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Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos

nytimes.com

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Re: Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos

#141

Post by simplify »

komali2 wrote: post #115
simplify wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several problems. First, what is intelligence? Is it simply math & science? What if we lose other hard-to-measure, essential traits? How much happiness is "better"? Should we "switch on" a gene that makes someone perpetually happier, given the option? What happens when a set of traits becomes popular? Will diversity be lost? Will everyone choose lighter shades of skin?

Those are fantastic questions. Aren't they worth exploring with further research?

Yes, so long as you're not playing with human lives while researching it.

Re: Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos

#142

Post by saidajigumi »

saidajigumi wrote: post #113
komali2 wrote: post #6

>and is sure to renew ethical concerns that some might try to design babies with certain traits, like greater intelligence or athleticism. If America doesn't do it, China will, and in a generation will be swollen with a population so much more fit as to make the question of the US standing toe-to-toe laughable. If China doesn't, Russia will. I want genetic engineering because it's logical that as humans learn to exer…

> our much more intelligent children will realize total species improvement is a better investment I view this as a fallacy which is close kin to the "algorithms are neutral" fallacy. Scenario: we, with our incredibly poor understanding of genetics vs. the total impact of those on a fully-developed organism do this: 1. Make more "intelligent" humans, but oops the genetic modification we make reduces empathy. E.g. the…

I've realized that I have an even deeper problem with the whole notion of eugenics-for-"intelligence" here. It's mired in the better-living-through-[TECH THING] mentality.

I'll digress with an example from medicine: humanity made amazing, world-changing strides in health care on two important fronts: antibiotics and trauma surgery. These areas, the pill and the scalpel, then grew to encompass the vast part of the mindshare of modern Western-style medicine. But at some point the model fails to meet with the real world: pharmaceutical companies spend vast resources trying to create pills that alleviate symptoms, but don't address root causes. Surgeons invent surgeries we don't need, which have no effect on end outcomes. Here, the slowly growing field of "functional medicine" is seeking to move forward with rigorous, evidence-based approaches to diagnosing and addressing many previously intractable (or only superficially treated) conditions by tackling underlying root causes.

Back to the eugenics thing. It presumptively answers the question of "why, as a society, aren't we a whole lot smarter than we are?" with a generic "Better genetics FTW!" I have a counter-hypothesis: humanity is currently terrible at maximizing the potential of the members of society we have right now. I'd go so far as to say that the idea that eugenics-for-smarts is even useful is built on little more than a whole bunch of terrible classist, racist belief systems. Worse, it's like some junior dev ratholing for weeks optimizing the heck some function which uses .001% of the app's resources. There are bigger problems to solve, start with those.

A breadcrumb in that direction: we've now had multiple examples of fantastic high-school level math instructors who pop up, take an underserved student body that an "honors" class series wouldn't touch, and turns them into star math students, knocking down AP Calculus exams with aplomb. Yet the school districts they're in invariably end up fighting these teachers tooth-and-nail. We should be sending in people like field anthropologists to understand and document the personal, social, and pedagogical methods at play here, and figure out how to train teachers and build schools to make these wins fully replicable.

Re: Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos

#143

Post by brianpgordon »

Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #82
laydn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how you portray the US to have a higher moral standard for this subject matter. I wonder if there's a Chinese guy who read the article and said: If China doesn't do it, USA will, and in a generation will be swollen with a population so much more fit as to make the question of the Chinese standing toe-to-toe laughable. If USA doesn't, Russia will. Maybe it is time to start thinking about an international agreem…

It's not moral standards we have, it is ridiculously parochial notions of purity and natural-is-better attitudes. If we fail to free our children from stupidity and ill health, we are the moral imbeciles. If Asian nations increase health, IQ, and happiness through genetic selection and engineering, this will speak of higher moral sophistication. We have right-wing religious conservatives on one side and on the left a…

I share some of your frustration about the irrational preference for "natural" things. Too often these attitudes result in the rejection of critical advances like GMOs and vaccines.

But I also have to preach some caution about meddling with human genetics. At this point we have what I think you can agree is a relatively poor understanding of the potential consequences of splicing DNA in a human zygote. Crashing headlong into an age of careless modifications could be disastrous for the survival of the species.

I just finished reading the Firefall duology by Peter Watts (http://rifters.com/) and one of the themes in the second book is that "baseline" humans are in some ways hardier than modified transhumans. Natural selection has fixed a lot of the bugs in us baselines over millions of years, and that's a hard-won legacy that we shouldn't be too quick to discard for barely-understood alterations.

Re: Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos

#144

Post by sitharus »

saidajigumi wrote: post #113
komali2 wrote: post #6

>and is sure to renew ethical concerns that some might try to design babies with certain traits, like greater intelligence or athleticism. If America doesn't do it, China will, and in a generation will be swollen with a population so much more fit as to make the question of the US standing toe-to-toe laughable. If China doesn't, Russia will. I want genetic engineering because it's logical that as humans learn to exer…

> our much more intelligent children will realize total species improvement is a better investment I view this as a fallacy which is close kin to the "algorithms are neutral" fallacy. Scenario: we, with our incredibly poor understanding of genetics vs. the total impact of those on a fully-developed organism do this: 1. Make more "intelligent" humans, but oops the genetic modification we make reduces empathy. E.g. the…

Nah, we'll just put them in to stasis and send them out on a space ship. There's no way future generations would wake them up for their own gains.

Re: Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos

#145

Post by nonbel »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #11

> They injected a synthetic healthy DNA sequence into the fertilized egg, expecting that the male genome would copy that sequence into the cut portion ... Instead, the male gene copied the healthy sequence from the female gene. The authors don’t know why it happened. This seems like the most remarkable part of this entire article. It sounds like a huge discovery. There's a lot of ethical concerns that can be laid asi…

That is pretty interesting... I've hit a wall on figuring out what they did here but maybe have missed the info.[1]

1a) One male who was heterozygous for a certain mutation donated his sperm:

-"only three adult heterozygous patients were identified by OHSU Knight Cardiovascular Institute physicians and referred to the research team, one of whom agreed to participate in the study."

1b) X females donated Y amount of eggs:

- I didn't see these numbers discussed anywhere

2) One sperm each was matched to each of Y eggs for Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). It isn't clear whether any selection for sperm went on here:

-"Oocytes were fertilized by ICSI using frozen and thawed sperm. Fertilization was determined approximately 18 h after ICSI by noting the presence of two pronuclei and second polar body extrusion."

3) Z zygotes were found at the end of the above 18 hours:

-"zygotes were collected 18 h after ICSI and placed in a micromanipulation drop...Injected zygotes were cultured...for up to 3 days to the 4–8-cell stage"

4) 131 embryos formed from those Z zygotes that got injected with CRISPR-Cas9, consisting of 830 cells total:

-"A total of 830 blastomeres were isolated from 131 embryos, including 19 from control, 54 from zygote-injected and 58 from M-phase-injected groups."

5) A sequence was attained for 730 of those 830 cells:

-"Of 830 blastomeres, 730 (88%) resulted in successful libraries and produced PCR products for MYBPC3 while the remaining 100 blastomeres (12%) failed to generate PCR products and were excluded from the study."[2]

I mostly wanted to know Z, how many and what percent of zygotes survived the CRISPR/Cas-9 treatment. It seems to be missing. I would also like to know X and Y (initial number of women and eggs donated) though.

[1] http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature23305

[2] Elsewhere (the reporting summary) they say "no data were excluded"

Re: Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos

#146

Post by _yvjs »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #88
laydn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how you portray the US to have a higher moral standard for this subject matter. I wonder if there's a Chinese guy who read the article and said: If China doesn't do it, USA will, and in a generation will be swollen with a population so much more fit as to make the question of the Chinese standing toe-to-toe laughable. If USA doesn't, Russia will. Maybe it is time to start thinking about an international agreem…

America, historically, has been defined by a Protestant culture which places a lot of religious and moral significance on conceiving human life, and on God's role in creation. Chinese culture does not, as far as I know, have the same stigma against genetic engineering (I admit that while I have traveled for some time in China, I am relatively unfamiliar with any moral, religious, or cultural issues they may have on t…

> a Protestant culture which places a lot of religious and moral significance on conceiving human life

Er, that would be more characteristic of Catholicism. There's a reason for this Monty Python skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifgHHhw_6g8.

Francis Galton, a product of a thoroughly Protestant society, was already worrying about the negative correlation between socioeconomic status and fertility very shortly after the Industrial Revolution.

Re: Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos

#147

Post by dang »

gressquel wrote: post #127
dang wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racial and national flamewar is not allowed on HN, and we've banned this account.

think banning him is a bit harsh. A warning should be fine. I also don't think he meant to be racist, he is just afraid something as powerful as gene editing can get into hands of wrong people. Not saying all chineese are bad.

I'm always happy to see community members reading others charitably, and I'm also happy to be wrong about any HN user's intentions (and unban or adjust accordingly). However, in my experience comments like this never lead anywhere good in the future, both in terms of their effect on threads and in terms of future output from such accounts. So we'd need a commitment not to post like this again to HN.

Re: Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos

#148

Post by Noos »

komali2 wrote: post #6

>and is sure to renew ethical concerns that some might try to design babies with certain traits, like greater intelligence or athleticism. If America doesn't do it, China will, and in a generation will be swollen with a population so much more fit as to make the question of the US standing toe-to-toe laughable. If China doesn't, Russia will. I want genetic engineering because it's logical that as humans learn to exer…

This assumes that mass genentic engineering will be 100% successful in designing supermen, when it could very well doom a generation of Chinese children to higher risks of autism, infertility, or unseen consequences.

The idea we can control evolution is fairly ridiculous, when we barely even understand it. Most humane people don't want to experiment on generations in the hopes to see that we can.

Re: Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos

#149

Post by chii »

openasocket wrote: post #12
abhi3 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did let them grow for 5 days which should have provided some data. Though what I don't get is why were they destroyed after 5 days? If it's considered ethical to allow abortions for periods up to 20+ weeks, then it should be considered ethical for science as well.

The practical reason is it's not clear how long they would survive. These embryos are in a petri dish, unless they were to implant them in a women's uterus I'm not sure how long they would be able to develop. You might be able to develop them longer than five days, but then you hit the ethical issues. The entire moral argument for abortions is based on bodily autonomy of women, and that those rights trump the rights…

I think i would put the same importance on the well-being of a women and scientific progress.

One shouldn't trump the other.

Re: Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos

#150

Post by chii »

bryananderson wrote: post #135
quotemstr wrote: post #14

Good! For too long, we've been hampered by the limitations of a human nature evolved millions of years ago for a very different environment. All previous attempts at changing human nature have failed. Activism does not work. Grand social movements do not work. Policing language does not work. We now have a chance to succeed in improving ourselves using tools that actually work.

But this is just not true. I know it doesn't feel like it when you get on Twitter or turn on the news, but human beings are far nicer to each other today than they have ever been in history. Violence, poverty, and bigotry are all on gargantuan, multi-century downward trends. The evidence is clear that human behavior can change.

Every period claims they are better than before. Only future generations can truly determine the actual degrees objectively.
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