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First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

technologyreview.com

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Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#41

Post by maxerickson »

roceasta wrote: post #38
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).

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.

It seems to be a philosophical position more than anything:

http://wasdarwinwrong.com/korthof97.htm

I would guess it is wrong; we are on a track where genetic manipulation to treat blatant defects will (relatively shortly) be cheaper than the traditional medical treatments.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#42

Post by telotortium »

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).

This isn't an academic paper but at least one academic, John Tooby, has gone on the record as strongly believing that mutations are accumulating in the human population due precisely to this: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26714.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#43

Post by devrandomguy »

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…

The problem with not editing the germline, is that that could easily be used to implement a DRM scheme. The recipient of this sort of editing might have a very high chance of only producing disabled or dead offspring, as they themselves would have been, without intervention. They, and their descendants, would have to procure this same treatment in order to procreate.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#44

Post by rubatuga »

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…

The medical dogma never comes down to do no harm, at least today. The Hippocratic oath is largely symbolic today. The main goal of a physician is to ensure the well being of their patient. This means that they will judge the risks/harm to the benefits and make a judgement, and receive informed consent.

Anyway what’s abhorrent about the blastulation method? Furthermore, I don’t think there is a need to only let those with a large number of recessive deleterious alleles use it. It should be more open to let people edit the genome of the embryo to remove even one or two dominant or recessive deleterious alleles. There’s no reason that if the technology exists, is safe, and is regulated that it should be only used for people with a huge number of genetic defects.

And can’t you just sequence or test one of the cells from the morula stage?

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#45

Post by cellis »

mac01021 wrote: post #40
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.

100 million paying 10k is much more likely. And 1 trillion is in market value, not revenue. Imagine if you could sell a therapy such as a seasonal cure for "common cancer". Drugs can be insanely profitable and there are already several drug makers in the hundreds of billions of market cap.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#46

Post by dlss »

ekianjo wrote: post #31
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…

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.

> Most other drugs have to be proven safe to use even before showing tangible benefits.

What? I encourage you to read about prescription drug side effects. If a drug were safe, it would be over the counter rather than prescription. Prescription drugs are exactly the kind of harm/benefit bundle GP is describing.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#47

Post by devrandomguy »

WalterBright wrote: post #20

Gene editing is probably the only way humans can colonize space. By adapting people to different gravities, air chemistry and pressure, radiation, etc., the need for life support equipment can be significantly reduced, and the quality of life of the colonists can be improved.

I agree with the others that this is a long way off. But just imagine, if 200 years from now, you could grow a space-worthy carapace overnight, with attachments for gear. And organs that transform a dense solid into maneuvering gas and oxygenated blood. In fact, we could just do away with the whole breathing thing, that is so unreliable and unhygienic.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#48

Post by rubatuga »

albertTJames wrote: post #36

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.

Most agree that it is unethical to purposely have a disabled/diseased child if it possible to not have a nondisabled one. In that case, I think it is quite ethical for this technology to be used on those with debilitating genetic defects. We’re in no rush to allow any genome editing other than that.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#49

Post by youfeelbrain »

albertTJames wrote: post #36

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.

I agree. If it's put on hold until too late, it's really likely rash decisions will be made. It's almost as if we aren't learning from SciFi films.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#50

Post by grovegames »

rxhernandez wrote: post #27
WalterBright wrote: post #20

Gene editing is probably the only way humans can colonize space. By adapting people to different gravities, air chemistry and pressure, radiation, etc., the need for life support equipment can be significantly reduced, and the quality of life of the colonists can be improved.

Let me start by saying I'm not a biologist. However, it would seem prudent to think we are much much farther from doing most of what you said than doing terraforming at small levels when we just started editing embryos. Ostensibly the science doesn't even yet exist to do what you are describing whereas funding is the majority of the problem for terraforming at small levels.

I'm confused. Terraforming is 1000+ years away, if we are ever even able to do it at all. I'm unclear of what you mean by 'small levels' because either you are terraforming, or you aren't. You have to create an atmosphere, you need to create a planets worth or water, you need to inject a crap ton of CO2 into the atmosphere to create the material plants will use as building blocks, to create the O2. All of this is millennia away. We've been non stop injecting CO2 into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial era, and that (while a bit of an issue today), isn't nearly enough carbon to begin to terraform a planet.

But for genetically modifying stuff, we're doing really well on that track. Most of the tech needed for designer babies is here. The issues with it aren't the tech existing, but our willingness to create massive numbers of defective offspring before we get a viable glow in the dark human. It's not the tech that's lacking, only our appetite for failed runs and a severe distaste for side-effects. But that's proven to work, CRISPR has already proven to be able to make glow in the dark pigs, so it's a matter of refinement. We don't have the slightest clue about terraforming. Just ideas at this point.

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