Startups are pushing the boundaries of reproductive genetics
wsj.com
wsj.com
People often try to bill these technologies as “trying to control everything” or “trying to make the perfect child” or all this business about “tech people think they deserve what they have due to their genetics” (paraphrasing Sasha Gusev) etc. but I don’t think that’s the driving impulse for most parents.
The reality is so much more complex than the headlines people chase. One couple who I spoke to who were considering this were afraid of the opposite of the intelligence chase. The mother was concerned that she’d pass on her Asperger’s Syndrome. Another friend of mine doesn’t want to have kids because her brothers (and other male relatives) have schizophrenia.
In my family’s case, we will not have boys (coincidence: all our female embryos are the ones unaffected) but that’s fine. Our baby girl is a beautiful happy child and even if she weren’t, she’d be mine and I’d love her as much. But being able to increase the chance she has the full sensory experience available to mankind brings me a bit of content.
I hope all of these people I have met who fear genetic disease will be able to mitigate the risks as well as we have. Ours is monogenic, but as polygenic prediction improves their chances will improve too.
People on the happy path don’t often realize what it’s like for those not on that path. In our family, a cousin had her child via her last embryo. That also happened to a friend. Imagine if the last one had a debilitating condition that could be edited out. Most parents would choose not to have that child and then they would simply be childless.
In some future world, those people could have the condition edited and they could have the child.
Finally, here are the notes I made throughout the process:
https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/IVF
And a view into my genome
https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/roshan-genvue/
And a link to my comment on an HN article on something similar: the potential for removing trisomy-21 (Down’s) from an embryo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44677834
The problem here is a tragedy of the commons - the people you describe are avoiding a certain kind of pain (a child who will die early, or who will have a condition that the parent already has) and exchanging it for both
1) the uncertainty that the child will have unknown other issues, either due to the genetic sampling process or due to whatever genetic interventions are made, and
2) the chance that future humans will need to support the changes that the parents have introduced to the human germline
I work in this area of biology, and, as far as the editing tools go, none of these tools are as foolproof as they are described.
I recognize the human sorrow of not being able to have the particular kind of family one always wants, but I feel we forget the significant downside potential to the rest of humanity.
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lastly, regarding trisomy 21 - I have more sympathy around 'repairing' individual single-nucleotide variants and I suspect that it will be attainable at levels nearing perfection in our lifetimes (so error rates below 1E-11 if we want 1% chance of any off-target lesions).
I do not see how this is ever going to happen for trisomy 21 repair - the only realistic possibility is screening to avoid it.
I know edited humans will exist at some point, but I hope that easier availability of selective technologies will act as a pressure relief valve for parents that are potential customers / commercial backers of embryonic editing.
Like, there are trials underway right now for organ specific editing for genetic diseases. In that, they just do some CRIPSR injection in the liver or the affected organ to regain lost function.
The trick is what we decide 'lost function' means. So, for issues with lost enzymatic function or the like, sure, yeah, that's totally a disease, no worries. But what about Vitamin-C function? We could easily edit someone to produce that again, I mean, most mammals have this function.
And, yadda yadda yadda, the slippery slope slips, and you get people that have gills or some such nonsense.
I think most people's worry is in germ-line editing, where you 'rob' children of choices.
Look, this is ethically difficult stuff. We don't have a lot of history to draw on here, and the actual implementation is technically difficult to do and to understand for most people (that would include these children, they would not really know what was done to them). Add in economic fears and issues with progeny really being your progeny (oh hey, a A2160F Thermo-Fisher gene editor is actually my father, when you think about it), and ignore all the Star Trek nonsense. This stuff is terribly fast and terribly unfair and terribly long lasting.
The GP post alludes to correcting trisomy 21, but we should note that, in general, the process by which a ‘simple selection between unedited embryos’ becomes a pregnancy is both painful and dangerous for women and is not risk-free for fetuses.
Sure, it could be used to make the world better. So could the internet. How is that working out for us?
Do you think that corporations whose only motivation is profit will treat this technology with the respect it requires in order to not blow up in our faces? Do you think that governments will be able to resist the pressure that capital will put on them when restricting the use of this technology?
I'd imagine that both you and your partner already had comprehensive carrier screening and most fertility centers would not implant an embryo with any known aneuploidies. What were the main advantages of WGS in your view?
* The labs that did traditional PGT-M available to us wanted embryo biopsy, parent samples, grandparent sample. The PGT-WGS guys wanted embryo biopsy, parent sample. For reasons specific to us, grandparent samples were not easy - and I found the reason for not requiring it convincing.
* I preferred moving from the biology space to the data space because:
* * At the time, only some 25 years had passed between the association of the variant with hearing loss and our attempt. There was a reasonable possibility our last child would be 5 years out from there, depending on implantation success, needing to go to surrogates, etc. That's a fifth of the way again from original discovery. It's entirely possible that new associations are found in that period.
* * I am a bad biologist, but I have a degree in Mathematics and I would say I'm a competent programmer. I should be able to stitch together a minimal bioinformatics pipeline, if required, with the assistance of my cousins (two of whom have Ph.D.s in Molecular Biology).
* I trusted the WGS process more because of greater effective transparency. At the end of the process, I requested and obtained the FASTQs for our embryos. This is far superior to receiving a Detected / Not Detected result.
"Hey, you've got a broken gene? Sucks to be you, my rigid ethics requires you to play the lottery with worse odds than the others!"
In another thread about the same subject, I mentioned the issue of color blindness, and how some professions are open to ~92% of men and ~99.5% of women (because of how it's inherited). Society seems to be quite uninterested to start some wide campaign to replace color-coded information, even during the 2010s when the equality debate was active, it was never "upgraded" to include male issues like these.
With DNA editing, this problem could be fixed on the other side (along with much more serious issues that can affect an unlucky individual).
I don't know why there is so much fear to be out-competed by a hypothetical "superhuman", when the most easy implementation of DNA editing seems to be fixing genetic diseases (often "flipping one letter" to the correct one)?
Our ancestors would make the most daring bets in pursuit of a better for their children. Hunter-gatherers setting off in an unknown direction in search for more abundant pastures, knowing that their survival was unlikely.
Everything we have is thanks to them.
Today we sit on our laurels, unwilling to take trajectory-changing bets because things might go wrong. In our risk paralysis, human evolution will come to a standstill, and that is a disservice to all future humans.
No longer can an individual family or group of humans set out in that direction in search of a better future. They will be thrown in prison for daring to instead.
Eugenics and artificial selection results in monocultures. In the long run has the opposite effect of what you're describing.
There are plenty of risks to take today (with things like gene editing - which does not mean "monoculture") and there will be plenty of trajectory-changing risks to take tomorrow.
It's very hard to just do stuff nowadays. For example, building something on your land, selling stuff to other humans, marrying someone, immigrating somewhere, renewing your id, paying your taxes.
The immense burden of paperwork and the knowledge required to navigate it all, and the paralysis that comes from just being aware of the burden, is not trivial.
The individual really ought to stay in their lane and fit into the template that's expected of them by the systems they are subject to.
It legitimately wasn't like this a century ago. We were oppressed by nature (disease, material poverty), but in many real ways we had more freedom of action to just do life stuff.
There are numerous counterexamples to this and plenty of them worked out fine. The speed and enthusiasm we adopt new technology is unmatched by any culture with a surviving literary tradition that I'm aware of.
On the subject of colour blindness, i know many people who are colour blind and it's little more then a minor inconvenience for them. A large portion of the population probably don't even know they are colour blind. It's pretty widespread.
This is where you have it wrong. The risk is not to society, it is to the individual. One family can take on immense risk to discover something that benefits all of humanity - whether it makes us live better, cure a disease, etc.
Yes, there are society-wide upheavals that a new technology like this might create, which you might be referring to as a "risk" - but upheavals are a fact of life all major technologies throughout human history. We will adapt.
Everything that is on the leading edge of medical science feels like playing god and some people will loudly protest against it, but the next generation will consider the very same thing absolutely normal and expected.
IVF was once "playing god".
Heart transplants were once "playing god".
Resuscitation was once "playing god".
Surgeries of inner organs were once "playing god".
Vaccination against smallpox was once "playing god".
This I think is in some ways the most pathetic argument of them all because it reveals a profound moral cowardice. I just saw a chart today, 1 billion children under the age of five have died since 1950, a lot of them to disease. While you're afraid to play, god's racking up quite a score.
What's so astonishing about it is that the suffering doesn't seem to matter. Before modern medicine something like 20% of pregnancies ended fatally. Every time you play god what people seem to be afraid of is not the suffering, which is omnipresent because life in its natural state is pure carnage, but not having to attach your name to it and taking responsibility. It's okay if some old guy rots away miserably because if I assist in his suicide then I might make a mistake and I had to make a choice. Rather, forward it to god or nature, or what have you. And then in addition this cowardice, thinking that conscious inaction isn't an action, gets rebranded as a humanism.
This source estimates 1% from 1700 to 1750 in England:
Nobody requires you to have children. Your problem could just as easily have been infertility. So instead of gambling, you can choose to treat having a genetic disease like being infertile, or you can dabble in eugenics. My "rigid ethics" frowns on eugenics. We have lots of children who have already been born who need help. They may never satisfy your desire to see your (admittedly bad) genetics reflected in the world, but maybe they could give a legacy to your intellect and compassion?
Eugenics was once very popular among the middle and upper classes, though, before there were incidents. There's no reason to think that it won't be popular again. I think that society as a whole has to decide how we treat human lives though; your children don't strictly belong to you, they belong to themselves and are protected by the state (even against you.) I'm totally comfortable if we decide that this sort of thing is going to be criminal, or if we decide that this sort of thing is going to be mandatory. I just know where I sit on the issue.
And I also know that the places that eugenics survived was in things like dog and cat breeding, and the preferences of people for dogs and cats did not make them healthy, it made them interesting. Ready for the human version of "Twisty Cats"?
The taboo against genetic repairs is more comparable to antivax, rather than eugenics. Every part of the medical sciences is an intervention against "nature taking its course", in order to prevent harm to the individual.
If every dentist did this, the genepool would improve.
The difference between anti-vax and anti-eugenics is that eugenics makes society more fragile by producing a monoculture, whereas vaccinations make society more durable due to the network effects in the spread of disease
Not really, especially since this is widely regarded not as much of a genetic problem, but as a difference in diet of modern society.
I am also unsure if eugentics *necessarily* brings monoculture. We did it for hundred of years to dogs, and while some races are definitely worse off than others, we literally created more than any here care to remember, and many absolutely love races I find truly ugly.
So the problem with eugenetics lies in understanding what culture lies behind it, imho. While there is a pull to uniformity, people don't like too much of the same, because instinctively you understand it loses value. No difference == no worse, but == no better too.
I grew up in rural Kentucky. One of the worst, most ineffectual education systems on this continent.
We were still taught, very clearly, and with zero ambiguity about how genetic inheritance works.
A 7th grader in bumfuck Kentucky knows more about genetics than you've demonstrated here.
Since you apparently missed class, I'll explain: evolution by natural selection only applies when the adaptation in question affects survivability before reproducing.
A genetic problem that causes you to die or become infertile before you've had children can be evolved away. Anything that happens to you after reproductive age does not get affected by natural selection because the selection pressure of reproduction is gone.
This is called an evolutionary shadow.
Again, this is what we teach to middle school kids in rural Kentucky. You really don't have any excuse to be so ignorant.
> Anything that happens to you after reproductive age does not get affected by natural selection because the selection pressure of reproduction is gone.
You are mostly correct but must also consider traits that affect the odds children will fail to reproduce. People can for example be genetically predisposed to depression or impulsive anger or substance abuse or ... any of which can impact the survival of their children thus selection pressure does not entirely disappear after a child is born.
If parents have some sort of health issue after reproductive age, that diminishes their ability to help their offspring.
Not to mention that juveniles also get dental problems. We live in a society where you need to get braces in order to look attractive and get a mate. We are breeding people who do not have the features they need to survive without artifical intervention.
This is a funny message to attach to "if you have bad genes, you shouldn't reproduce".
Not that they should have the final word the subject of course. I'm just saying you can't assume they they didn't because they have a contrary opinion.
It would be, if I had said that. If I had something extremely screwed up about my genes, I definitely wouldn't reproduce, though. Reproduction is irreducibly narcissistic, even though it's fine - it's our purpose if we could be said to have one. But I don't need to watch a child suffer intensely to feed my ego.
Also I, like everyone else, have plenty in my genes that I hope my kids don't get but it doesn't keep me from having them. They can have a big noses, or weird teeth; hopefully they'll have the character to overcome it.
But I think you need to realize that people will be trying to breed extremely skinny girls with huge breasts, or extremely skinny boys with huge breasts, or that a trend will catch fire about girls with eyes really far apart because of some movie star, and there will be a generation with a million girls with brain damage and constant migraines. All because we couldn't tell wealthy people "no."
Even if we're doing eugenics as a society, it would have to be tightly regulated in every way (what do we define as an illness?), and now you instantly have government eugenics. Are you happy with that?
No wonder that you are calling yourself "pessimizer".
Maybe your confident assessment of the horrors of the future is wrong?
You read something that wasn't in my comment. I said that nobody is forcing anyone to gamble. You can choose to gamble, but nobody is forcing you to.
Modern forms of family planning that include access to birth control, genetic testing, abortions, and prenatal screening can empower individuals to make choices that they feel will bring about the healthiest and happiest progeny. That's eugenics.
We as a society should continue to allow individuals to make these kinds of choices rather than leave it up to fate or a central authority.
But if a billionaire wants eugenics well that's different then.
Some different group of people: I believe Y, which contradicts X
You, looking upon the masses: X and Y are contradictory. Why is everyone a hypocrite?
I was born with retinoblastoma.
You want the state to use criminal law to control my reproduction based on my genetics.
You're "totally comfortable" with that. Easy position when it's not your eyes, not your children, not your choice being criminalized.
You invoke eugenics like it's a magic word that wins the argument. But you're the one advocating for state control of reproduction based on genetic fitness. I just want to select among my own embryos.
Your adoption argument only applies to people like me - people whose genetics you call "admittedly bad." Everyone else gets to reproduce freely.
The cruelty is that you get to advocate for my childlessness from perfect safety. You'll never face the choice you want criminalized. You just get to feel righteous about it.
So please avoid the ad hominem and do not presume that moral opposition is merely some kind of flippant and insensitive response coming from those who are not affected. There are plenty of couples who make this moral decision, because they grasp the moral reality of the situation.
No one is entitled to children. No one is entitled to any kind of child. This entitlement is precisely what makes it commodification. Children are not property. They are not a product to be customized. They’re human beings, and no one is entitled to another human being. It is good and natural to want children. It is good and natural to want healthy children. It is good and natural to marry and to try to have them. But it is not good to think you deserve them or that you are entitled to have them - and to have them in a desired condition - at any cost or by any means. A real parent puts his child’s good - real or potential - before his or her own, but this attitude of entitlement gets it exactly backwards. It involved begetting children from a fundamental position of disrespect toward them as human beings and toward all those who were thrown out in the process.
While there is no moral issue in principle with gene therapies that involve correcting genetic defects in an embryo in the abstract; in practice, there is a lot we don’t know about genetics, the details of the process matter, and the flippant overconfidence of startups is worrying But doing screening and terminating ‘undesirable’ embryos is gravely immoral.
[0] An embryo is not some ontologically other that later magically transubstantiates into a human being. “Embryo” and “fetus” describe stages of human development, like “infant”, “toddler”, “teenager”, or “adult”. It boggles the mind how blind and numb we are as a society to this reality, and so easily dehumanize human life in its early stages, simply because it doesn’t look like it does at more mature stages, and because it suits our desires.
I do agree that we don't consider the morality of what science is allowing us to do and I appreciate your arguments.
But unintentional harm during the normal course of living is a different matter, right? There's a difference between an accident or acting out of ignorance on the one hand and intentionally harming someone. You don't provide an example of anything "normal", so I can't address it specifically.
Furthermore, moral actions involve proportionality. For instance, consider a pregnant woman who has developed cancer. Chemotherapy is quite dangerous to her child, but it may give her a very good chance of surviving. Can she licitly take chemo, knowing this risk, or even knowing that certain harm will come? Yes, she can, not because her unborn child's life is less valuable than hers, but because her life is on par with that of her unborn child, and for that reason, she may take chemo to save her life with the unintended side effect of her child's harm or even death. (She isn't using the harm or death of the child to benefit, hence "side effect".)
> I do agree that we don't consider the morality of what science is allowing us to do and I appreciate your arguments.
I appreciate your recognition. Human beings have a bad track record in the morality department, and with the power that the scientific process gives us, we are like toddlers with a a shotgun.
A couple cells in a petri dish don't gain moral status owing to having DNA matching Homo Sapiens. That's ridiculous.
Specifically, the capacity for rationality and the capacity to choose among alternatives (insects feel things, too, in their myriad insect ways). And these properties, far from being properties among many, are definitive, constitutive, essential* to what it means to be human. (The instantiation of other human properties is always as human-specific instantiations rooted in these above essential properties; while a cat also feels something analogous to human anger and experiences something analogous to the human desire for food, they are not univocal.)
In other words: human value comes from the kind of thing humans are, which is to say rational animals.
And these essential properties exist in potentia during the embryonic stage. A rock does not have the potential to be rational, nor does a dung beetle at any stage, nor do even human gametes, as their development does not lead to a rational being. But at fertilization, from that first cell when a new human being comes into existence, we have a being in the most literal sense that has exactly that rationality scheduled, as it were. And the degree of rationality we express is always a continuum. How much rationality has developed in an infant? How much rationality does a toddler express? The teenager or even most adults? A bed-ridden person with Alzheimer's in old age? A comatose patient? To say that human life at some stage or other does not possess humanity is drawing lines in the sand, an arbitrary threshold that we choose to rationalize some action we wish to take that is opposed to the good of such a being.
You're basically committing the error of Parmenides all over again.
On an arbitrarily large timescale, many things have the potential to become other things. Depending on your preferred theory of abiogenesis, some frothy chemical soup on early Earth had the potential to become, and did become, all of life. This does not give the soup moral value equivalent to all of life. What matters is what things are now, not the other things they could turn into.
It seems to me that you would consider the harvesting of these cells to be immoral but also that you'd consider killing these cell lines to be unacceptable.
In your opinion Henrietta Lacks still alive as long as this cell line is alive somewhere in a lab? What if the cells are frozen? If she died what remains? How is it different from an embryo?
1. Is harvesting cells in the manner of the HeLa cell line morally licit?
2. Is killing such cells morally licit?
3. Is Henrietta Lacks still alive through this cell line?
4. How are the cells in this line different from an embryo?
(1) No, I would not say this is immoral. First, these are cancer cells. If removing cancer cells from a human body is immoral, then it would follow that removing tumors would be immoral, which it isn't, because a tumor is a defect - it deviates from the norm of a healthy, functioning body and interferes with its operation. Removing such cells is a corrective procedure. It restores the body's healthy function, which is the entire point of medicine.
Now, what if the cells were healthy? Here, it would depend on the aim of doing so as well as the impact. For example, removing cells from a healthy heart because you wish to diagnose a patient with a minor illness would be bad if doing so also damaged the heart in some way surpassing the good enabled by such extraction and diagnosis.
However, say the person in question is suffering from a serious illness, and the damage or resulting risks of such an extraction is proportionately less than the good of the life-saving effect it would enable, then this would be morally licit.
(2) No, I would not find killing such cells immoral either, because...
(3) ...Henrietta Lacks is not alive anymore than a hand severed from my body and kept alive artificially is still me. Indeed, that hand is no longer a hand, because a hand is only a hand when it is a integral part of an organism and functioning as part of that organism. If you reattached that hand to my body while I am still alive, then it would be my hand.
(4) These are not embryonic cells. They will not develop into a human being.
Now, even if we ignore that they are cancerous, you may say that such cells can be modified or "reprogrammed" into embryonic cells. Yes, they can, but that involves modification. The result of that modification would not be Henrietta Lacks, but a clone, or a distinct person with the same DNA. I would reject such cloning as immoral.
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Now, developing cell lines derived from adult cells is different from developing cell lines from the destruction of embryos, which brings us back full circle. It's the destruction of a human being in the embryonic stage that is categorically immoral.
Imagine women going through this extreme painful thing every month and the best we have is generic painkillers and stupid jokes about “the special day”. Do you know people petition their cities to remove traffic light installations for visually impaired people just because they don’t like the clicking noise?
It’s a cruel world friend. Unless you get a billionaire to care about your problem, it will take many years until there is interest and consensus to improve the situation.
Ah yes because this site is populated by batshit insane evil wannabe billionaires.
There can be some sensitivity about trying to figure it out with them. I've added little affordances here and there, and ironically, I rely mentally more on color coding things because I am bad at finding things in a visual field than most.
I've also found that colorblind family members and friends just never tell you and they tend to suffer in silence. Even my own half-brother (which I have a 15 year gap with) didn't tell me he was colorblind until recently.
I think the more controversial conversation around human improvement needs to happen at some point as well. There's a fundamental problem with the modern world. It has changed over the last ~1000 years so much faster than our evolution could possibly keep up with, and we are now woefully unfit for it. There are so many life-threatening diseases (obesity, tribalism, depression) that are due to our behavior. To speed up and guide human evolution to make ourselves more empathetic, more reasonable, better physically suited to lifestyles revolving around thought instead of physical work, would be a huge long-term win for our species.
Of course there are inevitably a bunch of assholes trying to inject racialized agendas into this conversation, and that understandably poisons the very concept of genetic betterment for most people. But those racist tendencies are exactly the kind of outdated human nature I'm talking about eliminating.
Here lies the crux of the issue
For some people in the past (eg 1939 Germany), or some people now in power in the US, "improvement" might not be defined as you'd like...
Also guess what, once we have discovered the "gene to increase IQ" (if that exists)... we will also be able to wilfully build "artificially low IQ" people who will never complain, and never be able to defend themselves because they won't have access to an education... guess who will be interested in being able to create such a big population and will force people to have that free labor workforce...
If history told us one thing, is that we shouldn't play "magicians"
It might be stuff like an increased cultural focus on some genetics being "better" than others. Or an increased genetic divide between the rich and the poor over generations. Or unintended consequences where we make mistakes and cause new diseases or problems for the people that are being genetically modified.
But the chance of governments intervening in this seems low, other than maybe to require people to not select for bad traits or to put more restrictions on this technology (as many have already done).
And the idea of genetically engineering an under-class is equally absurd. Who would buy-in to that? It’s so obviously ethically evil. If we live in free countries with free press, this is just not going to happen.
If it is unintended, then when we notice it happening we will change course. We will see that the specific gene edits had negative effects, and we will avoid those gene edits in the future. The effect size will probably also be a lot lower than if you were specifically aiming to make people as agreeable and authority-following as possible.
Additionally, the people with the gene edits would only make up only a small percentage of all the people in a society. They will get some form of herd immunity when combined with people born naturally, older generations, and people without the gene edit.
This is a dramatically different situation to someone intentionally trying to engineer a servant class.
Artificial selection of slaves has already existed in the US historicially with chattel slavery. It is merely one regime change away
It seems very unlikely that poorer countries with dictators would have the skilled workforce, competence, and resources to pull this off. Perhaps some wealthy authoritarian states like the UAE could do it, but it would still require a massive effort for it to happen. And why bother when they can just import labour instead?
Poor countries can just outsource the task to the first world in the same way they outsource surveilance today. Bred slaves are more subserviant and better workers, 4/5 genetic engineers agree!
Elon Musk is trying very hard to produce robots and failing... imagine if it had access to a tech that solved all the hard problems, like making senses that work, vision, smell, etc... just keeping those beings "dumb enough" that they obey order... what if... we could just use humans and re-engineer them to obey...
"free countries with free press" haha. The guy bought the US election ("the #1 democracy in the world") for $250M
It just doesn't make sense. It is much cheaper and easier to just pay already-living people to work for you, instead of waiting decades and spending millions of dollars genetically engineering and raising each person, just in the hope that they then decide to work for you. That's just ridiculous.
The appeal of robotics is that the robots cost $30,000, you can build them on an assembly line, and they do not have emotions so will happily complete repetitive tasks over and over again all day and night. Comparing that to the cost of raising children, genetically engineering them, and coercing them into working for you is just insane. The maths do not work out at all, never mind the fact that it would require a logistical marvel to actually make this happen, and you would require immense amounts of power to not be stopped.
From every single angle this just doesn't make any sense at all.
What if their parents are really proud of their red hair and then give their kid bright red hair that their kid wished they didn't have? It becomes weird when you can no longer point to luck for the reason you are a certain way, but instead have actual people that you can blame. And that becomes especially weird when you are talking about preferences that are not inherently good or bad, like height, hair or eye colour.
Behold! The perfect man: A simpering, oversocialized, impotent, obedient nerd!
If you really believe in naturalism, you believe that bacteria and insects are (presently) ideal forms of life. However, I suspect you do not believe this, and are instead arguing from an untestable value based position, as nearly everyone in this discussion is.
We don't have a single, all-equal dog race. Diversity will remain and might even explode.
At the same time, governments and cultures have tried to tightly control, or heavily "incentivize" who gets kids, and that has led to dark places.
I think we are just entering a phase of "the same, but with tech". Changes are going to be faster, and thus we will notice them a lot more, but IMHO the result is not dependent on tech, but on culture.
There's actually a huge problem with pet rats in that they're all remarkably inbred. If you don't get your rats from a dedicated professional breeder who's been at it for decades, your pet is likely going to get really sick at the end of their life. Females tend to get catastrophic tumors, and all have extremely delicate respiratory systems. Out of the dozens of rats I've kept, only one died quietly in her sleep of old age. The rest were horrific and gruesome.
Yeah, there'd be a good amount of money in it for whoever can fix rats' genetics.
Funny thing is that this kind of stuff is considered haram by the CCP who are fanatically dedicated to social order.
If a tech billionaire edits an embryo and figures out how to make a human immune to a certain disease or live a better life, that is a win for the rest of us.
And before anyone says "they'd just keep it for themselves" - there has been no medical technology in human history that hasn't become generally available after a couple decades.
In society, i guess, if such super-humans are designed to have a 500 year life, they have automatic adusted there pension age to something like 450 years.
In law, because such super smart super-humans allways know things better, the fines are 100 times higher.
On the other side, of course, who would not choose the best for the best for the own child. Why should a person wear glasses the whole life, if it is possible to switch a few genoms.
So many difficult questions ..
There are already prohibitions on allowing transgender people to participate in some sports. It seems unlikely that the children of ordinary people will be allowed to participate in sports with children who are known to be genetically enhanced so that they are more powerful, etc. It is an interesting question though.
How would you test it anyway.
I would imagine this debate depends a lot on 1) how many people have their genes edited, and 2) how big of a difference that can actually make.
Is Usain Bolt actually superior, or is it purely the drugs? It’s difficult to say, because the drugs don’t exist and nobody ever takes them and it’s all skill and talent.
What are you talking about? If they had no steroids, and their training was far worse than what we have now (running on wood chip tracks), and they were still the best individual in the world at doing their thing, they were definitely genetically blessed.
I know a few couples who’ve chosen their baby features for cosmetic and aesthetic reasons. One specifically went for blonde hair blue eyes. Neither of the parents have these features but the father allegedly has a grandmother who was from Scotland.
It may be 30 years or more before the impact of genetic manipulation in humans becomes apparent.
This could cause very signifcant suffering to those effected. The manipulation techniques are not entirely understood, in the past organisms that have been manipulated have not had the outcomes that were hoped for or expected.
In addition during this work it is possible that suffering and death may be inflicted on human infants.
These dangers surely must weigh heavily on anyone considering this sort of work be undertaken.
In the same breath - he told me how all his friends who are similarly PHDs in biotech are seeing their research grants cut and not finding opportunities because of the anti-science stance of the current administration.
Selecting embryos to avoid a known deleterious allele/gene is easily done, and without any harm. Similarly, one can choose blonde hair or blue eyes, etc. However, this is less reliable as too many different genes contribute to these traits, e.g. approximately 16 genes are involved in eye color alone.
Consider an attempt to select 5 different genes each simply available in a "good" or "bad" form in both the parents, and which are randomly contributed to an embryo. Statistically, you would need to screen 97 embryos to get one single embryo that has the optimal combination.
IVF typically transplants 2 or 3 embryos per cycle, so you need 200-300 embryos to get your chosen combination of only 5 genes. A typical woman will produce 3-400 eggs in her lifetime.
So, optimal genetic selection of embryos will not be a major thing any time soon. Those paying for it are deluded.
CRISPR editing of embryos is even more complex and less likely to succeed that the simple screening of embryos described above.
If you want to optimize the genetics of offspring, it's far, far, easier to choose the parents than to engineer the embryos.
People are allowed to mutilate their babies, raise them in whatever destructive fashion they please, avoid vaccinating them in an environment where they will be exposed to deadly viruses.
But god forbid someone try to make their baby immune to AIDS, some other genetic disease, or reduce the likelihood of psychosis given family history.
There is no world in which regulators will let this happen. There is no way to test this in a manner that will satisfy them, because babies can't consent to a trial. If it was up to regulators, human evolution ends here. No group should have that power over our species.
It is the same problem as modern medicine being so prohibitively expensive to test, that most ideas go to the bin. We need a deregulated zone to allow for progress to actually happen.
Genetic tampering can lead to all kinds of unknowable nightmares.
Circumcision?
Circumcision is absolutely mutilation.
> Genetic tampering can lead to all kinds of unknowable nightmares.
You can "tamper with your kid's DNA" just by having kids with the wrong person and passing down a genetic disease.
There are plenty of unknowable things about life. You could die in a car crash. You certainly will die eventually.
Should we avoid taking risks entirely because they might result in bad outcomes? With this mindset, humanity would have never progressed. We would have never left our caves if we were paralyzed by our own fear.
Humanity is still early stage. We are not so different from those that once ventured out of their caves. To them, we owe everything. It is a disservice to all future humans that will ever live if we stop taking trajectory-changing bets because things could go wrong.
> There are plenty of unknowable things about life.
I agree but I know that I’m going to die someday.
As for where genetic engineering can lead I recommend the book “All Tomorrows”.
In any case i broadly agree with you - however there should still be guardrails and until we can safely and reliably manipulate the genetics of “less complex” animals we shouldn’t experiment with humans.
However you can probably do it if you really want! There are lots of countries that have less guardrails in place - but I would assume you don’t want to take the risk when it’s comes to your own life/offspring or am I wrong?
Take some trajectory-changing bets yourself and then I’ll believe that what you are saying is not just posturing
I would, but that's mainly because of congenital psychosis that runs in my partner's family. Would gladly take the chance at editing that out of any embryo if there were targeted therapies.
If you know of any, please let me know - my understanding is that psychosis has not been isolated as well as Down's and blindness has, so you cannot genetically screen an embryo for it.
Not sure if it can help in your case but definitely interesting.
And just as a small aside, not really related to OPs points, I'd just like to point out that nature pretty consistently tampers with everyones kids DNA, which quite regularly leads to absolute nightmare fuel. Whatever those unknowable nightmares may be, they have to be pretty gruesome in order to compete.
You're also just wrong - the first scientist to genetically edit human embryos edited in immunity to AIDS.
A huge chunk of the environmental disaster we are facing is because Europe and the US didn't go the nuclear route like France did in the 60. We could have had this crisis we're having now in a few hundred years instead.