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Comment by Something1234 | Hacker News Reader

Wait until they have kids. The deafness gene will be passed along. Soon enough we'll be like the cars with the hardware without the software or the locked features.

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Fortunately won't be a big issue, as:

>OTOF-related deafness is inherited in an autosomal recessive manner. If both parents are known to be carriers, each sib of an individual with OTOF-related deafness has at conception a 25% chance of being deaf, a 50% chance of having normal hearing and being a carrier, and a 25% chance of having normal hearing and not being a carrier.

source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK1251/

How is this any different from people who suffer from other genetic disorders that we have treatments for? Or people who just suffer from a chronic disease that requires regular treatments/medication for them to stay alive/health? (HIV, Diabetes, etc)

In vitro fertilization (IVF) combined with preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) is becoming increasingly mainstream. This advanced technique allows us to select embryos with healthy genes, thereby ensuring that babies are born healthy or at least reducing the risk of genetic diseases. Very expensive in US but is getting very affordable in Eastern Europe and Asia.

Another alternative is selective abortions after early genetic testing (though ethic and morale concerns here are huge).

that crazy pro-natalist fascist couple that's been all over the news lately do this. They pick and choose which of their embryos are the most fit overall, and/or which have blond hair I'm sure, and plan to have as many of them as possible. Seems a shame to go through all that, only to beat your kids in front of a newspaper reporter and give them neuroses that'll likely make them rebel against you, but I'm sure if they can invest in crypto stocks they must be very good at predicting the future right?

Deaf people can already have kids

Apart from the other points people have made, it's worth noting that these days parents can avoid having children with inherited genetic disorders through IVF. While there will always be a component of spontaneous mutations resulting in genetic disease, we may approach within a couple of generations a state where most inherited disorders actually disappear or reduce to vastly lower prevalence over time.

Some backward countries (like my own France) forbid that due to concern over eugenics.

I’m sure you have some undesirable genes too, whether you’re aware of it or not.

And we'll cure them too.

We have this already. As a species we are susceptible to many diseases which we have to take vaccines for, every generation.

I don't think susceptibility to viral diseases like measles is typically regarded as a genetic defect, is it? Any more than being flammable is a genetic defect, anyway.

There are a few people who are genetically immune to HIV, but it's quite rare. Whether everyone else is therefore genetically deficient is sort of a matter of perspective, I suppose.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_resistance_to_HIV

Any different from people needing glasses?

ah, an eugenicist. and yet, if i stated that eugenicists should be eliminated from the gene pool, you'd be outraged.

Obviously: for a start, since there’s no genetic test for eugenicism, you’d have to wait and eliminate them as adults. They may have already reproduced by then, but there’s also no clear mechanism for inheritance so we don’t even know if that is a problem. If they adopted children do we consider those kids to have inherited it?

The fear of being beholden to a company for your health is not one to dismiss so easily.

get a better healthcare system.

Damn. Might as well just kill ourselves because our children inherit our problems. My parents need glasses, I’ll need glasses. Fuck.

Typical engineers, tipping into eugenics to treat society as an optimization problem...

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