in IQ/16% EDU.
> since it's not yet obvious or fully proven yet that IQ is that heritable.
It is, and it says a lot that so many people have such a mistaken impression.
Has more info
https://m.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1940...
EDIT:
Shenzhen Medical Ethics Expert Committee said that the trial was not reported to before the trial.
https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...
https://www.google.com/search?&q=in+vitro+sex+selection+chin...
More intelligence + less risk-taking + more respect for authority = a high-score child sure to get into the top University and have the freedom to travel there.
/s
2. Why does China outlaw cloning if it has the same risks?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAhjPd4uNFY
(not affiliated, just love their videos)
Complacent western weakness at its best.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/ho... [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-17980177 [3]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-08/south-korea-cracks-do... [4]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/southkorea/9...