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First gene-edited babies claimed in China

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Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#251

Post by joshstrange »

dajohnson89 wrote: post #229
cultus wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with HIV just have to pop a couple pills a day now to take their viral loads to literally undetectable levels. With treatment, people with HIV can expect to live normal lives, and be healthy and active. It's also almost impossible to transmit HIV with such low viral loads.

And how expensive is that treatment?

Truvada which is a HIV prevention drug was priced at ~$1500/mo. I mention it because I know the chemicals in Truvada are similar but IDK the price comparison. Most people on HIV meds are probably hitting their Out-of-pocket max pretty early in the year.

I have had two high deductible plans in the last two year (work changed providers) and here were the things I remember:

Old Insurance:

Deductible: $3,000

Tier: 2

Price: 100%/$60

New Insurance:

Deductible: $3,000

Tier: 3 (maybe 4, I can't remember)

Price: 100%/25%

It was effectively free to me on my old insurance with the copay card (covered $3600) because I would hit my deductible and then have enough to cover the co-pays after. On my new insurance it's not feasible for me to pay ~$400/mo until I hit my OOP ($6000). You might be asking why I didn't look at a PPO plan instead of high deductible, because of the drug tier there was no difference in the price.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#252

Post by landryraccoon »

DennisAleynikov wrote: post #46
dqpb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's ethically black What does that mean?

"unethical" would probably have worked better. sorry for the confusion

If it works it won’t be unethical within a couple of generations.

If it’s highly effective our descendants will think we were barbarians for ever questioning its use.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#253

Post by landryraccoon »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #175
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…

As I said in another thread on this article: On the one hand, hurray for them for trying to eliminate a couple of quite serious diseases. On the other hand, we have very little clue what the long term effects of not having CCR5 will be for these children. Furthermore, do we really trust China to start messing with people's DNA? I could think up several uses for this that are downright dangerous in the hands of a coun…

This technology might not work at all, or it might be highly effective after refinements.

If it is highly effective moral arguments are moot. Genetic engineering will be like nuclear weapons. A nation that desires to be competitive or have economic dominance won’t have any choice, it will be forced to adopt its usage (or be left behind).

Even agreements to control nuclear weapons that could cause human extinction still leave nuclear weapons in the hands of many major nations (and a handful of tiny ones) so international agreements have little chance of curtailing genetic engineering.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#254

Post by nathan_f77 »

Noos wrote: post #250
nathan_f77 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think Christians (theism is just a code word for this, true lower-case theists are rare) feel this way, since they acknowledge the world is not pristine due to the fall of man, and suffering and pain exist. Usually the argument on that is that man is made in the image of God, and has special value due to this. They act as stewards of creation and reflections of God himself, and shouldn't be treated like anima…

That's a good point. I'm sure there are many Christians who would be comfortable with gene-editing to prevent disease. And people hold a wide variety of beliefs, so I shouldn't have made such a broad generalization.

Also pet breeding is a great example. But I think that's one of the advantage of CRISPR over selective breeding. Selective breeding results in lots of genetic problems like hip dysplasia, arthritis, etc. because the gene pool is too small. But I think CRISPR could probably fix most of these issues by splicing in the healthy genes from other dog breeds.

Although I just found this article: https://splinternews.com/meet-the-guy-biohacking-puppies-to-...

I didn't realize there was a DIY bio-hacking community just playing around with CRISPR in their backyard shed. This is concerning.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#255

Post by danenania »

zeroname wrote: post #242
danenania wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being pro-choice doesn’t require nullification of an unborn child’s rights. It’s the recognition that the mother’s right to agency over her own body takes precedence. That does not imply that a doctor or researcher has the right to risk causing debilitating life-long symptoms to another human being at any stage of development without a clear medical justification. By your reasoning, because an embryo has no rights wh…

> Being pro-choice doesn’t require nullification of an unborn child’s rights. It’s the recognition that the mother’s right to agency over her own body takes precedence. > That does not imply that a doctor or researcher has the right to risk causing debilitating life-long symptoms to another human being at any stage of development without a clear medical justification. It's not the doctor making the decision to go ahe…

Again, you are effectively arguing that it would be ethical for a doctor to try to experimentally create a glow-in-the-dark baby if asked to by the mother.

Good or bad science has nothing to do with the outcomes--that's good or bad medicine. There's plenty of 'good science' practiced on lab rats that would immediately become horrifyingly unethical if practiced on humans, but that has nothing to do with how well the scientific method is being applied and what can be learned.

Anyway, this discussion doesn't seem to be going anywhere productive, so I will bid you good day.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#256

Post by sizzle »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #175
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…

As I said in another thread on this article: On the one hand, hurray for them for trying to eliminate a couple of quite serious diseases. On the other hand, we have very little clue what the long term effects of not having CCR5 will be for these children. Furthermore, do we really trust China to start messing with people's DNA? I could think up several uses for this that are downright dangerous in the hands of a coun…

This is truly terrifying and sounds like the plot of a dystopian film. What a time to be alive.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#257

Post by ArchTypical »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #161
carlmr wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>improved memory is absolutely something evolution would select for in primates, especially humans. What if it makes people more scared, because they can remember past experiences better. This could lead to less procreation and thus inverse selection pressure. Only because a trait is superficially good it doesn't mean nature would select for it.

Why would a memory enhancing drug only increase rememberance of negative memories and not the positive and loving ones? Such people could become more active, motivated and procreating more because life seemed more motivating for them because they remembered all the good from the past also?

> Why would a memory enhancing drug only increase rememberance of negative memories and not the positive and loving ones?

There's a psychological phenomenon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#258

Post by skosuri »

kanzure wrote: post #215
skosuri wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hello :-). My method???

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#259

Post by DennisAleynikov »

landryraccoon wrote: post #252
DennisAleynikov wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"unethical" would probably have worked better. sorry for the confusion

If it works it won’t be unethical within a couple of generations. If it’s highly effective our descendants will think we were barbarians for ever questioning its use.

I agree it will change - actually if this becomes medically responsible nothing needs to change. we just need to stop experimenting on humans. once the science is sound it becomes healing humans with gene therapy

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#260

Post by gwern »

skosuri wrote: post #76
wycs wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though thousands of alleles contribute to intelligence, we would only need to edit a few hundred to get extremely large increases in IQ, especially if you perform a round of embryo selection (or even iterated embryo selection) before editing. Editing hundreds of alleles may sound incredible to you now, but I don’t think it will sound so incredible for long. Even ignoring GM, embryo selection can get us pretty far wit…

What you are saying is just not supported by evidence. For example, polygenic analysis of the latest meta-analysis from >250K individuals seems to say that the top several hundred variants explain in aggregrate only 5.2% of the variation in intelligence. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0152-6 (Supplement section 2.3.3 if you don't have access).

You are misunderstanding what 'variance explained' means. It means 'variance', as in, average differences between individuals; nothing to do with the average effect size or possible maxima or anything like that. It refers only to predicting the net effect after, being distributed at population frequencies, most of those hundred variants have canceled each other out. In editing, the population frequencies & distribution don't matter, only the summed effect size of all the variants flipped. Confusing one for the other is like confusing waves on a beach with a tsunami: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#limits-to-iterated-se...

Since they have an average effect size of ~0.05-0.1 IQ points or so, a few hundred of those would in fact be many SDs. You can download the PGS, grab the top few hundred or thousand betas, and sum them if you don't believe me. (I show this with Benyamin et al 2014 in that section above, but no reason one couldn't redo it with a better PGS; the results won't change much.)

And yes, Hsu really does believe this, he is quite explicit in that 2014 paper that that is how it would work (in addition to countless places on his blog & Twitter) and I've discussed it with him in the past.

(As other comments point out, the real problem with this logic is that the hits are usually not causal but tag the causal variant, even if you had some magic CRISPR which could make hundreds of arbitrary edits. That's soluble, but not easily. It is, however, not a problem for selection procedures.)

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