First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

How much would an insurance company pay to fix high cholesterol, diabetes, cancer etc? I know people spending close $10,000 a year on cholesterol medication. Diabetics' insulin can cost $500 (I don't know how long this lasts), plus the other blood monitoring costs and costs of other complications. Cancer treatment is not cheap but I don't know how to look up the costs.

All of the above costs are mostly covered by insurance, but if you work them out, a $100k treatment can pay off in as little as 10 years.

Of course there is a difference between ensuring someone's kids don't have a condition and fixing it in someone who is already alive. Will parents make this choice even if insurance pays for it?

You are confusing intelligence/wisdom with empathy/ethic.

From an interview with Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist:

"Q: What does that mean in human language? A: Any given couple could potentially have several eggs fertilized in the lab with the dad’s sperm and the mom’s eggs. Then you can test multiple embryos and analyze which one’s going to be the smartest. That kid would belong to that couple as if they had it naturally, but it would be the smartest a couple would be able to produce if they had 100 kids. It’s not genetic engineering or adding new genes, it’s the genes that couples already have.

Q: And over the course of several generations you’re able to exponentially multiply the population’s intelligence. A: Right. Even if it only boosts the average kid by five IQ points, that’s a huge difference in terms of economic productivity, the competitiveness of the country, how many patents they get, how their businesses are run, and how innovative their economy is.

Q: How does Western research in genetics compare to China’s? A: We’re pretty far behind. We have the same technical capabilities, the same statistical capabilities to analyze the data, but they’re collecting the data on a much larger scale and seem to be capable of transforming the scientific findings into government policy and consumer genetic testing much more easily than we are. Technically and scientifically we could be doing this, but we’re not.

Q: Why not? A: We have ideological biases that say, “Well, this could be troubling, we shouldn’t be meddling with nature, we shouldn’t be meddling with God.” I just attended a debate in New York a few weeks ago about whether or not we should outlaw genetic engineering in babies and the audience was pretty split. In China, 95 percent of an audience would say, “Obviously you should make babies genetically healthier, happier, and brighter!” There’s a big cultural difference.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5gw8vn/chinas-taking-over...

> So can we please stop with the deification of the default and get on with progress?

Well said! I fear, though, that a problem with this admonition is that some ascribe the default state to a deity.

However, I'm not sure that the characteristics you mentioned are of the same quality.

Hair color, gender, and other traits are neutral in quality - especially if there's risk in the procedure, it would seem wrong to select these superficial changes to fit the parents' preference. And while it would be nice to look into the future and determine what the human being created would prefer, we can't do that.

A propensity towards colon cancer or a propensity towards drug addiction being added or removed would be another class of traits, having a quality based on removing observed defects. I imagine this class is the most likely to be experimented with first.

The third class would be traits which are relative to baseline humans. Increasing intelligence, perhaps, would be the change that could most universally be described as an unalloyed positive change. What hypothetical future human would mourn their unborn mirror self and wish they were less intelligent? Perhaps the acuity of their vision and other senses would also be desirable. You might also consider changing aspects such as their respiratory or cardiovascular capacity - some humans like Chris Froome or Michael Phelps are extraordinary examples of not just training but innate talent, and wouldn't it be nice if we went beyond reducing the risk of heart disease to make everyone innately talented at breathing? And then you get into issues like whether or not to make them stronger (who's healthier, Froome or Phelps?), or taller, or more good looking (who decides what that looks like?).

It would be great if we could help our kids be healthier. And I (and most people) would like it if my parents had made me smarter. But the technology opens the door to dangerous possibilities.

> It has been observed (in mice) that editing the germline by directly editing the embryo will result in chimerism in the fetus.

This is an implementation detail to be overcome, not a problem with the general concept. And this study seems to have overcome it.

> The earlier Chinese publications, although limited in scope, found CRISPR caused editing errors and that the desired DNA changes were taken up not by all the cells of an embryo, only some. That effect, called mosaicism, lent weight to arguments that germline editing would be an unsafe way to create a person.

> But Mitalipov and his colleagues are said to have convincingly shown that it is possible to avoid both mosaicism and “off-target” effects, as the CRISPR errors are known.