What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing? | Hacker News Reader

What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing?

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31 pointsamanuensis53 comments

The main thing* holding back this is that we don't understand the human genome enough to make really useful edits. It's very rare that there's a change that would be better done with germline engineering than somatic cell engineering or gene therapy. One day that won't be true however, and that's when the problems will really begin.

To me the strongest non-religious argument against doing this is that it will further accelerate wealth benefits, eg if you could make your kids smarter. One of the problems with that however is that this technique is so cheap and easy that banning it will just create a black market, or a single country decides to allow it for economic or political reasons and people travel there to get pregnant.

That impossibility of controlling this is why I think we have no choice but to proceed slowly, cautiously, but under full transparency.

* there are also uncertainties about off-target effects and overall safety of the technique but I'm confident those issues will eventually be fixed too.

Agree with you. As much as I generally don’t like intervention I think regulation may be best here.

Why would anyone prefer having less intelligent people to having more smart people for the sake of eqality is beyond me.

Especially since regulations won't meaningfully impact the very richest - they'll travel to Thailand or wherever to have their kid's embryo edited and implanted. What it will do is prevent those innovations from coming into the reach of the rest of us.

Assuming nation states don't hoard what could be considered to be a long term strategic advantage.

My fear would be that the West, in paroxysms of misguided equal-outcomes ideology, ban genetic improvements - whereas China mandates it, and bans its availability to outsiders, setting themselves up for a long-term fundamental advantage which we might never be able to overcome.

In a sense, it doesn't matter what the West "decides". If China et al have this technology - and they do - and if they decide to exploit it - and they will - we have no real choice but to follow, or face our inevitable and profound outcompetition in the medium to long term.

Hm. Depends how you do it. Given how much it costs childbirth costs in the USA, I’m surprised there isn’t already health tourism from the USA to literally anywhere else. The cost of genetic modification will probably be small compared to the cost of childbirth, if the current existence and price of amateur CRISPR bio-hacking kits is anything to go by[1].

Could this be overcome by requiring all newly registered children to have full genome DNA tests, along with their parents, and prosecute on the basis of clear genetic modification? Or is that likely to get too many false positives?

[1] http://www.the-odin.com/bacterial-crispr-and-fluorescent-yea...

Indeed, there is some health tourism, but much less than I would expect given the prices.

I can't imagine that setting up a "Department Of Prosecuting New Parents" would go down well. Or even be possible. For example, most first-world countries today have millions of residents with no legal right to be there, most of whom the state does not prosecute/deport/fine. I think both for the lack of capacity to do so, and for lack of popular support for doing this at full scale. And deciding where someone was born (and who their parents are) is much much easier than deciding whether they got 100% of their DNA the old-fashioned way.

The entire history in Europe of the past 2,000 years is precisely this - the preference for equality over excellence.

See: Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche.

I'm not really sure where to start here. There was more "excellence" in the Roman Republic and prior times than the following 2000 years of European history?

This is a familiar critique that seems to conflate the modern self-esteem craze, communism, and the utopian "equality of outcome" with the traditional religiously based idea of equality, which is that every soul is made in the image of and has equal responsibility before God and that's it. The Lockean idea of human rights is cladistically derived from this.

Nietzschean philosophy is a bit too complex for me to explain in a HN comment, but I was referring more to the Master-Slave Morality concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master–slave_morality

Oh I know what it is, I just think it’s completely wrong to apply to Europe pre WWI. How a culture that explored and conquered almost the entire world had a “slave morality” because of the beatitudes or something was always baffling. What would be interesting is applying it to today’s secular Europe.

Governments in general would prefer less intelligent people in the populace for the sake of power and control.

>To me the strongest non-religious argument against doing this is that it will further accelerate wealth benefits, eg if you could make your kids smarter.

The exact same argument could be made against education, or any other human development.

Which is why most countries have some sort of public funded compulsory education.

Yeah, but a moratorium on gene editing is the equivalent of banning all schools.

Not even remotely right.

Banning all schools will affect all children.

Banning gene-editing will effect the children of the wealthy, or those who's parents chose to go that route.

A better example will be banning private schools, but even then, that requires the child to at least work hard and the parents to constantly invest for a child to get any value out of it, as oppose to gene editing.

Banning all schools will affect all children now because we have reached a point where schools are common. 200 years ago they were not, and if we decided to not allow any schools until we could provide schools for everyone, we still would not have any schools.

IMHO if you have the means to make your kids smarter (all other things being equal) it's unethical not to do so.

Ethics won't matter at all if it comes down to our survival on Earth. Among the multitude of reasons for getting several factors smarter very rapidly is the necessity for developing the means to avoid immanent extinction when we detect a suitably-sized lump of rock coming our way from space. If it's one with a diameter of 10-100 km then with current technology it's all over bar nothing (not even shouting). Back to square 1 or maybe 1.1 if we're lucky. You'd think we'd focus on this rather than on some of the issues which seem to obsess us. https://www.sciencealert.com/a-huge-previously-undetected-as...

and what if gene edited children all produce children with autistic conditions?

We dont know enough about it to allow it open slather in the community at large.

Then this gene edited children will again use gene editing to produce children with genes similar to theirs that are already known to not produce too many autistic conditions.

> We dont know enough about it to allow it open slather in the community at large.

Who are those "guardians of the community" that are allowed to decide what technology community at large can have access to and what can't? You can argue for regulation preventing fraud: doctors hiding possible complications, editing different genes than what was advertised, etc. but you can't disallow people to decide with what genetic code they create their own children.

> I think we have no choice but to proceed slowly, cautiously, but under full transparency.

but if there's any slight advantage to be had by going faster (e.g., there's a moratorium on editing certain traits), then those who would disregard the "rules" may gain and therefore, create a black-market anyway.

I think the only reasonable thing to do is to have unfetted access, and the lowest possible price point. Then let darwinian selection take place.

That makes sense to me.

Proliferation of nuclear-weapon technology has been somewhat effective. Because it's hugely technical and resource intensive. But CRISPR, not so much.

Not sure I agree with the first premise. If the technology was relatively safe and robust you could just routinely "edit" all births with a package of corrections for all known rare genetic diseases. There are several hundred well understood variants that are disease causing and correctable with editing a fertilised egg, with essentially zero available treatments later on.

Would you correct carriers as well (heterozygous with no symptoms). What about where the gene was advantageous in a heterozygous configuration? Would you eliminate all sickle-cell genes?

That's not something that you can decide for other people. If some people like their sickle-cell gene no one can force them to remove it, and similarly if they don't like it no one should be able to force them to keep it.

IIRC this has already happened with Tay-Sachs, although not by editing, just by testing (either before marriage, or of embryos). I think the disease is now more common among non-Ashkenazim, who are unlikely to be tested.

Seems like a useful test case to think about, and read about, rather than relying only on imagination.

I think the strongest argument against gene editing is the tendency for societal biases to be taken to the extreme. Gene editing is drastic and has the potential to greatly reduce genetic diversity in a population since people tend to want to become “normal”, or meme certain popular traits. If you gave minorities the ability to become a white males in America, would they? Certainly many would and it would mean losing the benefits of such diversity we currently have, even if it’s tougher for many people to be non-white male.

See “Chinese footbinding”, “injecting cement into posteriors for beauty”, “plastic surgery” for examples of the absuridty people will go to to fit in.

I can't help but find this incredibly condescending.

You would take away a technological advantage from majorities and minorities alike because their choices might not lead to your ideal of diversity utopia.

Here's a different take, on a different sort of diversity:

Suppose it turns out that extremely high-achievers are gambles on the part of nature, which have some chance of going wrong. For example, suppose that every birth of a potential future Nobelist comes with a 10% chance of serious disabling autism. (I stress, I'm not claiming that this is true, just setting up a thought experiment.) Many parents would decline this gamble: 10% is quite a high chance of devoting the rest of your life to care, for a tiny chance of having a world-class star in the family, who will anyway have very little personal gain from his contributions. But if the whole society decides never to gamble, we will (in my scenario!) miss out on major advances.

If we get to the point where we can distinguish genes that cause autism to be able to remove them, we'll also be able to distinguish 10% Nobelist case.

But even if that was not the case, with gene editing some parents who did not have a chance to make that gamble, will be able to make it intentionally.

The point of my thought experiment is to imagine that these are the same genes. Remember that about half of population variation is "unshared environment" meaning noise in the translation of DNA into an adult: genes will never allow perfect prediction.

I guess I believe that very few parents would make this gamble, because the risks are very personal and the benefits are mostly to others. But I could be wrong. One real live example is that there's been very little push-back against eliminating Tay-Sachs via testing.

In your thought experiment, even if very few parents made the gamble, it would be enough to keep the gene around until we figured out what in the environment caused autism, after which the many more would want to have it.

For the Tay-Sachs example what would be the reason to push-back against eliminating it? And who should have pushed back? people who had that gene, or people who didn't?

IMO the solution is to simply have more people, if we have 1000 billions on earth (which is possible with seasteading and terraforming deserts), 10 billion on moon 100 billion on mars we'll have enough place to try out all kinds of solutions, for people to decide how much to edit or not to edit their own genes, and many new random mutations arising simply because there are more new people than were in all of the history combined.

Other thought experiments are certainly possible, but mine is about the stated gamble, in which you cannot predict. That's what's meant by "unshared environment", it's poorly named, the environment you talk of is "shared environment". As I said, I don't know that this is true in the real world, but I don't think it wildly implausible. (Maybe tortured mad artists are a better example than nerds.)

Tay-Sachs is the first example I know about, of some genetic strain of humans being deliberately bred out of existence. Phrased like that I think the idea would alarm many people. But it has not. (I should remind myself more of the details of this story.)

Thought experiments aside, note that it's not obvious we need a single new mutation to make much smarter people. We just need the shuffling of the deck to place more of the existing + variants into one body. This will obviously be the goal of embryo selection, and I think would also be the goal of explicit editing. I'd wager that many more of the Nobel-sized brains alive at the end of this century (and the next) will owe their existence to one of these kinds of engineering, than to population growth.

Monocultures are fragile. They are fragile in agriculture, they are fragile in software development, and they are fragile in political thought. There is no reason to expect we would not be equally fragile if we all changed our genomes to be the “same race”, especially given that “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis” [1], and therefore can be expected to continue to find it easy discriminate against each other for being different right up until the supermajority[2] are all identical.

[1] https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...

[2] I was going to say ‘entire population’, then I remembered one of our differences includes a desire to be different; how different we get to be depends on social rules, which is why the number of furries who had themselves surgically altered to look like (say) cats is a small non-zero number.

Sure monocultures are bad but talking about banning gene editing to avoid monoculture at this point is the equivalent of proposing to ban people who already own cars to buy teslas to avoid electric car monoculture. Because we are not anywhere near a monoculture, and for some traits monoculture is ok (do we miss the old design of vocal tract that gave us ability to not talk?).

Also we won't have a monoculture for whole genome any time soon, because that would mean for everyone to raise someone elses kid which people tend to not like.

There is a possibility that some people will try to make changes to appearance eye/skin/hair color, shape of nose. But that doesn't have that much effect on survivability of human kind (balancing higher rate of skin cancer vs vitamin D deficiency has other methods now) and banning gene editing to prevent that would be the same as banning all surgery to simply not allow plastic surgery.

'You would take away a technological advantage.'

This begs the question. Whether this is an advantage or not is exactly what is at issue.

'Might not lead to your ideal of diversity utopia.'

One of the defining traits of humans is that they are acutely aware of their relative social status. A significant group of those perceived advantages are based upon appearance. The attempt to imitate and supersede others in a toxic battle for recognition creates all sorts of harms. Opening up our germline to that battle seems extremely dangerous. Your comment reads like pure political reaction.

I feel like the comments here have some beef with "diversity" as used in this context. The impact of genetic diversity within a species is extremely widely studied and there is little doubt to the benefits nor is it a matter of personal politics. It applies to algea as much as it does sapiens.

Yes, so it should be highly regulated. While technology also allows for plastic, surgery, one can argue that it is purely useless from a practical point of view and only wanted as a result of flawed reasoning and social pressures. It’s relatively harmless to the rest of society, but gene editing (especially if you can also permanently alter your reproductive genes), can have devastating societal effects if people are allowed to shoot themselves in the foot this way.

We have always had laws designed to manipulate society to help prevent people from shooting themselves in the foot (see qualified investor requirements, minimum drinking ages, mandatory car insurance, etc). For gene editing it’s particularly kmportant for the long-term survivability of the human race if we do not regulate our own use.

Why would anyone become a white male in today's political climate? If anything, the concern would be white males turning themselves into minorities to get racial benefits. :-)

>losing the benefits of such diversity we currently have

Could you describe some of these benefits?

Skin color involves only a few genes, which don't likely impact much else. It's pretty common now for people with different skin colors to discover that they're actually rather closely related. As in maybe only second or third cousins.

Let's say that we accept the "my body, my choice" argument for legal abortion on demand. It applies to eggs, sperm, unimplanted zygotes and preterm fetuses.

So why doesn't it also apply to CRISPR editing of our somatic and germline cells? I suppose that we could carve an exception, in the interest of the public good. As we have for the War on Drugs. But that's a dangerous path, if one cares about personal freedom.

Germline editing has consequences far beyond "my body, my choice". If your offspring have genetic defects from gene editing, and their offspring also have the same genetic defects, then "your choice" has consequences far beyond just you that "personal freedom" can't cover.

If you choose to abort, only your offspring is affected: far less consequential than possibly ruining generations to come.

I don't know what the War on Drugs has to do with anything here.

> If your offspring have genetic defects [..], and their offspring [..]

> If you choose to abort, only your offspring is affected

By aborting, you're not merely potentially saddling your offspring with genetic defects - you're denying them the most basic right to exist in the first place! And their offspring, too. You're shutting down that whole line before it can even start.

I'm pro choice, but this line of argument makes no sense to me. Hard to see how anything could have consequences "far beyond" depriving a germline of existence itself.

I do see vore's point. By aborting, you just deprive the gene pool of some genes that are on average not much different from anyone else's. But by using CRISPR, you're adding potentially damaging stuff to the overall human gene pool.

However, one could say the same about people who get exposed to mutagenic chemicals or radiation. Even through choice, as with airline crews. And once you start setting rules about who can reproduce, you have the specter of eugenics.

You may be pro-choice, but you would probably oppose the right of mothers to end the lives of their children (and descendents of those children) after pregnancy. So I don't see what is strange about the argument; you are allowed to terminate a pregnancy, but you do not necessarily have the right to inflict arbitrary other life changing modifications on your children. Like, no doctor would agree to amputate the legs of an unborn child without medical necessity (when asked by the mother), and I think 'my body, my choice' does not apply there.

I will admit there is a bit of a grey zone; few (if any?) places outright prohibit pregnant women from smoking and drinking, despite the possible negative consequences, but such behavior is still generally frowned upon.

> but you would probably oppose the right of mothers to end the lives of their children after pregnancy

Unfortunately the distinction is not that clear cut. When we have technology to raise several weeks old fetus to maturity in an artificial womb (which we'll have soon), what will be the difference between 'after pregnancy' and 'during pregnancy'? In both cases it will be something that can become a human if someone wants to spend resources to keep it alive.

> Like, no doctor would agree to amputate the legs of an unborn child

Situation with gene editing is the opposite. Is it moral to allow your child to be born with one leg, if there is an way to cure her to have both legs?

And the point about 'affecting all descendandts' is wrong because if we have a technology to make a change we can easily reverse it too.

> the point about 'affecting all descendandts' is wrong because if we have a technology to make a change we can easily reverse it too

If we had perfect editing technology (even without perfect knowledge of effects) then as you say we could easily Ctrl-Z the next generation.

But we don't have this yet, so I think it's not unreasonably to worry a bit about inflicting changes (including unintended off-target edits) on grandkids too.

Sure worrying a bit is reasonable, and that's the reason most people would not use gene editing now. (Unless they are trying to correct some well understood life threatening condition).

If we talk about so many people using it that it can change genetic composition of humanity, it means we already have a reliable way of making changes.

> I don't know what the War on Drugs has to do with anything here.

Arguably, "my body, my choice" applies to drug use.

But then, there are similar objections regarding public welfare.

[For the rest, see my reply to sho.]

>As we have for the War on Drugs

The war on drugs hasn't benefited the public.

True. But that's one argument that's typically made for it.

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