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First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

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Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#31

Post by ekianjo »

alextheparrot wrote: post #28
eggie wrote: post #11

We would need a very particular set of conditions for embryonic editing to be justifiable under a medical dogma that aims to "do no harm." Both parents would need to carry a large common set of recessive deleterious alleles, as this would make embryonic selection of non-carriers very difficult. Then we would need the editing system to be so reliable as to not introduce off-target mutations. In a preimplantation setti…

I'm not certain where the premise that our medicine must "Do no harm" comes from. Chemotherapy, for example, is known for being extremely toxic and harmful, yet the justification is that it often yields better outcomes than no treatment. Why can we not use the same justification for editing DNA? Honestly some therapies cause mutations by design, as some cancers are less capable of DNA repair. I do see one argument, h…

Chemotherapy is more of an exception than the norm when it comes to what treatments are acceptable. Most other drugs have to be proven safe to use even before showing tangible benefits. And even in oncology there are Phase I studies to ensure that your treatment is not Too toxic either. So yeah, Do Not Harm is very much a thing.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#32

Post by roceasta »

eggie wrote: post #19
roceasta wrote: post #6

The talk is of 'genetic enhancement' but the potential benefit seems more boring and necessary to me: removal of many new and as-yet-unidentified mutations. It is thought that these have been accumulating generation by generation since about 1800 when child mortality started to fall.

Why would you throw away the biodiversity of our species? You're forgetting about the huge bulk of mutations that have been tested (and were embryonic lethal). Our rapidly growing species has only accumulated mutations that don't cause us to die, and that's an immensely valuable resource to have. The evolution rate of a species is proportional to its genetic diversity.

>Our rapidly growing species has only accumulated mutations that don't cause us to die

Hygiene, nutrition and medicine (all good things!) also cause us to remain alive where previously natural selection would not have favoured those bearing too great a mutational load.

I doubt that existing mutations have been fully 'tested'. We know that the majority of mutations are harmful and that the brain is far from fully-developed prior to birth, for instance. Being complex there are many genes which control its development and it seems plausible that the result could be sub-optimal without obvious signs of disease or disability. Other things being equal, we could be slower, less resilient, less fertile, etc, than our 18th century forebears.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#33

Post by trhway »

adventured wrote: post #26
cellis wrote: post #15

CRISPR is coming. I seriously think with CRISPR we could see several trillion dollar companies. From cancer and aids cures to fundamentally altering what it means to be human, this is all within the near grasp of CRISPR ( if what i've been reading is to be believed ).

Gilead managed to demonstrate how curing a major disease does not result in such a spectacular outcome (of the trillion dollar scale). They did very well by curing HepC, briefly, and now they're eroding back down after just a few boom years. The same would occur with curing HIV/AIDS. There would be a brief boom derived from sales in some developed nations (most nations would receive the cure extremely inexpensively,…

what you describe just shows that the old business model - pill in exchange for money - starts to show its limitations in the globalized world. Facebook would never get where it is now if it charged $10/year in Africa and $100/year in US. The pharma company who figures out that new business model would become that trillion dollar company.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#35

Post by maxerickson »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #22
evolve2017 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very interested to read an academic paper that made this point. 200 years is a blink of an eye in almost any vertebrate's evolutionary time. Also, to support your claim, one would need evidence that the child mortality of the past reflected genetic unfitness (as opposed to poverty or the unavailability of antibiotics).

200 years is a decent chunk of time from an evolutionary standpoint. We feel it's short because of how long our history has been. But within 200 years you can manufacture N new breeds of dogs, for example. We just underestimate how much change takes place in the world.

Dogs are fertile at 1 or 2 years of age. You can do an awful lot more in 100-150 generations than you can in 10-15 generations (probably more like 6-8. Checking my family tree, many of my great-great grandparents were born ~1850, so for me personally, 5 or 6 generations).

In any case, we have to go back to the question that the GP asked, that dogs are malleable doesn't help us. Does reduced child mortality really cause more mutations to accumulate?

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#36

Post by albertTJames »

Ethics questions need to be raised now, and guidelines have to be decided. The future of humanity is in gene editing. It should not depends on the lazyness of law makers and outrage of godfearing creatures to decide the fate of humanity. It is time we take our evolution into our own hands.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#37

Post by Dylan16807 »

JeffreyKaine wrote: post #29
alextheparrot wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not certain where the premise that our medicine must "Do no harm" comes from. Chemotherapy, for example, is known for being extremely toxic and harmful, yet the justification is that it often yields better outcomes than no treatment. Why can we not use the same justification for editing DNA? Honestly some therapies cause mutations by design, as some cancers are less capable of DNA repair. I do see one argument, h…

Where it comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath

But in that sense it's not literal at all. Again, chemotherapy.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#38

Post by roceasta »

evolve2017 wrote: post #16
roceasta wrote: post #6

The talk is of 'genetic enhancement' but the potential benefit seems more boring and necessary to me: removal of many new and as-yet-unidentified mutations. It is thought that these have been accumulating generation by generation since about 1800 when child mortality started to fall.

I would be very interested to read an academic paper that made this point. 200 years is a blink of an eye in almost any vertebrate's evolutionary time. Also, to support your claim, one would need evidence that the child mortality of the past reflected genetic unfitness (as opposed to poverty or the unavailability of antibiotics).

I'm not making a formal claim just sharing my thoughts. Though I do believe at least one evolutionary biologist has written about this: Hamilton W.D. (1999). The hospitals are coming. Narrow roads of gene land (Oxford University Press). Btw the phenomenon of 'mutational meltdown' is a closely related topic and may re-pay googling.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#39

Post by evolve2017 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #22
evolve2017 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very interested to read an academic paper that made this point. 200 years is a blink of an eye in almost any vertebrate's evolutionary time. Also, to support your claim, one would need evidence that the child mortality of the past reflected genetic unfitness (as opposed to poverty or the unavailability of antibiotics).

200 years is a decent chunk of time from an evolutionary standpoint. We feel it's short because of how long our history has been. But within 200 years you can manufacture N new breeds of dogs, for example. We just underestimate how much change takes place in the world.

I think you're misunderstanding my point, but maybe I shouldn't have taken vertebrates as an example; we can of course imagine some island where massive selection pressures lead to speciation. I would be interested if you have such an example.

However, dog breeds are not species and, given their non-random mating, don't really tell us much about whether 200 years is long in vertebrate evolutionary time.

As far as humans go, I will grant that allele frequencies may have changed if you pick an isolated subpopulation of humans (say, everyone in Greenland) but even that seems extremely unlikely.

As an aside, there are researchers who are using the caste system in India as a way to explore genetic architectures within a civilization. As these castes have existed for considerably longer than the period we're discussing, meaningful allele frequency changes may arise.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#40

Post by mac01021 »

cellis wrote: post #15

CRISPR is coming. I seriously think with CRISPR we could see several trillion dollar companies. From cancer and aids cures to fundamentally altering what it means to be human, this is all within the near grasp of CRISPR ( if what i've been reading is to be believed ).

For each trillion dollars of company, you'll need a billion people to pay $1k each.

I'm not sure current demographics allows for more than one such company in any given sector, and it would need to have a virtual monopoly on whatever it were selling.

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