Beyond CRISPR babies: How human genome editing is moving on after scandal

It still makes a difference for this kind of experiment. There is a difference between experiments and studies on consenting adults and on children, the bar is higher when you are experimenting on children. And it is much clearer that certain types of experiments are unethical when you perform them on children while on consenting adults you could make an argument that the adults do understand the risk and consent.

Lol, as I like to say, the biggest mistake that I have made in my life is to pick the wrong parents.

So maybe we should take extra care with even more permanent and entirely optional changes.

The most straightforward way to answer the question is that off-target is kind of field lingo for “some other gene got targeted” and results in unexpected cell death.

Imagine in bacteria, if I guide the CRISPR components to a gene that metabolizes an exotic sugar and the cell just inexplicably dies—whereas targeting that very gene in a different spot does what you expected.

In eukaryotes, off-target effects likely occur more often (more genes) but we just don’t see them, because the off-target effect wasn’t immediately fatal. Instead, maybe a tumor suppressor gene got rearranged? It might take decades to see the physiological effect.

It almost certainly will become really cheap to do this in the future.

OTOH, selection of embryos, by it's nature, will always be expensive.

Assuming that (a) we can sequence embryos reliably, (b) we identify a large number of genes that are considered favorable, and (c) we come up with a way of creating large numbers of embryos (eg: artificial ovaries) then the "quality" of the child in such a future will, generally, be dependent upon that amount the child's parent were willing to spend to find their best possible child.

Do you want a one in ten baby, a one in a thousand baby, or a one in a million?

The price will be proportional to the number of embryos sampled, on average. Since this is a competitive process, no matter how low the price per unit decreases the amount of spend, as a percentage of income/wealth will stay constant.

How many people do you know truly willing to endure a lifetime of inferiority and subordination for "the greater good"? Get real.

Yeah, I'm amazed that so many commenters on HN think that the technology, or even our understanding of things like "smarter & better looking" is anywhere near this level of sophistication.

The sentence that really stood out to me was: > In the years since He’s revelations, researchers have uncovered further concerns about the use of CRISPR–Cas9 in embryos, including that it can shuffle large segments of chromosomes.

There are a number of horrible genetic diseases, including Huntington's Disease, that do not present until later in life; for Huntington's Disease it typically presents when someone is in their 30s or 40s. We don't know what shuffling chromosomes might do. There's a very real possibility that if there was widespread adoption of CRISPR to make children smarter and more beautiful, it would could with the side effect of condemning their bodies and/or minds to fall apart in their teens, 20s, or 30s.

Animal models won't tell us this. We'll only learn the true consequences over time. This is one of those situations where "move fast and break things" is just wrong.

Selective memory loss.

The dawn of infinite power was heralded in with the annihilation of 2 cities in Japan, and the death of many innocents exposed to open radiation in the development process. The industrial revolution began with pollution that worsened the lifespan on the 'winners' for decades before we figured out how to make these spaces safer. Modern medicine started off with bloodletting & modern psychiatry started off with lobotomies.

The first few generations that adopt a revolutionary technology see their lives get worse before they get better.

Problem is, AI, Medicine & Automation are all likely to produce revolutions that are bigger and faster spreading than anything we've seen before. I do not wish to be a 'growing child' in an era of increasing adoption of this tech. Growing up with just the internet was confusing enough as is.

More than all of these, the scariest is a technology that I've started hearing whispers of. We might 'solve aging' in this century. I hope I get to die before the advent of perpetual life seems to be on the horizon.

Everyone says germline editing would reduce diversity in the gene pool, and I can see validity to that argument. But, could it not do the opposite when people start altering their children to align with their own values? I could see the loss of some universally "bad" genes, but a lot of the judgement on this sort of things gonna come down to who does the gene editing and how they exactly implement it. When multiple groups start doing this in practice, I could see it fracturing the species more than homogenizing it. Especially when combined with something like iterated embryonic stem cell selection when you can jump several generations at a time. That would result in multiple post-human species derived from baseline humanity with their own specializations, talents, etc. Which would be more diverse.

Are you agreeing here or are you arguing that because humans have shown a lack of restraint in the past they should continue to show a lack of restraint?

mrna vaccines don't modify the human genome - this literally has nothing to do with the CRISPR topic.

Certainly, Mendelian diseases are a case where gene editing is currently justifiable. In fact, researchers have already cured “bubble boy” syndrome in several kids so that they can get a normal cold and recover just like anyone else. Remarkable stuff.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30995372/

This seems like a flip dismissal of a pretty serious challenge to the ontology of the grandparent comment. Soldiers can also present threats and competition to government (this is literally what a coup is). Soldiers also retire and go into various fields, including science, engineering, sales, and politics. And almost everything the military does is dependent on external contractors and public/private partnerships and, indeed, university research. So it's an awfully broad conspiracy to add value to infantry grunts, who play a shrinking role in the conception of U.S. military power.

And also every other country in the world has to opt to engage in the same conspiracy, otherwise all the benefits accrue to other countries that are willing to allow the technology to be exposed to civil society (e.g. when the average Chinese university graduate has the benefit of CRISPR super brain, it's going to add much more value than if Fort Hood has a bunch of Captain Americas sitting around).

In total this seems to involve a massive and sprawling worldwide conspiracy involving the coordination of opposing actors who have reasons not to coordinate in service of unclear benefits that don't seem to stand up to much scrutiny.