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How to Make Superbabies

lesswrong.com

26 pointsnsoonhui36 comments

There are stones best left unturned, I feel. I don't think we want a world where parents need to spend $100K+ in genetic meddling to ensure their child can compete in the future market.

I'm all for treating genetic diseases, but what is described in this article resembles eugenics a lot. And there are good reasons why this has been a taboo since WW2. Let's just say, there are other traits some people might want to select for than IQ. Ones you might not be confortable with.

I 100% agree, however the commonly accepted reason that eugenics is bad is that it involves killing and/or forcibly sterilizing people. I'm quite certain "peaceful" eugenics is still a very bad idea, however we should try to explicitly articulate why.

Making wealth even more hereditary is an obvious answer.

I don't think the fact that it costs money is the core issue; if it got really cheap it would still be very bad and maybe worse.

You create embryos, which are distinctly uniquely a human, then destroy the ones you don't want. It's eugenics, just at an earlier stage of human development.

I can respect that viewpoint, however it amounts to saying eugenics is about as bad as doing lots of very early abortions, or just having more miscarriages (currently 10 to 20% of natural pregnancies). Politically I don't think this line of argument would be effective at all, especially outside USA.

Yes, abortion also ends a human life. However, bringing up miscarriage is bizarre as a justification for feeling ok with it.

It’s the difference between a man dying of old age in his sleep vs putting a gun to his head in his sleep because he is old. As to percentages, 100% of people die eventually. Just because people die every day doesn't mean it’s ok for us to kill them.

In your view, is IVF eugenics?

IMO people are overthinking it: murders, eugenics, racism, genocides, cannibalism are bad because we almost subconsciously know that it threatens our own survival. Butchering and devouring non-primate animals, even sentient, are totally okay and good because that's how we are built to live and it's good for our stable long term prosperity.

I wouldn't be sure if it really matter whether embryos can suffer or if they deserve full human rights with right to a legal representative. To me the photos of them look like cells under microscopes, frankly. But our instincts do alert us that doing this could kill us all somehow, and for that reasons we hallucinate such moral arguments. Isn't that so?

His article reads exactly like Greg Egan's eugenics short story "Eugene". At that point, you are basically manufacturing humans

Funny coincidence, I just started Axiomatic! Eugene is up next.

> And there are good reasons why this has been a taboo since WW2.

I'd like to know about these, cleanly separated from slippery slop fallacies "informed" by years of dystopian fiction. Also separated from history, which has always been written by the victors first and foremost.

I don't feel like it's a hard subject to document oneself on. I suggest reading about the history of eugenics [1], from Wikipedia for example, and then branching out into more academic works, if you feel like going further.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_eugenics

> I'm a software developer by training with an interest in genetics. I currently run a startup working on multiplex gene editing technology.

This is the author’s own description of his expertise.

I have to look it up since I am not able to validate (by myself) the very strong claim he made in the beginning paragraph. I am comfortable not reading the rest. The claim is:

> Our knowledge has advanced to the point where, if we had a safe and reliable means of modifying genes in embryos, we could literally create superbabies. Children that would live multiple decades longer than their non-engineered peers, have the raw intellectual horsepower to do Nobel prize worthy scientific research, and very rarely suffer from depression or other mental health disorders.

'Software engineer who is interested in __profession__' casually hand waving away the ethical implications of human genetic engineering; worse, advocating for a for-profit version.

It makes me think they didn't try that hard to look them up before they started soliciting paychecks from celebrities and CEOs: https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/policy-issues/Genome-E...

Like... This is a person who has never seen Wrath of Khan. They are not to be trusted.

It's even worse: Has never seen Gattaca

Even worse: has seen both and was inspired by them.

Hard to believe IQ can be gene edited by 60 points simply like we can increase weight of chicken. And that without side effects. Is there any supporting evidence?

The fluorescent spunk made me chuckle. But I'd be wary of having such undeniable sign of gene editing on myself. It is going to be a huge issue.

Caveat: I'm compsci not biosci.

Going from 70 to 130 seems plausible, but only that specific range as the nature of the scale is statistical not absolute, and outside 2σ the tests themselves aren't reliable. Going from 130 to 190 isn't really a meaningful score because there's almost exactly 8 people with IQ 190 or higher at any given moment, and which people they are depends on the previous day's rest and last hour's caffine and alcohol consumption. (Likewise in the other direction, single digit IQs are not meaningful because there's a lot more than 8 people at any given moment in the days between e.g. when Alzheimer's causes them to forget to drink water and when their liver and kidneys fail).

As for evidence, there's two options for IQ: biology and environment. But even the impact of the environment is tied to your genes, e.g. lead is famously bad for brains, a quick search found some genes are associated with binding to heavy metals including lead to reduce toxicity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallothionein

However, that everything comes down to "can your genes thrive in these conditions?", is not enough to say we can now engineer this.

I *do not* make any claim that we actually know enough yet to do this. Proof of principle is much, much, easier than proof of specifics: we knew fusion power was possible in the 50s, we still don't have commercially viable fusion power.

I think you are mistaking several IQ scales. IIRC the scale that uses 1 stdev per 15 points saturates around 150. The iq scale that goes to 190 is a different one.

For modern IQ tests, the raw score is transformed to a normal distribution with mean 100 and standard deviation 15.

It doesn't "saturate" at any level, it's just not economically viable to gather enough data for any specific test to be highly reliable outside 2 sigma.

Ignoring the fact that this is basically eugenics with extra step, I'll engage with the sci-fi elements.

There's a difference between using gene editing to repair imperfections of nature versus using it to over-clock biological machinery in non-deterministic ways. It's Chesterton's fence but with millions of years of evolution. Yes we have the technology to edit genes today, but it will take whole lifetimes to "prove" anything in a truly scientific sense.

The cherry on top is the off the rails justification that this is all very urgent and necessary because of the imminent arrival of "digital gods."

LLMs have more self awareness than you do, and (ironically) you won't disagree with me.

Genetic selection is available in Canada for parents that carry detrimental genes. They can either screen the embryo prior to implantation during IVF, or do early stage testing of naturally-conceived embryos.

Exactly which diseases can be selected for is regulated.

Source: My wife and I participated.

Here is my Law concerning humans, and technology. If it can be done, it is bieng done. If it's possible to do, many people are working out how to do it. If something is physicaly impossible to do and violates the known laws of physics, then many people are trying to do it. Gene edditing is totaly doable, with the financial barriers in free fall, so it's monsters and magicians time comming up, with the ancient justification of "if we dont, then they will...first"...Homo Geneticus here we come. Disscussions on right/wrong, ethics and morality, are of course not bieng conducted in any of the numerous black labs and research facilities world wide.

So why are those configuration bits currently set to the states they currently are?

Forget the babies, I'm selfish. Can my existing DNA be modified to make me a super-human? How long does it take to replace all the old DNA and cells? Where do I sign up?

With today's knowledge of genetics it ain't happening. We have barely started gene editing for single point mutation diseases like sickle cell. The stuff described in this blog post (which is mostly gobbledygook by the way) are traits that are (1) hugely polygenic and (2) not known well enough from a genetic perspective anyways. It will be decades at best before they'd attempt genetic editing in that scale on a healthy person.

But if we want to solve the second one I welcome it as a person who works in genetics research, always good to have more money.

Replacement time varies by tissue — IIRC skin is ~weeks, brain is never.

The main face of this channel has done DIY auto-modification to treat lactose intolerance: https://youtube.com/@thethoughtemporium?si=oL0ODZUmh1poEFNU

Brave New World, anyone? Also it's another good time to quote H.Melville:

“For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”

> The scientific establishment, however, seems to not have gotten the memo. If you suggest we engineer the genes of future generations to make their lives better, they will often make some frightened noises, mention “ethical issues” without ever clarifying what they mean, or abruptly change the subject.

This, I'm fairly confident, is absolutely untrue and I would be interested to see why they think this is the case, or to hear what specific objections they have regarding the current discussion. This New Yorker article (https://archive.is/uHf5J) from 2023 is about He Jiankui, whose methods the author specifically cites. More than likely, the author just doesn't agree with the objections raised by the scientific community, but I don't think it's about "not getting the memo."

The user Metacelsus mentions this in the comments:

> Finally: we need to be sure not to cause another He Jiankui event (where an irresponsible study resulted in a crackdown on the field). Epigenetic issues could cause birth defects, and if this happens, it will set back the field by quite a lot. So safety is important! Nobody cares if their baby has the genes for 200 IQ, if the baby also has Prader-Willi syndrome.

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