Are We Too Close to Making Gattaca a Reality?
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
The genetically engineered angle seemed like a small plot device, not a central feature. If we take health and wealth of the typical first worlder and compare it with that of the average third worlder, it already looks pretty Gattaca to me.
[1]Full text here: http://somethingcompletelydifferent.wordpress.com/2011/02/15...
It's always boggled my mind that some authors have such little regard for science fiction. In my opinion, it's one of the most powerful contexts you can use, when done well.
Isn't their significant evidence that more diverse gene pools, even unexpected combinations of genes are usually more adapted in several ways, because of heterosis [0]. It seems foolish that this one new factor would make eugenics any more successful than its last phase of popular. Not to mention it the deeply-held 'moral repugnance'[1] aspect.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis
[1] http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2624677/Roth_Repu...
The world is harsh and unforgiving, genetic is only a tiny fraction of all the possible problems, why would you not give your kid the best chances with the things you can control ?
Apart from other -more serious- problems, obviously, but genetic similarity is not necessarily a good thing.
At that point there would be enough GM humans walking around that a virus might evolve to attack only them, and it would spread like wildfire among the population given the lack of genetic variation, the only exception being old regular humans and maybe a few of those with parents wealthy enough to get them tailor-made without any of the preexisting "parts" that the majority uses.
It starts off with a picture of hell, and then shows him overcoming it.
The ultimate end is not even to simply pick the contents of the 46 chromosomes. It is medically plausible to purposefully create human chimeras -- basically it when fraternal twins happen to combine to become one fetus. ("We have selected these 46 chromosomes for the neural material, and these other 46 for the skeletal-muscular system. Looks like we have a few fetuses where the combination took to the right locations. We destroyed many eggs, but it is all worth it so your son can be the best, right?")
There are problems with genetic selection. But I think the larger problem will be the personal toll of new found ways of negatively assessing ourselves, and pointlessly diagnosing our inevitable sundry personal weaknesses as medical syndromes.
A mild example in Gattaca is the six-fingered pianist - which in essence means that 'being a pianist' has to be chosen by others before you are able to think and decide.
And there are obviously horrible possibilities of specialization, like deliberately creating conscience-less embryos for military needs or autism-squared embryos for specialized uses (as suggested in Frank Herbert's Dune, for example).
" Their tests cannot recognize every possible shade, but they are specific enough to distinguish between brown, blue and mottled brown-blue eyes, as well as brown, black, blonde and red hair. Such studies are intended to help solve crimes, but clinicians at fertility clinics could easily adapt the strategies for PGD. "
Sounds like a lot sooner (now?) law enforcement will be able to determine a lot more about a potential suspect with just DNA. Or am I not reading that correctly?
What is extremely irritating is that people actually think that genetics works the way it is portrayed in the film. This is patently false. Yes, some portion of what an organism is is determined by the primary sequence of its DNA. It turns out that the contribution of primary sequence alone is quite small. Look at all the naive genome wide association data sets that have revealed that primary DNA sequences are in most cases very poor predictors of phenotype. This should't be surprising to anyone who has even a cursory understanding of evolution and the interaction between ecology and development. Yes, this is classic nurture vs nature stuff.
The fact that people want to claim that science could actually give us a universal, deterministic and predictive answer about the future should quickly alert us that the principles on which they are basing their predictions is not science and not predictive, but instead an ideology based on prejudice rather than evidence.
Will we also be the ones demanding that the new generations have no right to design their children, while they'd argue that we should just "mind our own business" and that it's not government's place to decide how to effectively "create" their own children.
I think this century will see a lot of interesting changes, and not just technological, but also societal. Can we design our own children? Can we marry robots? Can we change our gender? Should the government be able to monitor our thoughts to protect us from terrorism? Will we still have the nonsense "war on terror" even 50 years from now, or will we end all "war on abstracts" by then, just like we are about to end the war on drugs?
A lot of new questions will need a lot of new answers as new technologies start making all sorts of new things possible.
What makes you think you know what is better for your off-springs than random chance?
I consider diseases and human frailties a great part of what makes us humans. If we all had sharp teeth and powerful bite, we wouldn't drive cars, we'd chase furry animals and bite them with our powerful jaws. Occasionally stopping to hang around in the trees and eat fruits.
The same thing that makes me think that I am better at building a bridge than random chance -- while the correlation between my predictions of the results of my actions and the actual results of my actions is not perfect, it is definitely greater than zero (which is what the correlation would be from random chance).
> If we all had sharp teeth and powerful bite, we wouldn't drive cars, we'd chase furry animals and bite them with our powerful jaws. Occasionally stopping to hang around in the trees and eat fruits.
[citation needed]
Humans already are better long-distance runners than just about any other animal [1]. As a general rule, we don't spend all day running, despite the fact that we probably could.
The likely problem is the potential for increased suffering for future generations, not necessarily to the child to be immediately born.
There are genes that a usually superior when heterogenous. Sickle cell is the classic example. But it is quite possibly true that Tay-Sachs is also heterogeneous superior -- there is circumstantial evidence that it has been positively selected for.
If people feel it is necessary to make the smartest children possible, the grandchildren will risk immense unnecessary suffering, unless they are brought into this world under the loving care of a genetic counselor.
But surely humans beat randomness at many if not most tasks. This argument is not as much about whether we get sharper teeth or not, as it is about possibly saving a kid about a genetically inherited disorder. You may consider human suffering to be what defines humanity, but those who suffer most certainly don't.
And about betting randomness... I recall sometime reading about this certain ethnic group, which is taboo to single out and which has a disproportionate amount of Nobel prize winners (amongst other interesting features). The work describe how this people had both, compared to baseline population, higher than average IQ and higher than average propensity to some rare autoimmune disease that affects the brain. It turns out they had a higher incidence of several genetic mutations that each individually made you smarter (thus adaptive), but when found in the same individual made him sick.
Now, extrapolate this to a bunch of helicopter parents, micromanaging optimization to this or that characteristics in their own kids genotype. To me it sounds to much like a bunch of script kiddies merging commits to an arcane, critical, undocumented legacy system.
I'm just saying humans tend to optimize for the short term.
Suffering is essential because without suffering, there is no empathy.
I'm reminded of the episode http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Masterpiece_Society_%28e... in which a technology created to help blind, helps crew to save the society, which couldn't conceive it because it was too perfect.
> myopia
> alcoholism
> addictive susceptibility
> propensity for violence
> obesity
> Low Risk of Colorectal Cancer
> Longest Expected Life Span
> Least Expected Life Cost of Health Care
--but, but, but chance! No guarantees in life! Blah, blah, blah...
But, for the love of god, don't select for the "let's hope he stays out of jail" gene. That's a social, behavioral, circumstantial outcome, based on the decision making of the other human beings a person surrounds themselves with.
I take heavy issue with selecting for or against cancer genetics in particular. A lot of actual cancer outcomes rely on circumstances, environment and behavior. Beyond that, cancer is by-and-large a normal outcome for tissues that don't fail for other reasons. Any organ or tissue that doesn't get killed by something else, on a long-enough timeline, will be killed by cancer. Given that premise (the inevitability of cancer) it only makes so much sense to target "cancer genes" as a selection criteria.
Oh, and by the way, if you have any sort of problem with genetically modified foods, then you should take the exact same issue with genetically modified humans.
Monoculture induced by inbreeding, selective breeding and artificial selection is a killer that destroys at time-scales beyond individual generations. Just look at Chihuahuas and their propensity for asthma, or German Shepherds and their weird leg problems.
This is to say that any damage we do now, we won't necessarily be alive, to feel or understand the ramifications of. If all of us collectively decide to choose the absence of an adaptation, and that adaptation becomes essential a century after the fad, say hello to blight, extinction and perhaps the collapse of human civilization. Keep in mind that the loss of civilization (modern human society, and it's trappings of education, and scientific method) has the absolutely damning knock-on effect of being rendered into a scenario where it is no longer possible for humanity to "undo" it's own ruin.
Why? Because when you place a human social group in a suspended state of "less than grade-school quality" education for more than a generation or two, you'll find that on the other end, the group's descendants live in a state of uneducated superstition, lacking disciplines that engage in true scientific rigor (which can be enormously expensive). No more 4 year university STEM fellowships in this barren apocalyptic wasteland. Think in terms of what has happened to Afghanistan, where several decades of war have produced a generation denied of modern society. Now, imagine that same population also suffering from genetic disorders, induced by a fashion trend no one remembers. Only nature will decide who lives in such a scenario. But wait, it gets worse, given tendencies for human xenophobia, what if genetic choices made now, produce a form of future "racism" among uneducated apocalyptic cultures which we can't anticipate?
Okay, sure. This is the Michael Bay Extreme Nightmare Scenario™.
But still, we're toying with "science" that we don't fully comprehend, and all the while, we seem to be approaching it with all the solemnity of a coked-up Fashion designer caterwauling across a runway during Fashion Week in NYC.
If you don't find that dangerous (from a patently non-religious perspective)... well then... I don't know what else to tell you.
Self-interest is the prime motivator of human behavior, so if we want to avoid a future like this there will either have to be objections that speak to it directly ("It's too expensive!" "There's a 5% chance of horrible complications!" etc.), or laws will have to be made to prevent it in the same way that we prevent people from other forms of self-interested behavior that hurt society at large.
I can imagine the class system argument (though I'd like to hear it, because it is interesting and not that straightforward), but what about the others?
The race of the child is alredy determined by my choice - if I marry a person of my race, then our kid will be the same; and if I desire a child of race X, then I can go and have lots of kids with someone of that race.
And what is the cruelty difference between not making a frozen egg into a baby because of its genes, and not making a frozen egg into a baby because you decided you don't want more kids?
But while their decision is rational for them individually, it perpetuates racism in the culture by reaffirming that the skin color of the privileged is the "right" skin color, which reduces the pressure on the society to examine its prejudices. Children of those parents with the wrong skin color who can't afford the treatment will still be discriminated against, but there will be fewer of them then there would otherwise be, so they'd be even more isolated and unable to effect change.
If this cycle continues to a point where the cost of the treatment becomes zero, eventually everybody chooses to give their children the privileged skin color, and the disadvantaged group effectively disappears. Is that genocide? I dunno. But it's definitely something.
These dilemmas have been common to disadvantaged groups throughout history -- see the struggles light-skinned black people in America have had with the morality of "passing" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_%28racial_identity%29), or the tensions that can emerge in Jewish families when a child marries a Gentile. Genetic modification would just make the process of choosing to "opt out" of your own race easier, which would tempt more people to try it.
Racism: The external indicators of race will be under the parent's control. Look what rich people do to become more whitebread; imagine what parents will do to make their babies more acceptable. The entire process will enable racism on a level beyond any in history: prenatal genocide?
Cruelty I mean by the prejudices 'natural' babies will endure simply by being born into a world that favors others. They will be branded even before they are born, as inferior, through no choice of their own.
Class: No matter what class I am, I would definitely want my kids to [have a chance of] go a class higher than I am, and if I would deny my kids that opportunity for my own reasons, then that would be an evil, selfish act against my children;
Cruelty: If such society really is likely, then the same argument applies even more; I have a clear duty to protect my kids from such cruelty, and that duty is more important than the need to protect myself from some discrimination or conserve financial resources;
Race: well, it doesn't apply for me (same race marriage, all embryos would be the same), so I can't honestly say how it'd feel - but yes, given current experience in many countries it will mean that there will be a bias of skin color. But does it have horrible consequences? I mean, the current effect of gender-biased abortions in large Asian countries results in skewed gender rates and the excess males w/o mates will create social unrest; but race IMHO is generally a cosmetic difference, so nothing really changes if suddenly all of Earth decides to have white, black or purple skin.
If many parents choose to blunt the racial characteristics (not just skin color but eyes/lids, nose width, lips, limb length, jaw, teeth) it will serve to make any 'normal' child with those characteristics a real standout. Racial characteristics become almost proof of genetic inferiority. There's no problem with that?
As for the second statement - Any 'improvements' that are sufficiently large to matter will probably be sufficiently large to detect; the problem is about how we treat "genetic inferiority" as such, not really about how it is detected - by looking at racial characteristics, blood samples, asking your parents or your next-gen-facebook-DNA-profile.
I feel that your points sum up, in essence, to 'this will lead to more inequality'. And yes, it will. Probably the only thing that can make it equal is to ensure that everybody can do that (although we can't ensure even that everybody can eat or not be a slave) - since we definitely can't ensure that nobody will do that.
Of course, if you have enough money to genetically design your children, probably have enough money to feed and raise them right, give them access to the best education, and probably have time to be with them, and is that what will make the difference, not so much to have the best of the best genes. But even without the designer genes, nor growing in a rich family normal people still have the potential to be great in whatever they do.
But is not designing the problem, is being discrimined later by people with access to your genetic info (something not very private as we leave traces of it everywhere), if that impairs your access to education or work, that will affect what you are too. Just labeling those that discriminate based on genetics as aryan race fans could put those practices in a negative enough light to avoid it to spread.
To what extent you have been outsmarted by robots is determined mostly by genetics. But if slum-dwellers were given basic income and a negative income tax, it would be impossible to farm them for votes, so they have been indoctrinated to believe that they are smarter than robots and have been cheated out of jobs. This keeps them voting for the next handout, keeping the welfare bureaucracy and its "leaders" in power.
We are living in a vicious genetic dystopia today.
Naturally you will read not a word of this in Scientific American. They are hyper-leftist and cannot imagine a future of automated prosperity without their kind to centrally plan it. (One of the reasons they continue to moonbat against Reagan to this day was his vast expansion of the negative income tax.)
Vincent: You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back.
I know some people will want it, but it would need to be near universal for something like Gattaca to become reality.
Nature and nurture are just two factors that contribute to a child's wellbeing and success in life. If you'd be willing to send your child to a private school in the hopes of giving them a better education and a leg-up on the competition, why not give them better looks and higher intelligence (were it possible), as well?
I've yet to see any convincing ethical arguments as to why this would be wrong. So far, every argument made in opposition to designer babies seems to boil down to "it's not natural". Well, neither is agriculture, medicine, the Internet... as a species, we've gotten to where we are by changing nature to suit us. Why should procreation be any different?
However, I'm not convinced that medical science is there yet, so my child is just an iteration for big pharma. Perhaps we produce a whole generation of intelligent children who develop Alzheimer's when they're 25. I realise that argument is made against every new technology (especially medical), but making an active choice somehow makes me culpable and it would be harder to live with it.
Also, there's the idea of what happens if this becomes universal. Since some traits seem universally desirable, all parents will choose to grant them. So if everyone is given the genes to be massively intelligent, is that a good thing?
Then there's the quality of life argument, which makes me deeply uncomfortable. Essentially, choosing a fully-sighted embryo over a partially-sighted one implicitly says "partially-sighted people are likely to have lower quality of life than fully-sighted ones", and that sounds wrong both ethically and practically.
This is a really difficult debate, though. Put in the hypothetical situation of having to choose, I guess I would end up choosing the best possible embryo, but I'd rather not have to make the choice to begin with.
Agreed, but I think it's a matter of if, not when. As our knowledge of gene expression, epigenetics, protein folding, and the like increases, the set of things we can't do will shrink.
>Perhaps we produce a whole generation of intelligent children who develop Alzheimer's when they're 25
It's certainly possible that we'll leap before we look, but I'd hope not. We've had examples of that in the past, but the result of those tragedies is that research processes have improved. They're far from perfect, but they've certainly gotten better.
>So if everyone is given the genes to be massively intelligent, is that a good thing?
I'd say so, yes.
>choosing a fully-sighted embryo over a partially-sighted one implicitly says "partially-sighted people are likely to have lower quality of life than fully-sighted ones", and that sounds wrong both ethically and practically.
I think, on average, it's simply an objective fact that "full-sighted people have a better quality of life than partially-sighted people". I can't think of any way that astigmatism has improved my life, and it's something I plan on rectifying permanently once my finances allow it.
As for being ethically wrong, I don't see it. Just because someone is perfectly capable of living a happy and fulfilled life with a birth defect doesn't mean the lack thereof wouldn't be preferable.
>I'd rather not have to make the choice to begin with.
Keep in mind, not choosing is itself a choice. Just as you'd feel guilty if the procedure caused a birth defect, I think you'd also feel guilty if your child was born with a birth defect that you chose not to screen for or take steps to select against. That said, there we finally find an ethical quandary: the nature of the procedure would mean choosing to select against that defect would mean choosing not to have your child, and that's not something most parents would care to think about when looking at their kid. There's a big difference between choosing which fertilized egg to implant and looking at your kid and wishing you had chose not to have them. I think most people would be okay with the former, but would likely (and rightly) recoil in horror at the latter.
My thoughts on this are overshadowed by Brave New World. I realise how enormously snobbish and arrogant this sounds, but there are some jobs where having an enormous intellect would definitely be a burden. So either we have to automate those jobs (not necessarily possible), accept that some people are going to be very unhappy, or breed a specific group of people with lower intellects.
I guess this is a variation on the 'tragedy of the commons' - something that's wonderful for your child and my child would probably be a disaster if it were given to everybody's child.
> Just because someone is perfectly capable of living a happy and fulfilled life with a birth defect doesn't mean the lack thereof wouldn't be preferable.
I think sometimes disabilities are part of what make them amazing people. Would Beethoven have written such wonderful music if he had full hearing? From what I've read of Dame Evelyn Glennie, she seems to say that her deafness taught her to hear the music in a different way. So I'm worried that removing everything we perceive to be a defect results in a rather bland human race. It would be better to work on improving society so that being blind didn't cause many people to become depressed, for example. Adding lifts and ramps to buildings as well.
> Keep in mind, not choosing is itself a choice.
I'd like that the choice is not even possible. If the choice can be made confidently by a large proportion of the population, then it would inevitably go this way.
Yes you're right, a lot of this does depend on what we're considering a defect and at what stage. We have obviously done the whole Down's Syndrome scan, and we had no idea what we would have done if it had come back positive. If I could have done this pre-conception, then it would be a more comfortable decision. But if the question was about being short-sighted (which both my wife and I are), or whether we'd prefer a more athletic child, then the question gets much harder.
But sight (IMHO) is a very important thing.
Think of it this way - to compare apples with apples, let's talk about a single person, not two people who can be wildly different. The moral dilemmas have different answers for different people, so think from your personal perspective:
If you would/could make some currently fully-sighted person become partially-sighted, would it be a neutral thing or an evil thing, according to your beliefs? Would you have a duty to avoid doing that?
If you would/could make some currently partially-sighted person become fully-sighted, would it be a neutral thing or a good thing, according to your beliefs? Would you have a duty to do that?
If you had an ability to choose between some person being partially- or fully-sighted; or flip a coin instead (50% chance of only partial sight) - would you avoid making the choice? Is it ethical to avoid making the choice?
Usain Bolt obviously has two pretty amazing legs, and my legs by contrast must look 'less able'. But I'd be offended if you assumed that Usain Bolt has a better quality of life simply because he has 'more able' legs.
So with this gene selection we end up in selecting only those with the legs of Usain Bolt.
I feel the same about sight. I'm fairly short-sighted so wear glasses, and my glasses are kind of part of my personality. Even if somebody wanted to pay for the laser surgery, and it was a guaranteed success, I can't say that I'd definitely do it.
So in the case of your questions - if somebody asked me to improve their sight, and it was in my power to do so, then I would do it. But I don't think it would guarantee them a better quality of life.
1. Make up a few (say, 6) in-vitro fertilized eggs;
2. Extract a cell (or multiple cells at later stage, depends on the tech) to run the genetic tests;
3. Discard those who carry the mutation;
4. Depending on random factors, now you have 0-4 potential embryos. If you have many, you need to choose which one(s) will be put in the mother.
And this is the interesting part. At that point you already know quite a lot about each of those genomes - at the very least you definitely know all of their genders, but you do know (or can easily know) much much more already with the current tech. You have to make a choice anyway from that 'menu' of the few genomes that were just created. And absolutely any choice other than complete randomness will be biased towards something. So, the question to society, what amount of choice is 'acceptable'? Is throwing dice ok? Is looking at simulated extrapolated portraits ok? Is looking at statistical data allowed before making the choice?
The entire traditional / medical / western / whatever you want to call it model of childbirth in New Jersey is very much about making you acutely aware of the things that you should be afraid of during the pregnancy. All of these things are detectable with a litany of very expensive tests! And you will be lectured and browbeaten to hell and back if you decline, so I imagine that factors heavily into the popularity of chromosome tests these days.
Current prenatal testing, in essence, warns you about some (not nearly all) harsh diseases, and people may choose abortion after finding that out. There are some diseases where it actually allows a cure/therapy even before the embryo is born; but currently that's rather rare; so in general, if someone has already decided that they won't do an abortion, then doing those tests has no practical value at all.
Exactly, which we weren't gonna do. It's a complicated issue for sure, but it did work out for us. Thanks.
I think the problem will be on the supplier side. I look back at the cloned cats that don't look like the original (different hair color) and think that genetic selection will be very interesting from a Tort point of view.
1) ok, Christians in US - cannot really speak for the others
As the article kindly submitted here points out, people are already demanding designer babies. They used to try to get those by looking for sperm donations from the Nobel laureate sperm bank,[3] but that project had disappointing results, and the sperm bank is no longer in operation.
Researchers on human genetics I know locally (who analyze the data from the Minnesota Twin Families Study) use a photograph of two identical (monozygotic) twins from Germany[4] (from a different source, I think the original medical journal source, rather than the blog I link to here) to show that although genes are certainly very influential on human development, environment, including differing choices of lifestyle, matters too.
[1] http://health.usnews.com/health-news/articles/2007/09/11/cra...
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_genom...
[3] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4700156
[4] http://thesameffect.com/check-out-identical-twins-otto-and-e...
(weirdly, some of what she predicted - about 10 years ago now - seems to be coming more true in software. you can't help but think of google when you read descriptions of the biotech corporations, with their compounds designed to isolate superior employees ;o).