Hopefully in the next 50 years but that’s wishful thinking.
Yes, they can and likely will both happen to some extent, but I think they aren't independent, so I feel justified in trying to nudge the public conversation back towards the issues that I think matter more.
[1] https://www.upstate.edu/whatsup/2019/0220-treatment-for-cani...
I wouldn't underestimate the emotional toil of dealing with illness and death [1].
Tackling these problems head on requires (a) exposing researchers to that toil and (b) removing from the pool anyone who doesn't want to do that. Given how much of Silicon Valley culture is built on borderline-ludicrous optimism (once it's over the border it no longer qualifies as building), it makes sense that the indirect approach finds resonance here in a way the direct one does not.
Where your argument finds ample purchase is in the asymmetry of idiot luxury spending in our society to basic and applied research of any kinds, wings or Wilm's tumour.
[1] https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/19/mental-health-doctor-res...
That interdependence may be beneficial, though.
Experience and revenues from cosmetic treatments will help health-restoring treatments.
Genes are far more complex than inserting a sequence into a delivery mechanism.
I'd go one step further in arguing they're complementary. The personalities that will work on e.g. wings or longevity are not the types drawn to curing diseases, much less the boring ones.
Broadening the field from solving mundane problems to solving daring ones is net positive. You gain personalities that would have otherwise stayed away. (You see something similar in space programmes.)
In all seriousness, at times I do genuinely wish species transition were possible. Imagine gender dysphoria but for species, so species dysphoria. It may sound insane, but honestly so can the entire concept of dissociative identities.
I don't know if I'd want to change my brain, but the physical properties of the body definitely. I want the body to be a fluffy quadruped...
Thank you for the link though, that is very interesting. It is intuitive, but not something that normally comes to mind~
Like it or not, the way society is currently arranged, making stuff for rich people is more profitable than making things for poor people, and greed can kick in, so people do things out of love of money rather than necessity. were the deck stacked more equal, maybe things would be different, but human psychology is devilishly complex.
Solving e.g. male pattern baldness or bone loss from peridontitis means guaranteed billionaire from out-of-pocket treatments alone.
Trans is a much discussed variant that is hard to have a normal talk about, but there are many more variants, for instance women hating their breast & wanting to remove them, I think most people here would agree that intensive psychological treatment are preferable to actually removing healthy body parts. But in the end an adult can do what they want.
If you feel like a man but you don't look like a man, why could that cause any identity problems? It must mean your body is actually part of your identity, so changing it changes who you are
That’s contrary to most of human history, where we specifically try not to take what we’re dealt.
It’s useful to ask yourself: why should vaccines be "allowed" (or "accepted" or "they’re good") but body change shouldn’t be? They’re both as artificial as a Twinkie.
On the other hand, a bodily alteration is much more predictable, and, importantly, I'd still be me. I wouldn't become some other person.
This me has an instinct for self-preservation. Thus, if both options were available, I would absolutely choose transition over erasure.
The entire point of genetic engineering is to try to engineer people at the cellular level. A fanciful example would be modifying human metabolism to be more similar to those of birds that consume most of their calories in the form of simple sugars. Humans can't eat a diet of 100% sugar and remain healthy, but other animals can. It may be possible to change that fact, if we know how to edit our genes.
In fact you don’t even need sugar. Carbon dioxide and water alone are sufficient. Plants produce their entire biomass using nothing but carbon dioxide, water, sunlight and trace elements from soil.
Amino acids and proteins don’t occur without life. Living creatures have the ability to synthesize all amino acids and proteins from simpler compounds.
That's like saying "now that we invented canals let's try to fix the world's irrigation problems before making fountains and water parks"
We can, and always will, work on many different things at once.
The tools to investigate this will get cheaper and easier, driving more people into the field hoping for the next big win, a big payout, or just to make an impact.
Anyone can make a small circuit design have have a fab print it for you. The same could happen here, all you need to do is provide the sequence
Given our overall density, we would need enormous wings and musculature. Consider that the heaviest flying birds alive today weigh maybe 40lbs and have a wingspan of 8ft or so. If we naively extrapolate that linearly then an adult weighing 160lbs would need a 32ft wingspan.
There were flying pterosaurs that weighed much more than the heaviest flying birds today, but they were also the size of small planes and it’s a bit of a debate how well they even flew. They may have struggled to even take flight.
So injecting yourself with some designer DNA isn’t just going to make you grow wings, it would have to completely transform you into a completely different creature, simply due to the physics of flight.
Additionally, you need not only to be able to fly, but your body needs to function well enough to stay in this new state. You would also likely need an enormous caloric intake to support the massive new growth, or it would take a very, very long time.
It wouldn’t be designing wings for a human, it would be designing a be creature based on a human but not human at all, really. Call me shortsighted but I don’t really see how that will ever be possible.
Argentavis magnificens had a wingspan of around 24ft and weighed around 72 kgs or a 160lbs which is close to what an average human weighs.
If you compare growth rates to other mammals like elephants, I doubt a change like that would take much more than 5-10 years.
That’s the question, can a human sized body that can fly additionally support a human sized brain? I suspect you would have to spend nearly every waking minute eating to support both. Or at least a substantial portion of your day. No time for hacking, gotta eat.
You’ll probably have to pay full up front for this, as no one will finance you since you’ll be too busy foraging for sugary fruit or carrying livestock off to your eyrie to work a job to pay it back.
Finally, this raises another question I won’t even attempt to answer: is it even possible for you to still be “you” in another body? How responsible is your body, beyond just your brain, responsible for making you who you are?
But that may be more of a philosophical debate so I’ll leave it at that.
It's not just a matter of growing wings. And yeah, the energy demands of making all these changes, as others have pointed out. The only kinds of animals that go through this level of non-fetal metamorphosis are insects with weights measured in the tens of grams, energy needs that kind be sustained by something like a cocoon. How would you meet the energy demands of an adult human going through metamorphosis? You couldn't do it by eating, not only because your gut can't actually digest the amount of food you'd need (you don't have an elephant gut) but also simply because being conscious through the process, unlike insects in a cocoon, would be so absurdly painful that I doubt you'd be able to function and do anything at all, let alone spend all of your time finding and eating food. You'd need to be put into a medical coma and injected with intravenous nutrients to have any shot at all.
Why on earth would we ever try this? In reality, giving yourself genes to grow wings would just kill you.
Look at this picture from Wikipedia showing Argentavis side by side with a human: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentavis#/media/File:62628-A...
What sorts of processes do you imagine are necessary to stretch the human body to the size of the Argentavis body without adding any weight? It'd be like getting flattened by a steam roller, then drawn and quartered. Bodily tissue isn't balloons.
Seriously, lesser-schooled folks don't realize the extent to which evolution took tiny variations over an extremely long time to achieve physical flight. The way it arose differently in pterosaurs, birds and bats is fascinating.
I think younger children are capable of understanding more about genetics than we often suppose. More of these concepts should be taught at younger ages.
In OP's defence, they never mentioned flight. Maybe they just want a peacock train.
I would opt for smaller tweaks like an extra rhodopsin folding with longer features so I could see near (like tv remotes) ir. re-enable hibernation. Things some mammals already have would be good starts.
True, you might have to be a junior Olympian to do it, but it’s possible.
On earth your pectorals would tear off of your sternum long before you achieved takeoff.
The lack of Moon atmosphere is a real problem though.
For example: Retrobiosynthesis simulates biochemistry backwards, to find the steps necessary for a biological system to build something, usually a small molecule. Galaxy-SynBioCAD / Retropath would be one example: https://jfaulon.com/galaxy-synbiocad-portal/
Constraint based metabolic modeling models cellular metabolism, and lets you simulate adding and removing chemical reactions to a cell, and predict the outcomes. COBRApy would be one example software tool: https://opencobra.github.io/cobrapy/
Design editors for DNA plasmids, like the Teselagen design editor let you construct DNA sequences representing new biological capabilities to be added to an engineered cell, which can then be synthesized or constructed. Teselagen design module: https://teselagen.com/design-module/
Generative AI systems can 'hallucinate' functional proteins and DNA sequences that meet a design specification for function and/or shape. For example, GenerateBio's Chroma model can literally take a 3D file designed in a standard CAD program, and then automatically come up with an amino acid sequence that will fold into a protein with that exact 3D shape- and it actually works. https://github.com/generatebio/chroma
An emerging field is coupling all of these types of tools with predictive models to enable 'inverse design' where you create a spec of what you want, such as a material with some desired properties, and it will automatically suggest biological routes to it.
It might prove easier to grow biological pylons for external jet engines...