CRISPR, the Disruptor | Hacker News Reader

CRISPR, the Disruptor

nature.com

88 pointsSapphireSun21 comments

Ramez Naam had a good response to all the fear surrounding CRISPR: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/05/don...

I don't fear the CRISPR, but most of the points in the article are consequentialist in nature based on how hard it is to apply CRISPR in practice right now. Genetic technology moves very fast, c.f. CRISPR :P What seemed impossible a few years ago is now almost practical.

The real point one should take away I feel is the idea that parents will act to benefit their children more than they want to create "superhumans" or other mutants. It's pretty clear to me that the way forward is to allow disease oriented research, but debate other uses well in advance of feasibility.

What's wrong with creating superhumans? That is if we all become superhuman.

There are a lot of risk reduction reasons and also a lot of ethical and moral reasons. These are all legitimate and worth considering, and hopefully another commenter or two can elaborate and point you to resources.

But I want to take a moment to highlight the legitimacy of sentimental reasons in this case.

Humanity is an important and closely guarded trait, for reasons that some have characterized as "self-evident". One could characterize "civilization" largely as a mechanism for preserving humanness and helping it flourish. When it comes to deciding the genetic fate of the species, these rather sentimental ideals about what makes life worth living are perhaps one of the most important decision criterion.

What exactly is humanity? Wiping out as many other species as we can? The Kardashians? Soylent?

Hopefully we can leave that behind.

Boredom, laughter, appreciation of art, curiosity, etc.

Genetic modifications could theoretically remove all of those things, and give us other things besides, drives we wouldn't recognize in the slightest.

It's natural that an intelligent agent would defend against modification to its current primary drives, but the thing about changing your mind about what you want is that once you've done it you no longer care about your previous drive. I find it hard to think of reasons why we'd rationally object to changing our fundamental motivations, since we wouldn't care after we did it. There's no real reason to object other than a craven appeal to self-preservation taken axiomatically.

The same can be said of suicide.

Humanity is also suffering, pain, despair, hate, agony, torture.

Human condition is indivisible from suffering. Such is life they say. For millenias humanity has not made a significant number of its individual members happy or fulffilled.

Humanity as something immutable is in its waning years. And I won't mourn for it. The posthumans are coming. Let them come faster.

Frankly, it is precisely because of the human condition that technologies like this are dangerous. What happens when a misogynist wants their daughter to have a reduced sex drive, or a fundamentalist government wants its people to be more religious. If we have this capability, it will not go well.

> it will not go well.

It doesn't go well now, at this very point in time.

>misogynist wants their daughter to have a reduced sex drive

Number of instances of female genital mutilation is absolutely insane.

>fundamentalist government wants its people to be more religious

ISIS. Saudi Arabia. Russia. Propaganda and state religion works well enough. There is no need to look far from HN to see how governments prop up religious beliefs in general populace. "In God We Trust" on US dollars and "under God" in pledge of allegiance are a few fine examples.

And frankly, human genetech and biotech modification can't be stopped, neither by laws or popular opinion. The incentives are just too great.

In the end the debate will be pointless. If CRISPR and other techniques advance to the point where a Gattaca-like level of genetic manipulation is possible, they will be used. Banning them means that they will be used by only the elite.

That's not really a response to crisper, rather a response to why humans won't be engineered using crisper any time soon.

Crisper itself is very powerful. And like any dual-use technology, that power can be put to ill purposes. Crisper however, is unique in that it is 1) easy and 2) only understood by a very small fraction of people.

Nukes are 1) hard and 2) not well understood. Guns are 1) easy and well understood. Synthetic biology will become well understood, but not for a generation or so of people seeing how their tools have actual practical, ethical, aesthetic and damaging functions.

Crisper is scary because it's very potent, and very easy to use.

Sounds reasonable, except for the one sentence that exposes it as ideological wishful thinking: "Parents are likely to use genetic technologies in the best interests of their children."

Never mind the fact that "best interests" is highly subjective in the first place. It's exactly because culture, ethics and morality are subjective that people fear all forms of genetic manipulation.

And the rather naive "we're good and smart people here" spliced with subjective ideological views is not making a strong case.

There is a lot of reason for fear. The question is how we deal with that fear. Pretending the fear unfounded when all we know from the entire history of how the human race leverages science and technology says otherwise isn't helping.

This is possibly the most reasonable piece I've seen linked on the topic. CRISPR/Cas9 techniques do not give us anything we couldn't do before--- after all there have been TALENs and zinc finger nucleases for quite a while. It just made the process of designing a new nuclease system much, much cheaper. However, no endonuclease driven system is going to be efficient at introducing mutations consistently. The basic problem is that these systems require the cooperation of the genomic repair systems of the cell. There are several ways which these repairs are mediated, and only one (homology directed repair) yields the desired outcome. That this happens at a low rate, and requires the introduction of DNA templates only diminishes the overall efficacy and multiplexity of the process.

Even when flooding cells with preassembled Cas9/gRNA complexes that are immediately active, the overall rate of homozygous introduction of the target mutation is in a few %. Knowing this, I find it hard to believe that CRISPR will be how we ultimately engage in high efficiency genome modification. It depends too much on the biology of the target system. That said, the hype around it has initiated a great and timely public discussion about the use of these tools in medicine.

It seems like creating superhumans just became easier. I wouldn't doubt it if in a few years someone or some country creates superhumans and a society to rule the world. Remember there's only a 1-2% difference in genes that differentiates us from the apes. As NDT puts it, what would a human (he uses aliens as an example) be like with genes that are just slightly altered that puts their intelligence at a level higher than ours as ours is to apes?

AFAICT the majority of humans are no better than any other organism in nature that competes against members of its own species (or other species) for survival. Maybe these superhumans, rather than being evil will finally understand this and help the rest of humanity.

Maybe these superhumans, rather than being evil will finally understand this and help the rest of humanity.

Has this ever happened before? Any time any group of hominids has had an edge over another that they shared space with, it's pretty much resulted in subjugation or extermination. We're really, really bad at tolerating those who are nearly the same.

So wait, some yutz kid made air-infectious lung cancer?

I rather strongly suggest that the ethical oversight board review that particular lab with a flamethrower.

The HeLa cervical-cancer cell line seems to be air-infectious as well—at least to nearby lab cultures. Cancer is very easy to, even accidentally, turn into something infectious. It's hypothesized that this is a major reason behind human T-cells: the mechanism by which T-cells reject allografts (e.g. organ transplants) is an unintended side-effect of a useful function, in being able to reject foreign-body human-derived cancer cells.

There's a fantastic episode of Radio Lab which includes a story about the HeLa cell and discusses the fact that it's air-infectious, in case anyone wants to know more: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91713-famous-tumors/

Yeah, but this is worse. This is not a foreign cell. This is a virus that plugs in and rewrites your own cells. (If you happen to be a mouse. One hopes.)

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