We need a conversation about the future of human genetic enhancement

This is a space ripe for entrepreneurs to build in.

The article talks about things like determining height, but that's a silly thing to focus on because it is enormously complex. The things to focus on are the single gene alterations that have large benefits, and that can be done either now or very soon in humans, with low cost and high reliability.

What can be done now or soon includes:

a) additional muscle, via myostatin or follistatin, with human trials on non-genetic manipulation of these proteins already showing positive results, at least one human recipient of gene therapy, several natural human mutants, and years of heavily muscled animal studies.

b) telomerase gene therapy, if you're willing to take the cancer risk. It lowers cancer incidence in mice, counterintuitively, but mice have very different telomere dynamics from humans. Also at least one human recipient.

c) extra lysosomal receptors, which has been shown to restore youthful liver function in rodents.

d) and fifty or more other genes with varying degrees of support for things ranging from a halving of post-stroke ischemic damage to lower pace of generation of amyloid to a whole range of other things that sound worth having.

e) and the hundreds of single-gene mutations that cause serious disease. Fixing those.

This is the stuff that will be rolling into action over the next decade. It is so cheap that it will absolutely go the way of early stem cell treatments with widespread availability via medical tourism. That is where entrepreurs can make a real impact The skills needed to build CRISPR therapies are just as widespread as those needed to run a stem cell clinic - and overlap to a considerable degree, so that a large fraction of the existing stem cell centers are quite capable of adding gene therapies to their offerings given a few years of organization.

This is a space that will need better public understanding and education before any long-term useful result emerges.

> A January 2016 poll of a thousand American adults conducted by STAT and Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health found that although 69 percent of Americans had heard nothing or not much about genetic enhancement, nearly the same number felt that genetically altering unborn babies to reduce their risk of developing serious diseases should be illegal. Eighty three percent felt that genetic alterations to improve the intelligence or physical characteristics of unborn babies should be banned.

If use of gene-editing technology in humans runs far and fast ahead of public support, the discussion will look like a mixture of the moral panic over cheap and popular drones and that over the videos alleging the sale of fetal tissue.

The choice of messages includes: "gene selection improves lives", "cool! luminous goldfish", and "their babies will be Aliens!". Choose wisely.

I don't think that really makes sense because biological systems are constantly being recombined naturally. You're not introducing anything new, just creating a new combination. Every act of sexual reproduction is "tweaking" on two existing models in production that "work" as is.

It's more akin to putting out a new library or programming language (designed thing) into the internet (complex ecosystem).

Human biology is a rather robust system.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/survival-of-the-fl...

>"Let's change this very, very large, very, very old system that we don't really understand by just tweaking this one value that we're pretty sure does X ... and put it back into production. What could possibly go wrong?"

In a good number of cases, what some nucleotide does is pretty obvious.

There is a safer approach that can also result in very good ends. Embryo selection (what was in the Gattaca film). You make up 20 embryos in the lab, sequence all of them, pick the best one according to a set of criteria.

Estimated IQ gain is in the range of 10 IIRc per generation. Chinese are planning to do this - if they pull it off, inside 2 generations they'd have better human capital than Ashkenazi Jews (.2% of world population, 30%+ of physics Nobels, due to average verbal IQ of 115. That really skews distribution in the high-end...)

In the US, perhaps.