A 23andMe Patent
blog.23andme.com
blog.23andme.com
These guys seem to have a lot of patents#. Some of them seem (to me) like something you shouldn't be able to patent.^ It's a little creepy (but very easy) to imagine a future where most (rich) children are engineered by selectively accepting zygotes, sperms/eggs or actually creating them.
I don't know much about the economics or laws of IP, but I would really prefer that all the critical technology and data needed for engineering babies be treated as scientific discovery and available publicly.
#https://www.google.com/search?num=100&safe=off&biw=1024&bih=...
^https://www.google.ie/patents/US8510057?dq=23andMe&hl=en&sa=...
This process sounds like it's half a step away from that. The half-step being that they only mention testing the parents, and then the process permits a degree of hypothesizing about possible children. Meanwhile, how hard would it be to test an embryo in utero, and then make a shallow, superficial decision about the pregnancy?
The process is practical and ethical, when considering it's utility for assessing the risk of inherited, incurable diseases tied to varying combinations of dominant or recessive genes, but it's a flimsy assumption that it will solely be used for only those scenarios.
There will be couples with known risk factors, who will want to roll the dice and try anyway, because they love eachother and want a family, and then they check their pregnancy in utero for things like downs syndrome. But then, if you have the options in front of you, why not check out other characteristics too?
And then, if couple A was allowed to do that, and this is a business, after all... Why not couple B? This couple who has no life threatening conditions or genetic combinations, but has the money, and the confidentialitiy of protected health information laws shrouding their decisions in secrecy.
In 20 years, don't be surprised when a certain cross-section of humanity suddenly looks strikingly different, but without any obvious explanation.
Also, there are still a great many people who are very suspicious of any new medical technology and would not want to take any risks when it comes to a child.
It raises many important questions on how to properly and ethically handle genetic improvements in society, but in my opinion it doesn't at all say that the genetic improvements shouldn't be done, it simply warns about the social, political and legal issues that the society should discuss and solve alongside with the actual biological/engineering challenges.
30 year old me is much more pragmatic. The world is changing very quickly, and even though I'm still somewhat young, I know things will get harder for me as I get older (I work in the tech sector; "The Benevolent Treadmill"). I have a wife, and soon kids on the way. I need to be able to get more done in the day, concentrate more, remember more, and continue to constantly learn while competing against kids half my age.
30 year old me would select the best traits for my child(ren) in a heartbeat. I want better for them than I had, as all parents do.
And, by the way, "If X, then eugenics is not that bad' is in no way an acceptable argument against or for X; it's worse than irrelevant.
Which is what leads to eugenics, for example, with people with Down syndrome. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21555947).
"It is worse than irrelevant," I do not know why: I assumed the Parent was against eugenics, that is why I tried to make him realize it.
And if we had such a cure (as far as I know, we currently don't and won't for quite some time), then not applying it wouldn't be okay - not using that cure would be pure evil, and comparable to torture or, say, forcibly denying someone their eyesight or hearing or limb.
I wanted to refer only to "designing" children and/or "choosing them", not to, for example, a cure for Down's syndrome (assuming there could be one): what we have achieved with prenatal diagnosis is -in this case-, I reckon you will agree with me on this, is equivalent to eugenics.
I do not think medical interventions (apart from say quarantines for contagious diseases etc) should be compulsory: illness and its acceptance is part and an important one of our lives. Suffering is unavoidable, and one can lead a very human and happy life in sickness and pain. But this last point is something on which I have not made up my mind clearly yet, certainly.
But torture? It would depend on too many issues to compare not giving a treatment with torture. I might agree in some cases (very easy, very cheap and a "huge" rate of succesa).
But I am digressing. Thanks for your points anyway, this is a thorny and difficult topic.
Thus, I have a deep dislike for reasoning such as "X leads to eugenics, ergo X is bad". Eugenics is a loaded, biased label. Any decision should be judged as okay or evil on its own; and if okay decisions lead to the label eugenics, then it doesn't make them less okay in any way and shouldn't affect the evaluation of that decision.
However, the word 'torture' and denying senses comes from me earlier reading about (hopefully rare) incidents of deaf parents intentionally choosing (via selective artificial insemination) to have kids that will be permanently deaf as well. I don't agree with that and consider it equal to, say, those parents cutting the ears of their infant after birth.
And from that comes the reverse argument - if the procedures become cheap, easy and safe, then in practice 'not-fixing' a damaged gene is almost the same as intentionally damaging a gene; since you could easily have had both options; chose the damaged one; and forced that choice and consequences on the kid. The main difference is choice of action vs choice of non-action, which are psychologically perceived differently; the Trolley problem is the classic example.
Just to clarify: saying something is not OK per se does not mean judging the people who do that as 'bad.'
Theft is not OK per se but who am I to judge the hungry robber, for example?
The deaf people example is another example of dealing with human beings as things (choose one or the other as if both belonged to you. And the other is doomed to die, moreover), which is what puts me against these techniques.
We should definitely talk, this is a cumbersome means of communication.
Isn't this a direct violation of the principles of patents? A patent gives you protection to work on an invention, so that you have a monopoly to sell that invention and thus cover the costs of developing it. But here they have the patent, thus preventing anyone else selling the invention, but they are not selling the invention themselves.
I'm interested about law. (Not saying this is relevant to 23&me.) Can you patent a process for an illegal action? So, a business process that enables tax evasion (not avoidance)?
Until such time as there's a new owner or we're bought by Evil Co., etc.
Every time I read a best intentions phrase like that it reminds me of the company that promised, "Never to share your email with anyone. Ever."
Until they went bankrupt and one of the assets sold off was their customer database.
reminds me of the company that promised, "Never to share your email with anyone. Ever."
So no, there aren't any direct consequences of that, they have disclosed the "invention" in the actual patent text, and after patent expiry everybody will be able to use that patent text for their products if they wish so.
There's a scene from the movie Gattaca where Ethan Hawke is cleaning everything from his desk and keyboard in order not to leave any "DNA traces". First saw that film 10+ years ago but it has always stuck with me.
(Please, if someone with red hair reads this, no offense :-))
Can they say you definitely carry a gene for diabetes or lactose intolerance, for example, or do they just say you're at a higher chance of developing this? The website example given for carrier diseases looks so vague it's not worth bothering with ("You are a carrier of one or more infected conditions"... great, which ones!)
If they can give me a list of things I need to be mindful of in the future and, more importantly, why, I'd happily pay $99 for that. I.e; you've got this and that gene which leaves you susceptible to this condition which may lead to heart disease, etc. and we're %xx certain.
Does anyone have any experience of this kind of thing?
[1] http://www.ctrl-verlust.net/23andme-wie-ich-fur-todkrank-erk...
I have an account - for me it was worth it. It confirmed some "suspicions" I had about some of my families genetic predisposition.
It can show inherited conditions, and what genes you have (maybe 1 of the 4 markers for a condition).
They do show % certainty, and then they also show your chance of certain health risks vs the national average.
I'd be happy to explain more - I'll admit I haven't looked into all the results (or try to understand them), but I was happy with the $99 cost.
I really like 23andMe's product, although I dont like the idea of my genetic information being stored outside my country (different than US).
I hope the patent itself isn't as broad as they are painting it, statistical methods (algorithms) should never be a part of patent - they are too generic and based on mathematics.