And I'm sad about millions upon millions of mostly well-meaning people, who died of ultimately preventable causes - if only we could push the research from the lab to clinic faster.
Everybody is prone to ageing, and very soon it will be our turn.
> I cannot see a world in which this could be deemed healthy.
I cannot see a world in which fighting and avoiding natural death can take healthy forms. All matter decays. All things recycle. We have material bodies, hence we are part of the cycle of life. The old giving way to the new is a necessity for growth & evolution. I would even say it's beautiful. And healthy.
I'm not "just being offensive". Death is harmful, and insisting it must happen is perpetrating death. If you insist this, you are perpetrating a harmful ideology that interferes with research into senescence and therefore contributes to suffering.
I'm just concerned with the possibility of us "winning over death" and how it would transform everything. It's not another cure for an illness or another 100 years to live. It's no one ever going away without someone else making them. For better or worse. That's not a part of life. That's an entirely different existence.
People who claim it would be bad to live long are either coping or had a chance at a decent life or believe it would somehow cause unsolvable problems.
Let's say a mysterious virus spreads through the population, and edits all our DNA with the only effect that we all suddenly gain negligible senescence - people still die from accidents and acute diseases, but everyone retains the same level of general healthiness as a young adult with no aging. In that situation, would you be advocating that everyone take medicine to turn aging and death from aging back on?
So whats the limit? Its a big question that dosen't need to be answered now, because immortality is not on the table. Another 20 or so years maybe. So maybe lets take care of the world we got before we fall into some delusional sense of godhood. (Just upload yourfselfs bros)
It’s an amazing power for good and bad.
Why can't our legal system deter the obvious high-level publicly visible perpetrators of the recent "gain-of-function" fiasco is really some food for thought.
Take for instance what we’re doing with plants. We make designer plants that provide food, and are immune from particular pesticides. We then spray the fields and all the other plants and bugs die (besides the immune plants).
What happens when it turns out some genetic inserts in the corn creates something like mad cow disease (but in humans) 3-5 years later? Turns out some protein the corn produced we thought was harmless caused massive issues.
Genetics has massive implications even if well meaning.
I think the ability to eliminate disease is massively powerful and a net good. That said, I’m concerned about the long term tail end risks of such work.
I don’t think you can ban it, because someone will do the work. And those that do the work will get a competitive advantage (eventually letting them “win”). I think it’s about mitigating risks by reducing / limiting mass adoption of genetic based technology without a very long window of analysis.
One real-world example of this is genetically modifying the American Chestnut by splicing in genes of the Japanese Chestnut, which is resistant to the blight since it co-evolved with it. The resistance comes from how Japanese Chestnut trees respond to oxalis acid by walling it off, preventing the fungus from spreading.
> That said, I’m concerned about the long term tail end risks of such work.
One bleak science fiction novel that takes place in this kind of future, specifically an amped-up version of the corporate GMO food crop meddling you referenced, is The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.
Do you require similar safeguards with plants created by "classic" genetic engineering and random mutations occurring all the time? Such methods usually involve making tons of random mutations, which nobody tests for anything, until we manage to also get the one that we want.
Of course you rarely make a completely new protein by random mutations (different story with naturally evolving viruses), however, current genetic engineering of plants and animals for food is AFAIK not about completely new proteins too -- it's about turning off existing pathways, or about transferring existing proteins from one species to another.
... Unless by "deter" you just meant "make it illegal," in which case, agreed.
Asking for a friend.
Much easier to target one individual (and their whole host of genetic factors) than to target one genetic factor that can be associated with an ethnic group and pray that it doesn't either also express itself in an undiscovered way in other ethnic groups or have knock-on effects or the potential to mutate.
We aren't as genetically different as people imagine, and this sort of approach would be absolutely playing with fire.
"No more bad boy behavior, or the bad boys vanish from the surface of the earth." behavioral deterrence via a biologic weapon.
What a fascinating nash equilibrium, the unsocial monsters, forced to be social, including applying gentle pressure, so they do not become history like there victims of the past. What a concept..
Then it mutates and kills us all..
It isn't, and I'd be surprised if it ever could be. There will always be statistical correlations (especially when looking at multiple genes in combination) but you can't conclude what a person's brain and mind are like just from their genome.
Has