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First gene-edited babies claimed in China

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Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#211

Post by empath75 »

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.)

> is not morally or ethically defensible

Based on whose ethics and morals? Eventually a country is going to go all in on robotics and genetic engineering, ethics be damned, and the rest of the world is going to be left in the dust -- economically and militarily.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#213

Post by booleandilemma »

This is how China is going to take the lead. They will start breeding disease-resistant, stronger and smarter humans, and the west will take the moral high ground, tweet about how evil China is on their new phones, and fall behind.

Our ethics will be our downfall.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#214

Post by WhompingWindows »

wonderwonder wrote: post #12

There have been a good deal of medical and technological breakthroughs over the last couple decades. Reusable rockets, VR, machine learning, etc. This is the first article I have read that has made me realize that the future is right here, right now and there is a very high probability that things are now going to change rapidly. One thing to consider is that via crispr and stem cell treatments, genetic changes can b…

Crispr/CAS9 is not necessarily about large sums of money, though. It's a cheap technique, I could probably teach you it in 3 days of lab work, and someone with lab experience could learn it even faster.

The issue is more the genomics. We can tinker with genetic code quite effectively these days, however we can't reliably predict which developmental processes will be affected by our tinkering; in short, we are far behind in our understanding of the array of specific roles of genes beyond the narrowly defined disease pathways we want to affect.

Just as an example, say you want to change the encoding for one of the dopamine receptors to discourage dopaminergic activity, hoping to lessen the risk of addiction and reward-based activity. Well, dopamine is also involved in dozens of other processes, including movement, executive function, and more. Who's to say what effects will occur in a fully grown human?

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#215

Post by kanzure »

skosuri wrote: post #104
wycs wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I think the claim "one can raise IQ several standard deviations by editing https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.3421.pdf

Yeah, know his work, and I don't think he'd agree with you: http://www.genetics.org/content/210/2/477

Your method of modifying human height is naive because it assumes that your genetic modification technique to increase height would need to modify or even know about height alleles. edit: We last talked October 2015, hi.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#216

Post by Jtsummers »

xenadu02 wrote: post #123
buboard wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh wow. CCR5 has been found to have a role in memory recently. Knockout mice have better learning[1] and pronounced increase in spine formation/turnover[2]. These babies are going to have super-memory: 1. https://elifesciences.org/articles/20985 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29379017

Almost certainly not; improved memory is absolutely something evolution would select for in primates, especially humans. Most mouse models don't replicate in other animals either.

You have to live to reproductive age for your genes to carry on. So a genetic difference that improves outcome for adults, but harms children won't be carried on as often (per other comments, this one may improve memory--in mice--but has negative effects related to resisting common diseases like the flu). On the other hand, genes related to cancer perpetuate because their impact often is felt after primary reproductive age (at least historical reproductive age, since we've started having children later in life over the last century).

Additionally, nothing has to be selected (evolutionarily speaking). It's a stochastic process. We could be one base-pair swap away from perpetual youth, and never see it because it just doesn't happen (or when it did happen they died from other circumstances before reproducing sufficiently to spread the genes wide enough to be useful).

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#218

Post by barry-cotter »

carbocation wrote: post #198
barry-cotter wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You are an expert in your field of medicine. You are much better at making predictions from data in it than lay people and you are vastly better at effecting changes in your domain of expertise than laymen. That’s real expertise, like engineers, meteorologists, astronomers, microeconomists, or engineers have. Then there are people who are experts on talking about something but have no expertise in doing. Art historians are quite close to astronomers here in that they can be very good at out of sample tests and prediction but have limited ability to do things because their field doesn’t call upon them to do more than render accurate judgments. Then there are people who master a body of lore, who are called upon to discuss things. Ethicists are in this group, like priests, pastors or imams.

Ethicists are experts in talking about ethics. They have no special expertise in acting ethically, compared to other philosophers[1].

Ethicists have expertise in what amounts to a body of administrative law, like rabbis, imams or canon lawyers.

And we have strong evidence of actual harm caused by them. If bioethicists can’t get their shit together enough to defend compensated kidney or gamete donation they aren’t even broadly neutral. There are people being paid to argue against saving lives, and against helping to bring into the world new lives that are actively wanted. There are ethicists who argue that poor people can’t really consent because the offer of some good to sufficiently poor person qualifies as duress.

The Nuremberg Code is good. The system of IRBs and bioethicists built up around it is not just bad, it’s genuinely awful.

[1]The moral behavior of ethics professors: Relationships among self-reported behavior, expressed normative attitude, and directly observed behavior Eric Schwitzgebel & Joshua Rust

https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHTMB-4

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#219

Post by AllegedAlec »

aaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #169
valtism wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked with enough legacy code to know that playing around with seemingly unused areas can have unexpected consequences. The trouble here is that we can't see those consequences until they end up hurting someone.

The genome is the ultimate legacy code: - it's been written for billions of years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Earliest_biologica... ) - without any sort of upfront architecture or planning - the development methodology can be summarized as "change characters randomly and see if it compiles" - incredibly bloated ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA ) - contains random snippets copy/pasted fro…

> incredibly bloated

This would actually be preferable to how DNA seems to evolve. In most systems, there's actually quite an acute constraint to genome length due to the Error Threshold; when a genome gets too large, it has too many mutations and therefore the 'fittest' genome, often called the 'master' genome, cannot be sustained in the population. Therefore, there's quite a lot of evolution where the genome becomes essentially minified. Most often, this is done by overlapping genes on the DNA, (mostly by shifting the reading frame by one or two nucleotides for one of the two genes).

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#220

Post by wagutina »

booleandilemma wrote: post #213

This is how China is going to take the lead. They will start breeding disease-resistant, stronger and smarter humans, and the west will take the moral high ground, tweet about how evil China is on their new phones, and fall behind. Our ethics will be our downfall.

Rather "and do the same" than "fall behind".

We are taking the Chinese route for surveillance, data, AI. It's going to be the same for genetics. Maybe even faster because people don't want to be spied on but want to have stronger/resistant/smarter children, especially when they'll see other people getting those advantages.

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