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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

This is inevitable. Folks with a will to do this (edit embryos) can clearly do so. In fact this 'researcher' (or con man) did it 'in secret' which means without any institutional support. If this guy can do it in his basement, then what hope is there of putting the genie back in the bottle?

Folks go to all sorts of crazy medical clinics already, for all sorts of crazy reasons. I predict within the year, the rise of a 'custom baby' clinic in some country with lazy medical ethic enforcement. And folks will flock there and pay through the nose.

All the argument in the OP is irrelevant. The technical reasons this instance went wrong are irrelevant. The ethics argument is irrelevant.

We have to suit up, to prepare to deal with designer babies among us in their thousands, and soon.

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I agree. We should embrace and get the most out of this technology, not shun it. Same with genetic engineering for plants and animals in the food chain.

Oh I wouldn't go there. What we'll prepare for is the fallout of inexpertly/incompetently applied technologies resulting in fragile, heath-compromised people by the thousands. There's nobody in the baby business that has to be accountable, so they won't.

Heck you can buy snake oil on the internet and find out the next day that it doesn't work; yet the snake oil is still for sale. What accountability accrues from gene editing where the effects aren't known for months, years or decades? There will be no accountability.

> What we'll prepare for is the fallout of inexpertly/incompetently applied technologies resulting in fragile, heath-compromised people by the thousands.

In other words, something that we are already dealing with as a consequence of too much fast food and video games.

Yep. When over 30% of Americans are obese, and 12% of them in poverty, I find it hard to believe that we really care that much about individual humans. It all seems like anti-scientific knee-jerk moralism from people who don't really understand the technology.

If this gives us a chance to improve humanity, we should embrace it. Yes, there will be missteps along the way - but the ends justifies the means.

This is the point everyone needs to recognize. I predict we will also reach a point where viruses can be engineered, and engineering defenses will be a public health concern.

This is the world to come, and ethics aren’t a viable defense. The gene pool is going to be stirred up in ways we’ve never seen before, and it’s going to be a good reason for us to stop focusing on our differences and start thinking and acting as one species.

CRISPR and the coming/heralded genetic revolution are BIG deals. Right up there with the Internet, the Bomb, and Fire. Our world is going to be very different due to this revolution. Events like these immediately prompt even the most uninterested person to have deep philosophical conversations; it's that simple and yet grand. This stuff is important, yo.

That said, this revolution is a bit different, as it's not just the economics, the social structure, the food, or the power source that is being changed, it's your kids. Placental mammals are, generally, very protective of their young and we spend a LOT of time and food in raising them. Things like the genetic revolution are going to vastly disrupt that relationship, one that is ~65 million years old. Yes, today we have seen the first step in that timeline and it's not here yet. But all of us know that this power, for the perceived benefit of our progeny, is like an apple is to Adam; we have to eat it.

But there's the rub. We're doing this because we'll want our kids to be better off [0]. But then they will not be your kids. At first, they will mostly be your kids, minus some small percents here and there. But as the generations pass (10, likely less?) the relationship between mother and child will become looser and less obvious. The child won't resemble you, won't behave like you, and sooner than you'd think, won't think of you as a parent.

Here's the other thing, they will be Übermensch too. Not at first, yes, and there will be a lot of 'issues' along the way, ones that very much may derail the whole train. But we all know that they will be here eventually (500 years? 200 years?). The kids will be smarter, faster, stronger, gritter, handsome, charming, witty, etc. You won't hate them or fear them, you will want to be them and be around them and have your kids be like them too. Why? It'll be proven to 95% +/- 0.27% probability (give or take) that the gene editing works, just like you'd think, endlessly reviewed and studied over and over.

But then you get these Übermensch kids making their kids even more Übermenschy. And the problem from before comes screaming in. You're doing all this for your kids, that was the whole point, so that they'd be better off, more genetically blessed. But there is no end to that idea and this kid of revolution can really go exponential (provided there is no 'carrying capacity' to genetics that we've not yet discovered). Eventually, the kids get so far away from the parents that they aren't your kids anymore. The whole reason evaporates into this kinda genetic arms race thingy. Yeah, things will go on for another generation or two past that, but not much more.

We really need to examine WHY we all just know we are all going to get into this genetic arms race. We really need to know how these kids of things end; where are the exit ramps and the what do they look like?

We all want the best for our kids, but now we are facing the question of: how do you define your child?

[0] CRISPR may be able to edit genes in situ, yes, but I am focusing on germline editing and assuming that once fertilized, you're pretty much locked into a set of genes and developmental constraints.

> At first, they will mostly be your kids, minus some small percents here and there. But as the generations pass (10, likely less?) the relationship between mother and child will become looser and less obvious. The child won't resemble you, won't behave like you, and sooner than you'd think, won't think of you as a parent.

Without genetic engineering, how much are your descendants in 10 generations going to resemble you anyway?

This all sounds great but you're somehow forgetting that there are somewhere around 100.000.000 million humans alive today with genes defective to the point that they will kill their owners/hosts/whatever you want to call them.

Just in kids, there's going to be something like 1 million kids currently alive that don't have a beating heart. Babies don't actually need their heart to be beating, diffusion will provide plenty of oxygen to their organs and brains. They may not have a heart at all (that's rare though, more likely it has a hole big enough to disrupt things enough that it won't keep beating, although even a needle sized hole will kill them if it doesn't close).

These kids will, inevitably, grow. And their growth will kill them. The strongest among them will live something like 2 years.

50 times as many kids will have a degenerative disease. This may go from Leukemia to other blood issues right to ALS or MSC or CF. They will generally start dieing off at 6-8 years and some will grow to 25 or so. But they will die. And just in case you think 25 is nice, MSC/CF kids will feel like they're drowning constantly, 24/7, starting at ages 5-8. ALS is even worse. And yes, I get it, stephen hawking grew to 76. But he is an incredible exception and that was only possible with constant, 24/7/365 nurse attention. It is not generally possible. Even for people who get that 24/7/365 attention he grew to literally double the age of the next patient.

And let's just not talk about people with brain misgrowths or epilepsy. Let's just not talk about how horrible that is. Half of them will never have the intelligence of a 3 year old, but they're still mostly in constant pain.

Another roughly-same-size batch will have a serious defect in their bodies that isn't readily apparent. They will suddenly fall ill, and go from happily going to school to dead in 2 months following at essentially a random time. Not because of a disease or condition, but because their bodies really, really can't deal with things that are overwhelmingly part of our environment, going from UV light to pressure differences, to water, some insects, ...

That's the damage our own genes put humanity through. In total somewhere between 2% and 5% (depends on your ethnicity) of people have a serious genetic defect (something that will strongly affect them until the day they die). About 1% will die from it, mostly while very young.

Clearly, despite the potential for abuse (although some of your examples ... are they even abuse ? Mostly not from the only perspective that matters, that of the kids), there is a massive potential for improvement of the human condition as well.

I personally know a fair number of people that would love to have/ are in dire need of 'genetic repair', not just in the germline, but in vivo as well. Unfortunately, I think the numbers quoted are conservative. Have no doubt, the genetic revolution is just that, a revolution. We are in the early stages of this paradigm shift.

My point was more that this revolution is much larger than 'oh no, rich people will have smart kids' or ' rich people will live forever'. The example I exposed upon was that the very basic instincts of placental mammals are going to be challenged (potentially). Genetic engineering at these fidelities has undoubted potential for good for those in severe need of it. Thank God! But just like fire or quantum mechanics, it can do harm as well, and in ways we haven't been thinking about. Like, the fear of 'rich people are going to use the stock market even better with smarter kids' isn't thinking deep enough. With the genetic revolution you're going to have to first define the 'people' part of 'rich people', because that is going to become a variable.

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