Comment by bonsai_spool | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bonsai_spool | Hacker News Reader

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> 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 ...

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.

My interpretation of the discussion is not about editing, but about simple selection between unedited embryos

100% — editing is trivial to argue against. Embryonic selection is much more difficult to mount clear, decisive arguments against. Let's make sure we don't end up with net skewed sex selection, and not screw up gene/phenotype correlation too badly when selecting. Random selection of an embryo without a specific gene defect seems ultra benign though.

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.

I guess it depends on what you mean by edited.

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 first paragraph of the article mentions editing.

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.

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