Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

First gene-edited babies claimed in China

mainichi.jp

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 281 posts

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#191

Post by yesenadam »

nopinsight wrote: post #107
ramraj07 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for the interesting hypotheses regarding the evolution of intelligence. I have a somewhat different take and would like to share: Some of the most intelligent people in history including renowned philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians did not seem to focus on using their intelligence to acquire as much power or wealth as possible. They seemed to enjoy contemplating more universal and deeper questions…

Some of the most intelligent people in history including renowned philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians did not seem to focus on using their intelligence to acquire as much power or wealth as possible.

More significantly, they tend to not have children.

"Men of the highest genius who were childless include Newton, Faraday, and Mendel; Vivaldi, Handel, and Beethoven; Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle; Plato, Aquinas, Bacon, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant and Mill. Anyone who thinks he can frame a list of comparable individuals who had on the average enough children to counter-balance the childlessness of these, is welcome to try; but he will not succeed. ...Just below the very highest level, and average number of children is again far below the average for people of no intellectual or artistic distinction. And it is, again, spectacularly depressed by the huge contribution of the childless: Copernicus, Swift, Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Haydn, Dalton, Francis Galton himself - to mention a few examples at random." (David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales)

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#192

Post by jakobegger »

sanxiyn wrote: post #127
jakobegger wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is not. Heritability does not mean that there is a simple correlation between a trait and a small number of genes that could be exploited for targeted manipulation. Take height: Height is extremely heritable. If your parents are both tall, you are very likely to be tall as well. But height is influenced by thousands of genes, and each individual gene has only a minuscule influence. And each of those genes is a…

On the other hand, we can (today!) predict height from raw sequence with correlation 0.65: http://www.genetics.org/content/210/2/477 . It does not mean we can do such prediction for designed sequence (predictor likely will fail to generalize), but it can be used to select from natural variation. I don't see any wishful thinking here.

Yes, selecting the "tallest" embryo for implantation sounds somewhat feasible. It's similar to selective breeding with a shorter feedback loop. The only downside is that you are only selecting for genotype, instead of phenotype, so your model might accidentally select for some other things that you didn't expect.

But that's very different from designing an embryo by direct genetic modification.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#193

Post by nradov »

ramraj07 wrote: post #70
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…

Based on patterns in the past 2000 years of Chinese history, I suspect they're more likely to undergo a violent revolution before they have a chance to remake the world through eugenics or genetic engineering.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#194

Post by [deleted] »

buboard wrote: post #143
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.)

maybe we should be screening couples before we allow them to copulate, then. taking gambles with randomization experiments is 100% ethically indefensible. please, spare us the "100% correct" and certified ethical positions

[deleted]

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#195

Post by carbocation »

jpgvm wrote: post #95
carbocation wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we can find people who disagree with the broad consensus on climate change, too. Is there a broader point you are getting at?

Facts are not opinion. Morals and ethics however definitely are. You can show with empirical evidence that climate change is true. However no matter how hard you try you can't show with evidence that your moral framework or ethics are somehow the "one true moral/ethical truth".

Kiran is 100% correct in describing the scientific ethical consensus. These things are far more closely related than you believe.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#196

Post by carbocation »

chr1 wrote: post #130
carbocation wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Can prevent disease" implies that you are not doing experimentation. If you're doing experiments, it means you don't know if you can.

You can prevent disease if you make experiments and learn how to prevent it. So in this case experimentation is a first step in preventing disease.

In what ethical framework is experimenting on humans the first step?

(The answer is none.)

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#197

Post by nradov »

yesenadam wrote: post #191
nopinsight wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the interesting hypotheses regarding the evolution of intelligence. I have a somewhat different take and would like to share: Some of the most intelligent people in history including renowned philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians did not seem to focus on using their intelligence to acquire as much power or wealth as possible. They seemed to enjoy contemplating more universal and deeper questions…

Some of the most intelligent people in history including renowned philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians did not seem to focus on using their intelligence to acquire as much power or wealth as possible. More significantly, they tend to not have children. "Men of the highest genius who were childless include Newton, Faraday, and Mendel; Vivaldi, Handel, and Beethoven; Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle; Plato, Aquina…

One wonders whether those geniuses were actually childless, or if they perhaps sired some unacknowledged children?

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#198

Post by carbocation »

barry-cotter wrote: post #176
carbocation wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The modern biomedical ethical framework comes out of Nuremburg in response to Nazi atrocities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code

There’s nothing in there that would obviously prohibit the experiment we’re all discussing here. I can see how someone who deals with university IRBs or professional bioethicists might think there is but if we used risk reward thresholds as high as they do, or held to the precautionary principle that strongly we would still be discussing whether fire was a good idea. IRBs are a one way ratchet with tiny incentives to…

You’re saying that you can see how an expert would think that there is something in the Nuremberg Code that prohibits the experiment we are talking about here, but you know better than the experts?

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#199

Post by carbocation »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #110
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.)

I don't know if I agree with that. Some theists believe that we shouldn't tamper with God's perfect creation, because everything happens for a reason (including miscarriages, birth defects, and genetic diseases.) Atheists might believe that natural selection has got us this far, so it must be a pretty good process. A scientist shouldn't change anything, because they will be adding unnecessary risk to the natural proc…

This is an inaccurate understanding of CRISPR, which is not yet at the point where zero off-target effects can be expected. That is an important aspect of this discussion.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#200

Post by glenneroo »

sanxiyn wrote: post #89
hanniabu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does CCR5 have no other purpose? Hard to believe that it'd exist if it wasn't needed.

There are literally millions of healthy people without CCR5 receptors. (Millions is approximately 0.01% of world population and this mutation's frequency is certainly greater than that.)

What about possible dependencies which are also missing or required in those healthy people? That is, if you remove CCR5, are there other components which should be removed/replaced/inserted to enable the anti-HIV functionality? I would venture to guess that nobody really knows... yet.
Post reply on HN