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First gene-edited babies claimed in China

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Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#61

Post by nradov »

BurningFrog wrote: post #48
nradov wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genetic engineering might be able to prevent certain inherited diseases, but otherwise major net improvements are unlikely. A boost in one area tends to cause problems in other areas. That's why evolution through natural selection hasn't significantly increased average human intelligence over the past few thousand years. The average human genome appears to be close to a local maximum.

Human intelligence has not increased because it has not been strongly selected for. If it was maximized, at the expense of other traits, a lot could definitely happen. > The average human genome appears to be close to a local maximum. Absolutely, but it's maximized for the environment we lived in 10-100 generations ago.

"Superior IQs are associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bad-news-for-the-...

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#62

Post by modzu »

carbocation wrote: post #32
dqpb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"good but error prone" describes all of medical care right now. Hell, pharmaceuticals aren't even good in many cases.

That's absolutely not the standard for deciding to conduct an experiment on humans.

remember also its an unborn child -- its not an experiment on the living, consenting adult.

child grows up, experiences whatever unknown consequences of the genetic experiment. thanks dad!

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#64

Post by citilife »

This sounds super sketchy:

> He said the parents involved declined to be identified or interviewed, and he would not say where they live or where the work was done.

> There is no independent confirmation of He's claim, and it has not been published in a journal, where it would be vetted by other experts. He revealed it Monday in Hong Kong to one of the organizers of an international conference on gene editing that is set to begin Tuesday, and earlier in exclusive interviews with The Associated Press.

To be honest, _if this is true_ it sounds like he modified them without the parents knowledge or consent. Usually, I'm super skeptical of any "research" coming out of China. However, I've suspected that China has been doing this for a while anyway (without sharing it). So I'm left with three possibilities in my mind:

1. Government is releasing this to see how the world will react

2. The doctor excited to share their work, shared it - but did the work without the parents consent

3. Parents did this knowingly and in a controlled way

Of those options I'm betting #2 followed by #1. Highly doubt even if the parents consented this was entered into with the knowledge of the risks. Seriously if they are using Cas9 who knows what else could go wrong.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#65

Post by nostrademons »

carbocation wrote: post #18
wycs wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps this is true. I do not know. But human enhancement through genetic engineering is coming. Changes in traits, such as IQ, by 5+ standard deviations looks possible. We would be fools to outlaw it here, for we would become as children compared to future citizens of nations that do not share our taboos.

> Perhaps this is true. I do not know. But human enhancement through genetic engineering is coming. Changes in traits, such as IQ, by 5+ standard deviations looks possible. We would be fools to outlaw it here, for we would become as children compared to future citizens of Asian nations. What is the relevance of "Asian nations?" to this conversation? Also, we're talking about a specific experiment that was allegedly c…

"What is the relevance of "Asian nations?" to this conversation?"

I would assume it's because the article describes genetically-engineered babies in China, so obviously it's not outlawed there (or if it is, the law is not enforced). Grandparent poster is pointing out that if genetic engineering gives survival or competitive benefits to those who do it, it doesn't matter what your personal ethical, moral, and legal standards are, because your whole society will be outcompeted by societies without those strictures.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#66

Post by ganz »

nradov wrote: post #47
wycs wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true. Intelligence is polygenic. The average human is no Von Neumann. At the very least genetic engineering could raise average IQ to Von Neumann’s level. We know that phenotype is possible with no ill effects. It will likely take us much further.

You haven't addressed my point. No one disputes that intelligence is partly genetic. However if it was possible to raise intelligence through genetic engineering with no ill effects then why hasn't evolution increased the incidence of that phenotype already?

Not my area of expertise, but I think the intuition for why evolution didn't make us all Einstein's comes in two parts:

(1) IQ is very polygenetic - a big IQ gene might be 0.1 IQ, and there aren't a lot even that large, if I recall the large genome wide association studies done on this. As GWAS studies get larger we find more, but they're all super small effects.

(2) Having an extra 0.1 IQ point is easy to lose in the noise of other effects on having offspring.

So even if we assumed IQ was perfectly correlated with more surviving offspring in modern societies, it might take an extremely long time (even longer than a whole planet and a thousand years) to make a detectable difference.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#68

Post by beefsack »

citilife wrote: post #64

This sounds super sketchy: > He said the parents involved declined to be identified or interviewed, and he would not say where they live or where the work was done. > There is no independent confirmation of He's claim, and it has not been published in a journal, where it would be vetted by other experts. He revealed it Monday in Hong Kong to one of the organizers of an international conference on gene editing that is…

Your quotes also highlight the possibility that this is all fabricated.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#69

Post by danenania »

zxcvvcxz wrote: post #26
carbocation wrote: post #8

> It's "unconscionable ... an experiment on human beings that is not morally or ethically defensible," said Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a University of Pennsylvania gene editing expert and editor of a genetics journal. This is 100% correct. (COI: Kiran was my postdoc while I was a student in the lab a decade ago.)

Why? Seriously why? We do so many unnatural things to us through technology. The article discusses editing genes to try and prevent viruses.

Because it requires medical experimentation on human beings who can’t consent to it. Is it really so difficult to understand why that’s wrong?

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#70

Post by ramraj07 »

nopinsight wrote: post #33

Here is a controversial article published in 2013 by an evolutionary psychologist that everyone should give some thoughts on: Disclaimers: I do not have the expertise to evaluate its veracity but if true it will affect everyone in the world in some important ways within a few decades (the effects might already start to appear as we see how fast China has developed technologically. Yes, technology transfer is clearly…

Thanks for that super weird article. The author's motivations for supporting China's eugenics efforts are puzzling for sure.

Thankfully we might be safe for the time being. IIRC the BGI IQ sequencing initiative did not lead to any meaningful discoveries since it's not yet obvious or fully proven yet that IQ is that heritable.

My 50c is that we as a population have currently stopped evolving regions of our genome that can keep resulting in progressively higher intelligence, for two possible reasons: 1. there's some evidence at least from my view that any further increase in intelligence will cause other side effects like depression and autism (or perhaps a more intelligent version of us cannot unsee the futility of our lives?); 2. It's not in the interests of the population as a whole to continue having a fight between individuals having heritably different IQs, i.e. we have evolved into a local minima so that all IQ differences are stochastic and it's really hard to leave this minima through mutations.

I think the second possibility makes sense because intelligence is such a huge evolutionary advantage that a population with high instability in this trait might be doomed (more intelligent people can cheat more easily for short term personal benefit at the expense of long term population benefit). I really think that one of the first things modern humans evolved was the genetic ability to make sure that intelligence was completely randomized among the population, and I now hope that's true also because of all these efforts because if it's true none of these efforts would succeed for a long time.

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