61–70 of 96 posts
Abortion laws have tightly given time periods on when embryos and fetuses exist in the human/non-human spectrum, and thus, this simple legal loophole will allow you to do anything you want to it during the non-human phase.
Roe vs. Wade will always win forever. There's an army of pinkhats who will kill you if you say otherwise.
We are terrified, because we don't know, how to handle it yet. This should not stop us, the humanity. Our descendants will figure it out. There is no progress, if we are afraid of mistakes. The real problem is when we don't learn. Gattaca is a good example, what we should avoid.
Gattaca is a movie filled with terrible science (there is no evidence of a simple gene change for intellectual ability, etc) and characters that are terrible people (NASA today doesn't allow people with heart conditions to go to space, no genetic dystopia required, because having astronauts die in transit is suboptimal to the mission). I really wish that movie didn't get brought up every time gene therapy makes anoth…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I'm sure some variant of that will occur at some point, many genetic disorders are relatively simple and well understood. Even if we are still learning, there are dozens of disorders we could eliminate if we had robust genetic editing capability with pretty good odds of success.
"... many genetic disorders are relatively simple and well understood." Are they, really? As far as I know (and I am not a specialist, so someone more qualified may correct me), gene transcription and translation is far from well understood. It's as if we don't have access to the source code for the compiler, only the machine code and the syntax. You can draw correlations and infer causality from your changes, but yo…
Adding single proteins and flipping single genetic bits in single cell types in single organs is not the kind of thing that generally causes cascade failures. There are always exceptions, but in general biology is pretty robust to such changes. In fact, those are exactly the kinds of changes that occur from generation to generation. And these are precisely the kinds of systems that have been under deep study for the past four or five decades.
[1] https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/hbb/ [2] https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/brca1/ [3] https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/p53/
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> Doctor: So do you want the $500 edit to ensure your child won't have diabetes. How about the $2,000 Autism edit? Then the gender change edit is to late to perform. We could do artificial semination and guarantee the gender of your child. That's a straight up violation of the Hippocratic oath and blackmail/racketeering combined. We should enforce it strictly, vigilantly, and put doctors who attempt to do this in jai…
> How do you address this with policy? The same way we should be addressing inequality right now. How _will_ we address this with policy? The same way we already do: meaning that we do not, and in fact are thrall to an army of lobbyists and interest groups who would have us believe this inequality is not just necessary but in fact morally redeemable.
Which is, in fact, already happening without genetic enhancement: the Olympics are a pretty much a display of peak human genetic fitness, and no one loses their mind about it.
What would be a problem: genetically enhanced humans reach some critical mass and decide to purge the non-enhanced ones à la Eugenics wars in Star Trek (purely hypothetical)
We ethically shouldn't do this. We should not edit human embryos. I can't write 5 pages of why we shouldn't but the fact that we could make the difference between the have and have nots will only get bigger and bigger. Doctor: So do you want the $500 edit to ensure your child won't have diabetes. How about the $2,000 Autism edit? Then the gender change edit is to late to perform. We could do artificial semination and…
Jokes on you! Abortion laws have tightly given time periods on when embryos and fetuses exist in the human/non-human spectrum, and thus, this simple legal loophole will allow you to do anything you want to it during the non-human phase. Roe vs. Wade will always win forever. There's an army of pinkhats who will kill you if you say otherwise.
We ethically shouldn't do this. We should not edit human embryos. I can't write 5 pages of why we shouldn't but the fact that we could make the difference between the have and have nots will only get bigger and bigger. Doctor: So do you want the $500 edit to ensure your child won't have diabetes. How about the $2,000 Autism edit? Then the gender change edit is to late to perform. We could do artificial semination and…
That ship may have sailed in a society where you can legally kill the embryo or cut 1/3 of the skin off a newborn infant's penis.
We ethically shouldn't do this. We should not edit human embryos. I can't write 5 pages of why we shouldn't but the fact that we could make the difference between the have and have nots will only get bigger and bigger. Doctor: So do you want the $500 edit to ensure your child won't have diabetes. How about the $2,000 Autism edit? Then the gender change edit is to late to perform. We could do artificial semination and…
Making a rich child immune to diabetes or autism doesn't hurt poor people. It's strictly a net gain.
What's fundamentally different between this and, say, prenatal vitamins or good nutrition? Should we ban women from taking folic acid because it gives an advantage to people who can afford it?
Let's say an in-vitro preventive for diabetes could be developed but is blocked because of concerns about gene editing. That means thousands or millions of children will contract diabetes who wouldn't have if the preventive had been available and will die prematurely. How is that a good thing?
I can sort of buy the arguments for purely cosmetic changes like selecting sex or eye color or whatever. I can vaguely grasp the arguments against selective intelligence or physical strength enhancement. But to refuse to prevent diseases? Why?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We ethically should.
Agreed 100%. Why assume it's going to lead to some dystopian future when technological progress has shown that advances like this come down in cost immensely over time. Even an insurance system would want in on subsidizing these procedures if it meant an upfront cost versus long term or lifelong expensive treatments. Edit: Why even assume it would be an insurance subsidy -- the government has a strong motivation to r…
Wait a minute....