My wife and I have a whole-genome sequenced embryo that we selected based on Orchid’s results. In our case, we were trying to avoid a specific kind of hearing loss caused by a mutation in GJB2.
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:
Can you speak to why you and your partner elected to do WGS, when you could have opted for more specific targeted testing of GJB2?
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.
For the record, I don't know that Gusev is skeptical of genetic scoring for disease/disability markers, since that seems to be his professional research area --- a thing he's actually working on, constructively, not just critically. Like, intelligence gets all the press (or at least all the Twitter threads), and there the story is much murkier, but I don't read him as dunking on the kind of thing you're doing.
> 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.
---
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.
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.
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.
This kind of stuff is taboo for a reason. There are so many ways for it to go horribly wrong for society.
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?
This kind of blanket ban reasoning is kind of cruel to people with genetic diseases in their family line.
"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)?
It's understandable why society would be afraid of doing such things. It feels too much like playing god. Some things can be labelled in a different way to make them more palatable. But in this case i feel the wider harm to society outweighs the potential good to the individual. Which is the same reason i don't like assisted suicide.
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.
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".
Then that also applies to providing it. If the solution is to provide it to everybody, you can't, so you'll have to be selective. So even creating life-saving medicine means denying it to some people. Moral dilemmas everywhere you tread, as is normal.
> But in this case i feel the wider harm to society outweighs the potential good to the individual.
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.
It's not a simple debate, but you are suggesting unprecedented levels of medical intervention. It's an ethical minefield. Firstly, i'm sure this is not your intention, but you are basically suggesting we should test genetic experiments on human guinea pigs. I'm not an expert in medical ethics but i'm pretty sure it's a major no go however noble the intention (i know new treatments get tested the whole time but this is a level up from that) . You are also suggesting we should use it to solve problems as trivial as colour blindness, even without fully understanding the moral, ethical and social impacts of using gene editing in such a way.
>why society would be afraid of doing such things. It feels too much like 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.
I've tried designing information-dense things for colorblind coworkers, and they seemed a bit disinterested in testing it out with me. Even with tools that simulate it, you can still be off, I've found.
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.
We have become too risk averse as a species to make any real progress on this front.
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.
Maybe it's not risk-aversion, but an adjacent concept I'll call stifled freedom of action.
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.
I think it is fairly shortsighted to think that modern society is approaching "steady state" when we are on the "stick" part of the hockey stick curve of progress.
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.
> Our ancestors would make the most daring bets in pursuit of a better for their children.
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.
I often think what would happen if somebody were to engineer some sort of quasi universal cure to cancer, and they were to do it out of desperation. Say the cure works, and then this person wanted for it to reach more people right now. Would they become fugitives? Would the long arm of the law chase them to the confines of the world? What would the drugs lobby do if the billions of investment they must throw into drug certification are jeopardized by some Rambo?
"for any reason other than to cure a fatal disease" ... what about non-fatal but debilitating ? Sounds like you have a pretty absolutist view here ? What other reasonable exceptions can we imagine outside your rigid criteria ? Why should we not have nuanced discussions of the entire spectrum of reasons ?
Also hard to miss your implication of "agree with me or you are on par with a nazi"
Ask the question would you be comfortable allowing babies to be maimed or killed in a medical experiment to develop a treatment to some malady?
Make no mistake that is what we are talking about here. You are testing a therapy. Because you are editing the genome adverse effects of the therapy are irreversible and present at birth. Those adverse effects may include maiming or death.
So now that we have established what the stakes are, I ask again, what set of diseases do you think it is worth the risk of maiming and killing babies to develop a cure?
I think fatal monogenic diseases could be justifiable. But even there a valid argument could be raised about alternative approaches - ex. Cystic fibrosis.
Once you get beyond that things start getting dicey pretty quickly. Only a hop, skip, and a jump to nazi medical experiments on the “mentally retarded”. Check out the Belmont Report for more formalized ethical framework for medical experimentation on people.
Minimizing what the Nazis did is not cool and the suggestion that providing treatment for debilitating diseases to infants is ‘on par’ with murdering six million jews and millions more is honestly gross to me.
Keep your rhetoric in check before you start minimizing the Holocaust.
Your own claim was unambiguous: enrolling fetus/baby/infants (who cannot consent) in a trial for anything other than avoiding certain death is ‘on par with anything the nazis … did in WWII.’
I’m familiar with the Nazi medical experiments and how it informs modern bioethics. What you said is a significant step beyond any bioethicist consensus and trivializes the horrific mass murder that was the Holocaust.
This is really gross and there were 100 different ways for you to raise the ethical concern you're (charitably) trying to raise without comparing parents to Nazis.
> it was never "upgraded" to include male issues like these
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.
> "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!"
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"?
> instead of gambling, you can choose to treat having a genetic disease like being infertile ... I'm totally comfortable if we decide that this sort of thing is going to be criminal,
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.
We are childless. We could use legal reproductive tech like IVF, but we refuse to do so on moral grounds. This is painful for us, but we accept the reality of it, because, among other reasons, we refuse to commoditize human life and to kill human beings[0] to satisfy our desire to be parents.
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.
> Human life is valuable because of critical properties
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.
I disagree with your framing around embryos being human (largely because we're using our current scientific understanding to change what was intuitive into some abstraction that, itself, we don't understand - consider that pregnancy may be much more common than we know, but that otherwise 'normal' acts may harm these otherwise unknown pregnancies. Do we then prescribe the behavior of women after every sexual act they complete? But a mother causing the unintentional death of her progeny has always been wrong and socially punished.).
I do agree that we don't consider the morality of what science is allowing us to do and I appreciate your arguments.
> consider that pregnancy may be much more common than we know, but that otherwise 'normal' acts may harm these otherwise unknown pregnancies
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.
I'm curious where you place organisms like HeLa cell line[0] in your personal moral framework and world view on human biology.
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?
These are good questions. Let's enumerate the essential ones.
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.
--
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.
What if, for example, a dentist refuses to remove malformed wisdom teeth because his morals don't allow him to fix problems that a person is born with, and only fixes tooth damage caused by accidents?
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.
>What if, for example, a dentist refuses to remove malformed wisdom teeth because his morals don't allow him to fix problems that a person is born with, and only fixes tooth damage caused by accidents?
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
> If every dentist did this, the genepool would improve
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.
> evolution by natural selection only applies when the adaptation in question affects survivability before reproducing
> 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.
I agree with you and I think the comment you're replying to was callous, but maybe try to show more grace in tone. HN is starting to feel a little more hostile every day, which isn't healthy for open intellectual conversation.
I am well aware of that effect and how it does not refute my claim.
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.
> If every dentist did this, the genepool would improve.
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.
> "if you have bad genes, you shouldn't reproduce"
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?
"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.""
No wonder that you are calling yourself "pessimizer".
Maybe your confident assessment of the horrors of the future is wrong?
Uncharitably - GP likely believes (as many do) that the current zeitgeist of reproductive norms is ideal, as the possibility of it excluding themselves has never occurred to them.
There are also many (some in the comments to this post) who have excluded themselves because of it.
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.
The fundamental problem with eugenics, besides the immorality, is the misalignment of artifical selection with natural selection. The eugenicists always think they know best, but mother nature always gets the last word in the end
For better or worse, modern sanitation, medical care, industrial farming, and predator control have virtually eliminated the effects of natural selection on human genetics. Any changes going forward will inevitably be mostly artificial.
I am confused with your position. On one hand you seem to think that eugenics is bad and wrong, on the other had you have a preference on what people should and should not have children — but isn’t it literally eugenics?
Eugenics is still extremely popular and widely used in the form of sex selective abortions. This is one of the main reasons why population sex ratios are skewed in some countries.
Eugenics never went away, we just stopped calling it eugenics.
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.
I think it's pretty easy to get behind disease elimination in principle. >90% of people would be thrilled to use crispr to edit a congenital disease out of an embryo assuming it were as safe as any reasonable medical procedure can be. I think that ship is getting ready to set sail, probably not in the US at first, but the US will probably catch up eventually.
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.
The difference to 1939 Germany is that individual people can choose the traits, instead of a top-down authority. I think this makes a rather big difference, even if it does not remove the ethical concerns.
Rich people with access to the tech can do it now... who tells you that once this matures, Government is not going to "mandate" some "improvements" over wide swath of the population...
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"
There will definitely be negatives to technology like this. But the negatives are not going to be these ridiculous scenarios...
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.
Such policies would be incredibly unpopular, so you would need a true tyrant to make it happen. And even then, genetic editing would be a very expensive and slow option compared to just regular forms of oppression. Can that tyrant keep power for the decades it will take for them to get their subservient work-force?
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?
Such policies will be popular as long as eugenics-apoligists like yourself exist. Gene editing is not slow at all compared to breeding programs of chattel slavery, and it is not subject to short-term economic and military conditions like ordinary dictatorships are. Once it is unlocked, you have a pathway to creating an underclass that can NEVER revolt.
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!
It won't happen explicitly of course. The root comment mentioned "depression", for example, which is at least in part caused by inadequate work-life balance, poor quality of life in general, lack of social fabric, etc... So if you would genetically engineer people to be less depressed, even if you just empirically looked at what genes depressed people have in today's world (as the root comment is proposing), you could end up engineering people that are OK with working long hours for little pay, eating slop, sitting at home doing nothing, never socializing with anyone, obedient to their boss, etcetera etcetera. This would be, in effect, "genetically engineering an under-class", yet it would be easy to defend in the newspapers by just saying "we're only getting rid of depression, how can you be against it?" It's just a logical conclusion if you can think more than two steps ahead.
If the outcome is the same does it matter that there was never a secretive cabal organizing it behind the scenes? You'll happily march towards a dystopia because at least noone intended it to be that way? Is it really unintended if we can foresee it right now and decide to go ahead anyway? I don't get this attitude at all.
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.
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
The cost, complexity, and logistics of genetically engineering millions of people, and raising them, is astronomical. That's not to mention the level of backlash someone would receive for this would be unbelievable. This genuinely feels like something people would go to war over.
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.
Note that kids can't choose for themselves, only their parents. How parents define "improvement" might not always be in line with what the kids would want for themselves either.
Yeah, this is one area where I find the ethics especially confusing. If you try to make your kid taller, and end up giving them bad joint problems, who is to blame? Does the kid have the right to sue their parents? There are already "wrongful life" lawsuits after 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.
This and your comment upthread read like a textbook example of the naturalistic fallacy. The environment that produced your apparent masculine ideal was not permanent, nor was all of what it produced ideally suited to it.
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.
Humans applied eugenetics to dogs, animals and plants for thousands of years.
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.
One intermediate step between labrats and humans that seems sensible is pets. Maybe dogs in particular. Many popular breeds seem to be prone to genetic issues. I think once owning your own fuzzy little gmo is popular it would seem less dramatic to use it on people.
Domestic rats are very fragile genetically, it would be nice to try to "fix" them. Also science knows a lot about rat genome so it would be even easier than dogs.
Pet rat owners will fall over themselves to throw money at anyone offering a longer-lived and healthier breed. I would pay more money than I care to admit for a rat that lived just a few years longer.
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.
How do you turn a $50 rat into a $600 rat? Get a rat. I don't even what to know how much I've spent on rats over the years, a lot. We do so much in rats for medical research you'd think we could produce some super rats! But as you mentioned, they're so in bread, and even from really good breeders, they're still gonna die shitty deaths from some cancer or respiratory infection. You're right, I'd pay up for a GMO rat that lived a super healthy life, even if it was shorter than other pets. Rats are so awesome!
Tech billionaires might ironically be our only hope here as they are the only ones willing to ignore the bureaucratic red tape.
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.
I'd love to share your expressed hope of billionaires' beneficial impact on society, but alas, the behavior that I see in nowadays' crop leaves much to be desired. To be a bit more clear, I don't necessarily see the incentives that drive the wealthy individuals to align with others' hope.
In sport, are such super-humans allowd to play with normal people.
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.
I mean if we look at the athletes around before the invention of steroids, they weren’t genetically blessed at all.
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.
> I mean if we look at the athletes around before the invention of steroids, they weren’t genetically blessed at all.
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.
>In sport, are such super-humans allowd to play with normal people.
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.
I agree. I could see an opportunity for a future entertainment network or sporting competition where the only participants allowed to compete are those who can document their own genetics. One set of games for ordinary people and another for those people whose parents chose to try to engineer a result. All of this is so new that it may not happen in my lifetime but I'm not prepared to say that it can't.
Like most things it'll be the self-interest of the majority disguised as the "right" decision. If a small fraction of the population are genetically engineered to be more physically capable, the "right" decision will be to exclude them. Once they're a significant fraction of the population, the moral consensus will suddenly shapeshift.
It’s surely not just (or even mostly) a moral decision but a practical one too. Superhumans that dominate mere-humans would make that sport de facto superhuman-only, so if mere-humans want to enjoy competitive sport (and we do!) we’d organize a league of our own. Pretty much exactly what happens with sex and weight categories today.
A lot of elite athletes already select their partners from their peer group. NFL football has examples of second and third generation players trying to make it big in the league since the financial incentives are so huge. It's a lot like antique royalty marrying distant cousins in order to avoid marrying down into the "commoner" ranks. Controlling the bloodlines in order to have kids who can meet or exceed their parents' accomplishments.
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's important to consider the potential long run impact of this work.
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.
Quite a coincidence - last week I was speaking to a parent at my kid's school, he's a scientist and works for a Chinese biotech firm. He told how he has clients in China, who want to change the color of their eye or eliminate deafness in their child.
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.
The one consolation is that these efforts in vanity are unlikely to have broader impacts.
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.
I've said this before but I want to say it again: I think PGS projects that screen for intelligence/EA are genius products. They promise a margin-of-error level improvement on performance that can be fully evaluated only at the time the grown child applies for college, and the products are going to be purchased only by parents who were already going to fold space like a Guild Navigator to ensure their kids get into selective universities, so the vendors win "either way".
As an aside, I would be a lot less irritated with college admissions scandals like we saw a few years back if Lori Loughlin had to transform herself into a floating tank monster to pull it off.
They shouldn't be banned, but regulators would regulate their own shadow if they could.
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.
Some things don’t need citation. Nuclear energy is a great example. You don’t need citations to explain why allowing every country to pursue it is a bad idea.
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.
> People aren’t allowed to mutilate babies what the hell are you going on about?
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.
I agree on circumcision but you made it out that all kinds of mutilation are perfectly acceptable. But that one should definitely be banned, idk why (no -Jewish) Americans are so obsessed with it.
> 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 assume you don’t want to take the risk when it’s comes to your own life/offspring or am I wrong?
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.
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.
I had kids shortly before HeraSight became available, unfortunately. Though I did do LifeView PGT, which screened for disease risk and mental retardation only. It would have been really nice to get a potential ~9 more IQ points in my children via HeraSight. There's no downside so everyone should be doing some sort of PGT screening; it requires IVF to be used so it eliminates the ~30% chance of miscarriage due to trisomy. The PGT itself is very cheap, the expense is in the IVF.
no paywall: https://www.wsj.com/tech/biotech/genetically-engineered-babi...
My wife and I have a whole-genome sequenced embryo that we selected based on Orchid’s results. In our case, we were trying to avoid a specific kind of hearing loss caused by a mutation in GJB2.
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
Can you speak to why you and your partner elected to do WGS, when you could have opted for more specific targeted testing of GJB2?
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?
Going off my memory here:
* 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.
For the record, I don't know that Gusev is skeptical of genetic scoring for disease/disability markers, since that seems to be his professional research area --- a thing he's actually working on, constructively, not just critically. Like, intelligence gets all the press (or at least all the Twitter threads), and there the story is much murkier, but I don't read him as dunking on the kind of thing you're doing.
This is extremely helpful to me, thanks so much for sharing.
> 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.
---
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.
This kind of stuff is taboo for a reason. There are so many ways for it to go horribly wrong for society.
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'm pretty happy we got the Internet!!!! 10/10 would choose again
Hehe don’t blame you for it, it took me a long time to regret the internet and I still hope to be proven wrong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
This kind of blanket ban reasoning is kind of cruel to people with genetic diseases in their family line.
"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)?
This mode of banal cruelty is absolutely everywhere in the law, completely invisible to the majority who don't suffer under its boot.
It's understandable why society would be afraid of doing such things. It feels too much like playing god. Some things can be labelled in a different way to make them more palatable. But in this case i feel the wider harm to society outweighs the potential good to the individual. Which is the same reason i don't like assisted suicide.
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.
To be a bit blunt, God isn’t real and shouldn’t really be part of the discussion here - and I disagree that a belief otherwise is ‘understandable.’
Thank you for your contribution to the discussion, whimsicalism.
"It feels too much like playing god."
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".
Denying people lifesaving medical care is, and will always be, "playing god."
Then that also applies to providing it. If the solution is to provide it to everybody, you can't, so you'll have to be selective. So even creating life-saving medicine means denying it to some people. Moral dilemmas everywhere you tread, as is normal.
> But in this case i feel the wider harm to society outweighs the potential good to the individual.
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.
It's not a simple debate, but you are suggesting unprecedented levels of medical intervention. It's an ethical minefield. Firstly, i'm sure this is not your intention, but you are basically suggesting we should test genetic experiments on human guinea pigs. I'm not an expert in medical ethics but i'm pretty sure it's a major no go however noble the intention (i know new treatments get tested the whole time but this is a level up from that) . You are also suggesting we should use it to solve problems as trivial as colour blindness, even without fully understanding the moral, ethical and social impacts of using gene editing in such a way.
>why society would be afraid of doing such things. It feels too much like 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.
>Before modern medicine something like 20% of pregnancies ended fatally.
This source estimates 1% from 1700 to 1750 in England:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/014107680609901113
I've tried designing information-dense things for colorblind coworkers, and they seemed a bit disinterested in testing it out with me. Even with tools that simulate it, you can still be off, I've found.
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.
We have become too risk averse as a species to make any real progress on this front.
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.
There aren't any risks to take. Modern society is approaching a steady-state solution.
Eugenics and artificial selection results in monocultures. In the long run has the opposite effect of what you're describing.
Maybe it's not risk-aversion, but an adjacent concept I'll call stifled freedom of action.
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.
I think it is fairly shortsighted to think that modern society is approaching "steady state" when we are on the "stick" part of the hockey stick curve of progress.
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.
Steady state solution? Christ, imagine if they had decided that's where they were at in 1800.
> Our ancestors would make the most daring bets in pursuit of a better for their children.
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.
I often think what would happen if somebody were to engineer some sort of quasi universal cure to cancer, and they were to do it out of desperation. Say the cure works, and then this person wanted for it to reach more people right now. Would they become fugitives? Would the long arm of the law chase them to the confines of the world? What would the drugs lobby do if the billions of investment they must throw into drug certification are jeopardized by some Rambo?
Because we all know how batshit insane and evil American billionaires are.
How did your comment get downvoted?
Ah yes because this site is populated by batshit insane evil wannabe billionaires.
It's reductive and inflammatory while adding nothing to the discussion.
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"for any reason other than to cure a fatal disease" ... what about non-fatal but debilitating ? Sounds like you have a pretty absolutist view here ? What other reasonable exceptions can we imagine outside your rigid criteria ? Why should we not have nuanced discussions of the entire spectrum of reasons ?
Also hard to miss your implication of "agree with me or you are on par with a nazi"
What burden of disease are we talking about here?
Ask the question would you be comfortable allowing babies to be maimed or killed in a medical experiment to develop a treatment to some malady?
Make no mistake that is what we are talking about here. You are testing a therapy. Because you are editing the genome adverse effects of the therapy are irreversible and present at birth. Those adverse effects may include maiming or death.
So now that we have established what the stakes are, I ask again, what set of diseases do you think it is worth the risk of maiming and killing babies to develop a cure?
I think fatal monogenic diseases could be justifiable. But even there a valid argument could be raised about alternative approaches - ex. Cystic fibrosis.
Once you get beyond that things start getting dicey pretty quickly. Only a hop, skip, and a jump to nazi medical experiments on the “mentally retarded”. Check out the Belmont Report for more formalized ethical framework for medical experimentation on people.
Minimizing what the Nazis did is not cool and the suggestion that providing treatment for debilitating diseases to infants is ‘on par’ with murdering six million jews and millions more is honestly gross to me.
Keep your rhetoric in check before you start minimizing the Holocaust.
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Your own claim was unambiguous: enrolling fetus/baby/infants (who cannot consent) in a trial for anything other than avoiding certain death is ‘on par with anything the nazis … did in WWII.’
I’m familiar with the Nazi medical experiments and how it informs modern bioethics. What you said is a significant step beyond any bioethicist consensus and trivializes the horrific mass murder that was the Holocaust.
Take care.
This is really gross and there were 100 different ways for you to raise the ethical concern you're (charitably) trying to raise without comparing parents to Nazis.
reality is cruel
> it was never "upgraded" to include male issues like these
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.
> "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!"
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"?
> instead of gambling, you can choose to treat having a genetic disease like being infertile ... I'm totally comfortable if we decide that this sort of thing is going to be criminal,
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.
We are childless. We could use legal reproductive tech like IVF, but we refuse to do so on moral grounds. This is painful for us, but we accept the reality of it, because, among other reasons, we refuse to commoditize human life and to kill human beings[0] to satisfy our desire to be parents.
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.
Human life is valuable because of critical properties, such as the ability to have complex thoughts, feelings, and desires.
A couple cells in a petri dish don't gain moral status owing to having DNA matching Homo Sapiens. That's ridiculous.
> Human life is valuable because of critical properties
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.
I disagree with your framing around embryos being human (largely because we're using our current scientific understanding to change what was intuitive into some abstraction that, itself, we don't understand - consider that pregnancy may be much more common than we know, but that otherwise 'normal' acts may harm these otherwise unknown pregnancies. Do we then prescribe the behavior of women after every sexual act they complete? But a mother causing the unintentional death of her progeny has always been wrong and socially punished.).
I do agree that we don't consider the morality of what science is allowing us to do and I appreciate your arguments.
> consider that pregnancy may be much more common than we know, but that otherwise 'normal' acts may harm these otherwise unknown pregnancies
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.
I'm curious where you place organisms like HeLa cell line[0] in your personal moral framework and world view on human biology.
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?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
These are good questions. Let's enumerate the essential ones.
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.
--
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.
What if, for example, a dentist refuses to remove malformed wisdom teeth because his morals don't allow him to fix problems that a person is born with, and only fixes tooth damage caused by accidents?
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.
>What if, for example, a dentist refuses to remove malformed wisdom teeth because his morals don't allow him to fix problems that a person is born with, and only fixes tooth damage caused by accidents?
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
> If every dentist did this, the genepool would improve
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.
> evolution by natural selection only applies when the adaptation in question affects survivability before reproducing
> 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.
I agree with you and I think the comment you're replying to was callous, but maybe try to show more grace in tone. HN is starting to feel a little more hostile every day, which isn't healthy for open intellectual conversation.
I am well aware of that effect and how it does not refute my claim.
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.
> If every dentist did this, the genepool would improve.
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.
> My "rigid ethics" frowns on eugenics.
This is a funny message to attach to "if you have bad genes, you shouldn't reproduce".
> "if you have bad genes, you shouldn't reproduce"
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?
"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.""
No wonder that you are calling yourself "pessimizer".
Maybe your confident assessment of the horrors of the future is wrong?
Uncharitably - GP likely believes (as many do) that the current zeitgeist of reproductive norms is ideal, as the possibility of it excluding themselves has never occurred to them.
It has occured to us, that is why we strongly oppose it
There are also many (some in the comments to this post) who have excluded themselves because of it.
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.
This is true. However, people with that position tend to reveal it because it supports their argument.
The fundamental problem with eugenics, besides the immorality, is the misalignment of artifical selection with natural selection. The eugenicists always think they know best, but mother nature always gets the last word in the end
For better or worse, modern sanitation, medical care, industrial farming, and predator control have virtually eliminated the effects of natural selection on human genetics. Any changes going forward will inevitably be mostly artificial.
Well then natural selection has spoken. No need to select when it provides no survival benefits.
There is no need to select... until there is
Healthcare is part of the environment an organism lives in…
Utter nonsense. Anything that is possible is "natural."
These are terms of art in evolutionary theory.
I am confused with your position. On one hand you seem to think that eugenics is bad and wrong, on the other had you have a preference on what people should and should not have children — but isn’t it literally eugenics?
> you have a preference on what people should and should not have children
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.
OP doesn't express a preference, just references GP's preference.
Eugenics is still extremely popular and widely used in the form of sex selective abortions. This is one of the main reasons why population sex ratios are skewed in some countries.
Eugenics never went away, we just stopped calling it eugenics.
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.
Interesting have we all forgotten how American politicians literally came out and said 11 year old rape victims should be forced to give birth?
But if a billionaire wants eugenics well that's different then.
Some group of people: I believe X, which contradicts Y
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 think it's pretty easy to get behind disease elimination in principle. >90% of people would be thrilled to use crispr to edit a congenital disease out of an embryo assuming it were as safe as any reasonable medical procedure can be. I think that ship is getting ready to set sail, probably not in the US at first, but the US will probably catch up eventually.
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.
Define "improvement"...
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...
The difference to 1939 Germany is that individual people can choose the traits, instead of a top-down authority. I think this makes a rather big difference, even if it does not remove the ethical concerns.
Rich people with access to the tech can do it now... who tells you that once this matures, Government is not going to "mandate" some "improvements" over wide swath of the population...
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"
There will definitely be negatives to technology like this. But the negatives are not going to be these ridiculous scenarios...
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.
> And the idea of genetically engineering an under-class is equally absurd. Who would buy-in to that?
Artificial selection of slaves has already existed in the US historicially with chattel slavery. It is merely one regime change away
Such policies would be incredibly unpopular, so you would need a true tyrant to make it happen. And even then, genetic editing would be a very expensive and slow option compared to just regular forms of oppression. Can that tyrant keep power for the decades it will take for them to get their subservient work-force?
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?
Such policies will be popular as long as eugenics-apoligists like yourself exist. Gene editing is not slow at all compared to breeding programs of chattel slavery, and it is not subject to short-term economic and military conditions like ordinary dictatorships are. Once it is unlocked, you have a pathway to creating an underclass that can NEVER revolt.
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!
It won't happen explicitly of course. The root comment mentioned "depression", for example, which is at least in part caused by inadequate work-life balance, poor quality of life in general, lack of social fabric, etc... So if you would genetically engineer people to be less depressed, even if you just empirically looked at what genes depressed people have in today's world (as the root comment is proposing), you could end up engineering people that are OK with working long hours for little pay, eating slop, sitting at home doing nothing, never socializing with anyone, obedient to their boss, etcetera etcetera. This would be, in effect, "genetically engineering an under-class", yet it would be easy to defend in the newspapers by just saying "we're only getting rid of depression, how can you be against it?" It's just a logical conclusion if you can think more than two steps ahead.
I agree that this could happen, but this is more unintended consequences and less specifically genetically engineering an under-class.
If the outcome is the same does it matter that there was never a secretive cabal organizing it behind the scenes? You'll happily march towards a dystopia because at least noone intended it to be that way? Is it really unintended if we can foresee it right now and decide to go ahead anyway? I don't get this attitude at all.
The outcome is not the same!
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.
I think you're dangerously naive, anyway I don't think I can convince you (or you me ;), let's agree to disagree. Thanks for your thoughts either way.
"Who wants to buy that?"... really?
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
The cost, complexity, and logistics of genetically engineering millions of people, and raising them, is astronomical. That's not to mention the level of backlash someone would receive for this would be unbelievable. This genuinely feels like something people would go to war over.
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.
Note that kids can't choose for themselves, only their parents. How parents define "improvement" might not always be in line with what the kids would want for themselves either.
Yeah, this is one area where I find the ethics especially confusing. If you try to make your kid taller, and end up giving them bad joint problems, who is to blame? Does the kid have the right to sue their parents? There are already "wrongful life" lawsuits after 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.
Total non-issue. Parenting has never been about what the child wants, only what is best for them.
> more empathetic, more reasonable, better physically suited to lifestyles revolving around thought instead of physical work,
Behold! The perfect man: A simpering, oversocialized, impotent, obedient nerd!
This and your comment upthread read like a textbook example of the naturalistic fallacy. The environment that produced your apparent masculine ideal was not permanent, nor was all of what it produced ideally suited to it.
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.
I am not a naturalist. I simply believe that the industral revolution and its consequequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Humans applied eugenetics to dogs, animals and plants for thousands of years.
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.
Dogs are pretty f*ed up, I'm not sure it's a good example.
One intermediate step between labrats and humans that seems sensible is pets. Maybe dogs in particular. Many popular breeds seem to be prone to genetic issues. I think once owning your own fuzzy little gmo is popular it would seem less dramatic to use it on people.
Domestic rats are very fragile genetically, it would be nice to try to "fix" them. Also science knows a lot about rat genome so it would be even easier than dogs.
Pet rat owners will fall over themselves to throw money at anyone offering a longer-lived and healthier breed. I would pay more money than I care to admit for a rat that lived just a few years longer.
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.
How do you turn a $50 rat into a $600 rat? Get a rat. I don't even what to know how much I've spent on rats over the years, a lot. We do so much in rats for medical research you'd think we could produce some super rats! But as you mentioned, they're so in bread, and even from really good breeders, they're still gonna die shitty deaths from some cancer or respiratory infection. You're right, I'd pay up for a GMO rat that lived a super healthy life, even if it was shorter than other pets. Rats are so awesome!
Great, super rats. There no way that could go badly at all ever.
Put them on a planet and leave them there, at least then it couldn't go badly for us. And no, I'm fairly sure there are no books about this already.
We need super rats (or at least one) to train the super turtles.
They're prone to genetic issues because they're inbred.
So are some groups of human. It would be beneficial to be able to reverse that.
Yes and I don't see how that changes anything I said?
Are you aware of Star Trek lore? Tech billionaires will make their Khan.
Funny thing is that this kind of stuff is considered haram by the CCP who are fanatically dedicated to social order.
Tech billionaires might ironically be our only hope here as they are the only ones willing to ignore the bureaucratic red tape.
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.
I'd love to share your expressed hope of billionaires' beneficial impact on society, but alas, the behavior that I see in nowadays' crop leaves much to be desired. To be a bit more clear, I don't necessarily see the incentives that drive the wealthy individuals to align with others' hope.
I know someone working on this! That's about all I can say for now though :)
In sport, are such super-humans allowd to play with normal people.
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 ..
A lot of elite sportsman are already genetically blessed. They just got there randomly instead of by design.
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.
I mean if we look at the athletes around before the invention of steroids, they weren’t genetically blessed at all.
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.
> I mean if we look at the athletes around before the invention of steroids, they weren’t genetically blessed at all.
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.
>In sport, are such super-humans allowd to play with normal people.
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.
These rules are all made up anyways. The answer is if the people with influence over the decision want it to be the case.
I agree. I could see an opportunity for a future entertainment network or sporting competition where the only participants allowed to compete are those who can document their own genetics. One set of games for ordinary people and another for those people whose parents chose to try to engineer a result. All of this is so new that it may not happen in my lifetime but I'm not prepared to say that it can't.
Like most things it'll be the self-interest of the majority disguised as the "right" decision. If a small fraction of the population are genetically engineered to be more physically capable, the "right" decision will be to exclude them. Once they're a significant fraction of the population, the moral consensus will suddenly shapeshift.
It’s surely not just (or even mostly) a moral decision but a practical one too. Superhumans that dominate mere-humans would make that sport de facto superhuman-only, so if mere-humans want to enjoy competitive sport (and we do!) we’d organize a league of our own. Pretty much exactly what happens with sex and weight categories today.
Sports already select for genetic lottery winners
A lot of elite athletes already select their partners from their peer group. NFL football has examples of second and third generation players trying to make it big in the league since the financial incentives are so huge. It's a lot like antique royalty marrying distant cousins in order to avoid marrying down into the "commoner" ranks. Controlling the bloodlines in order to have kids who can meet or exceed their parents' accomplishments.
Just for womens so far. There are some men athletes for ex. with Myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy.
How would you test it anyway.
The ban is ignored.
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's important to consider the potential long run impact of this work.
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.
Quite a coincidence - last week I was speaking to a parent at my kid's school, he's a scientist and works for a Chinese biotech firm. He told how he has clients in China, who want to change the color of their eye or eliminate deafness in their child.
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.
The one consolation is that these efforts in vanity are unlikely to have broader impacts.
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.
Side note: You folks should watch the movie “the substance”
I think Gattaca is a more relevant movie here.
Or the Masterpiece Society episode from TNG.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Masterpiece_Society
I've said this before but I want to say it again: I think PGS projects that screen for intelligence/EA are genius products. They promise a margin-of-error level improvement on performance that can be fully evaluated only at the time the grown child applies for college, and the products are going to be purchased only by parents who were already going to fold space like a Guild Navigator to ensure their kids get into selective universities, so the vendors win "either way".
As an aside, I would be a lot less irritated with college admissions scandals like we saw a few years back if Lori Loughlin had to transform herself into a floating tank monster to pull it off.
They shouldn't be banned, but regulators would regulate their own shadow if they could.
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 engineering is banned because people will almost certainly use it for something else more nefarious than cure AIDS the first chance they get.
The same can be said of things like mRNA vaccines, but they have done good for society.
You're also just wrong - the first scientist to genetically edit human embryos edited in immunity to AIDS.
the first, but not the last
the methods of cleaning up messes introduced are also kind of disgusting
Citation needed.
Some things don’t need citation. Nuclear energy is a great example. You don’t need citations to explain why allowing every country to pursue it is a bad idea.
Again: citation needed.
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.
You need citation on why authoritarian dictatorships shouldn’t have access to nuclear power?
Yea. Nuclear power is not the same thing as nuclear weapons.
People aren’t allowed to mutilate babies what the hell are you going on about?
Genetic tampering can lead to all kinds of unknowable nightmares.
> People aren’t allowed to mutilate babies
Circumcision?
> People aren’t allowed to mutilate babies what the hell are you going on about?
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.
I agree on circumcision but you made it out that all kinds of mutilation are perfectly acceptable. But that one should definitely be banned, idk why (no -Jewish) Americans are so obsessed with it.
> 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 assume you don’t want to take the risk when it’s comes to your own life/offspring or am I wrong?
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.
Incidentally there is another thread where just this is being discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45867125
Not sure if it can help in your case but definitely interesting.
I think OP might be referring to circumcision.
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.
I had kids shortly before HeraSight became available, unfortunately. Though I did do LifeView PGT, which screened for disease risk and mental retardation only. It would have been really nice to get a potential ~9 more IQ points in my children via HeraSight. There's no downside so everyone should be doing some sort of PGT screening; it requires IVF to be used so it eliminates the ~30% chance of miscarriage due to trisomy. The PGT itself is very cheap, the expense is in the IVF.