Frightening question: what if this technology could be targeted not at species, but at races?
AFAIK human "races" are largely superficial biologically - there are some correlations, but weaker than the variability between individuals.
Race:
- white
- black
- hispanic
- other
Like when you get your driver license or open a bank account. Coming from Europe I was surprised by such a question. Racial issues run very deep in the US.
Now CRISPR alters the specific sequence that it targets. In fact, CRISPR only cuts the DNA at that sequence, other proteins must be employed to change and then fix the DNA. It may be well enough to simply cut up a specific race's DNA and leave it at that. Or if those cells die off too fast, splice in some garbage DNA that will at least let the cell reproduce.
Wading into a minefield here, but is this even remotely true?
My understanding of DNA testing is that it can only tell you what genes a person has. I wasn't aware of any reliable way to cluster genes into racial groups. (The 23 & me stuff is all probabilities, wide percentage ranges, etc.)
Further, I thought it was the case that science has basically abandoned the concept of race specifically because it couldn't be reliably measured, even by DNA analysis. Is this not the case? What am I missing?
Popular understanding of race (it's a social construct, so this is the relevant metric) has little or nothing to do with susceptibility to a given disease. Similarly, dark skin != what we commonly think of as "black" (think dark-skinned people from Asia, for example).
For example if you have a dark skinned person with epicanthic fold, chances are that's a person from Indonesia or its whereabouts.
Race is not ONE trait, it's a set of traits, and all of them are encoded in DNA.
Or South Africa, or east Africa, etc. Or since we're talking about people and not geographic features, we could be talking about a person in the e.g. Americas who is the product of many "origin" regions of the world.
> Race is not ONE trait, it's a set of traits, and all of them are encoded in DNA.
The problem is the "set of traits" is squishy and often defined in the moment. This, plus the importance we assign to race in all affairs, has led many societies to try to codify what is meant by race. Racial distinctions are different in the context of different communities (e.g. in the US it's very important to know who is "black" vs who is not).
For example, in the US we long practiced the One-drop rule [1], which lead to absurd racial classifications [2] that required you to know a person's entire ancestry back 3 or 4 generations in order to identify her race (obviously, this is recursive).
The trouble is we start from a position of knowing how we want to classify a person, by seeing them or knowing where they come from ("I know she's black, so my classification scheme needs to ensure she's black."). We then need to apply tools (one-drop rule, etc.) to make sure that person fits the classification.
Gene clusters are a clumsy way to accomplish the same thing using modern tools. Obviously some populations share some traits. But saying "race" is something that can be objectively identified for every given individual is naive.
Back to your original point -- there's no such thing as the "last few genes" that make a person black. That's approximately like saying the last few quanta of pigment in a person's skin change their race. Or that a person's race can be determined by calipers [3]. It's ridiculous.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule
QED there's no biological basis for race.
Yes, races are largely a social concept. However, once society has defined races based on whatever phenotypes that are in fashion at the time, it turns out that yes, there is a biological and genetic basis for those phenotypes. It's conceivable that this biological basis could be targeted by some gene-based technology. Probably not very accurately, but based on past observations I'd say that racist mass murderers are not particularly likely to care about such subtleties. And that's what matters for the GP's point.
- where we see a person - who this person is with - what clothes the person wears - what a person smells like - body language - spoken language - the manner in which they speak (loud, soft, etc.) - the way they walk - all sorts of other cultural markers (like stance, eye contact, etc.)
I suspect that all these contextual, largely non-biological factors play a huge role in how we decide a person's race. Possibly so much so that the biological markers we do have available are mostly useless.
Please correct me if I'm wrong though; I am far from an expert in this area!
I assume your worry is that it might selectively activate in some race to do a bad thing? But that's not how it works. It always activates, and the only thing keeping it within the mosquito species is that they physically can't breed with anything else. And obviously no such barrier exists with races.
So we could worry about a completely different and theoretical technology, but not so much this one.
Humans reproduce far slower than mosquitoes, and if someone managed to modify a few humans, there would likely be plenty of time to detect it and fix or contain it in some way.