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China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

theguardian.com

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Re: China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

#51

Post by withinboredom »

president wrote: post #38
hatracksat wrote: post #17

Who cares about unintended consequences if you're the first person to study them? China gets to deal with a novel problem and will get novel rewards eventually because the west let itself get soft. EDIT: To all the people making Nazi comparisons, we stole the atom bomb from the Nazis. Their science across multiple disciplines was on par or superior. We're smarter than them now because we /destroyed/ them. It's easy t…

You sound like the kind of engineer that skips code review and deploys an untested feature straight into Production.

It's not hard to review your own code. You just need to sleep on it, spend a weekend, then come back. Guarantee it'll be like someone else wrote it.

Re: China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

#52

Post by ak217 »

mattkrause wrote: post #39
sudosysgen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not nearly as much in 2019's modern societies.

Less now, for sure, but you're overlooking a major category. Many of the really bad mutations are embryonic-lethal, which is why a surprisingly high proportion of pregnancies "don't take" or end in miscarriage.

Yes, and many more cause carrier mutations that won't surface until the next generation, or late-onset metabolic or neural disorders that will cripple the individual later in life, or increase mutational load resulting in much higher chance of cancer. The fact that some mutations are benign and others fatal really doesn't change the issue that we don't yet know how to safely edit the human germline.

Re: China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

#53

Post by tuesdayrain »

mwfunk wrote: post #28
hatracksat wrote: post #17

Who cares about unintended consequences if you're the first person to study them? China gets to deal with a novel problem and will get novel rewards eventually because the west let itself get soft. EDIT: To all the people making Nazi comparisons, we stole the atom bomb from the Nazis. Their science across multiple disciplines was on par or superior. We're smarter than them now because we /destroyed/ them. It's easy t…

Medical ethics cares? Anyone who possess humanity and ethics and morals care? Maybe you don't care, but if so, you're a very different kind of person than I am, with very different values (or a lack of values) that I don't relate to at all.

I don't think things are so black and white. In my opinion this research has so much potential to improve humanity that it's unethical NOT to do.

Re: China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

#54

Post by wahern »

coolguy132435 wrote: post #37
wahern wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, when I studied biology in secondary school and as a freshman in college, it was believed that gametes were completely isolated and untouchable by viral infections. Turns out this is not true. But if you believe that gametes are incredibly fragile, I can see how it would be easy to believe this as otherwise you'd expect to see mutants everywhere. I realize the stakes are higher for germline editing, but rational…

Is what you describe the basis of Human Endogenous Retroviruses?

I've assumed so, but I'm not a scientist by trade and never looked deeply into it. I just know that over the years I've crossed paths with several papers that showed infection of gametes (usually sperm) by common viruses and often gave them a cursory look. These papers always catch my attention because what I was taught in school never made sense to me. I mean, I know gametes are in some ways more fragile than most cells, and they are clearly isolated to an extent (for obvious reasons), but the imperviousness I was taught seemed unlikely and unsupportable. And because of that I've always been especially skeptical of arguments premised, directly or indirectly, on the extreme mutagenic fragility of gametes and germlines.

Re: China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

#55

Post by deusofnull »

jandrese wrote: post #14
deusofnull wrote: post #3

Back in my genetics class in Uni, unitended mutations from gene editing struck me as a concern almost immediately. and its scary to think about. these unknown mutations could be benign, harmful, or even helpful, but if they entered the population through procreation... i mean i had an anxiety that the whole human genome could be damaged at a fundamental level. the complexity of the biological machinery that occurs du…

For the most part mutations like that simply reduce the reproductive viability of the offspring. We can't really poison the entire human genome worldwide without going to absolute extremes. Could we engineer a human so irresistibly sexually desirable and voracious that they could spread their genetic material with a subtle recessive defect across the globe in the span of a generation so that it could take effect befo…

Dunno, but all kinds of things could happen with novel co-dependent alleles with devistating effects when the express. Imagine theres a cool gene edit in 100 years that lets you live to 200 easy and it becomes normal for most people to get it. But, it just so happens that thers an early gene edit that was available 20 years from now, less ethically created and expensive. but hundreds of thousands of people get that first life extender.

Then, turns out the better / safer one 70 years from now has a co-expression with the decendents of the people who got it 20 years from now that makes you infertile, senile, or whatever.

thats the danger. If these edits become available broadly, youre not only worrying about co-expressions of edit genes developed at the same time, but edit genes developed at any time in the past (oh and also the rest of the human genome, which we still dont understand fully, and is a base concern for any gene editing whatsoever)

Re: China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

#56

Post by mattkrause »

ak217 wrote: post #52
mattkrause wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less now, for sure, but you're overlooking a major category. Many of the really bad mutations are embryonic-lethal, which is why a surprisingly high proportion of pregnancies "don't take" or end in miscarriage.

Yes, and many more cause carrier mutations that won't surface until the next generation, or late-onset metabolic or neural disorders that will cripple the individual later in life, or increase mutational load resulting in much higher chance of cancer. The fact that some mutations are benign and others fatal really doesn't change the issue that we don't yet know how to safely edit the human germline .

Totally agreed--I think this was a horrific and stupid thing to do.

I just wanted to push back a bit on the idea that medicine is badly "breaking" evolution by keeping people alive.

Re: China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

#57

Post by wahern »

ak217 wrote: post #43
wahern wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, when I studied biology in secondary school and as a freshman in college, it was believed that gametes were completely isolated and untouchable by viral infections. Turns out this is not true. But if you believe that gametes are incredibly fragile, I can see how it would be easy to believe this as otherwise you'd expect to see mutants everywhere. I realize the stakes are higher for germline editing, but rational…

I don't follow. Gametes are isolated from many viral infections, but even assuming that a gamete undergoes viral mutagenesis, that's not evolutionarily novel (viruses follow relatively predictable insertion patterns, and transposons are basically degenerate/grounded viruses that are almost certain to generate mutation events in any given zygote, unlike viral mutagenesis). It's also outside our control, unlike germlin…

Sure, they are more isolated. And in some ways they are more fragile. But my point is that they're not nearly as fragile as we believed. And more importantly a faulty premise--that they're extremely fragile--gave way to a faulty scientific conclusion--that gametes were impervious to common environmental stressors like the many infections that ravage our bodies.

We can't draw simple, categorical conclusions about gene editing, nor even germline editing in particular, because there are no simple, categorical distinctions. Suffice it to say, it's complex. Whenever we try to be reductivist about such things we end up drawing erroneous and even dangerous conclusions; e.g. gamete fragility -> viral imperviousness as solution to observed lack of harm -> underestimation of viral stressors and risks, and overestimation of gene editing risks.

Regarding stakes, what I had in mind was classic economic behavioral experiments where they show that a change in the magnitude of a bet changes choices in an irrational manner even though the expected payoff is exactly the same; even when you take into account marginal utility effects.

Yes, germline edits don't just effect one person, they theoretically could infect all of humanity. But so what? Remember when they were firing up the LHC and people were freaking out at the possible creation of blackholes. Given the error bars in known physics, there was a non-zero chance running the experiments could have destroyed the world.[1] Because nothing we could possibly learn would compensate for losing everything, does that mean we should never have turned it on? No. The calculus didn't change. That germline edits propagate doesn't mean our harm+benefit calculus changes; it's just that one of the risk factors in the equation changes from a 1 to something larger. Other factors, like confidence, may or may not need to be changed.

Regarding the argument that by intervening scientifically we're categorically more culpable than if we didn't do anything, that touches upon the is/ought and naturalistic fallacies. From a utilitarian perspective intervention vs non-intervention is irrelevant. I'm not a Utilitarian (capital U), but I don't see how we can have a constructive, scientific debate outside a utilitarian framework. Such lines of reasoning are more relevant to political and religious contexts.

[1] Well, maybe. Actually, perhaps many physicists would have said that the consensus science would have put the chance at 0. But the best argument was made by people pointing out that the Earth's atmosphere was constantly bombarded by particles far more energetic than what the LHC would create. Which is exactly analogous to germline editing. The fact is, the germline undergoes far more genetic stressors than we once believed. It must follow that it's more resilient than we believed, genetically, developmentally, and from an evolutionary perspective.

Re: China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

#58

Post by CoffeeDregs »

hatracksat wrote: post #17

Who cares about unintended consequences if you're the first person to study them? China gets to deal with a novel problem and will get novel rewards eventually because the west let itself get soft. EDIT: To all the people making Nazi comparisons, we stole the atom bomb from the Nazis. Their science across multiple disciplines was on par or superior. We're smarter than them now because we /destroyed/ them. It's easy t…

Looks as if you're receiving a decent number of downvotes (I upvoted) for expressing some truthiness mixed with too much vitriol.

>Who cares about unintended consequences if you're >the first person to study them? Everyone with a sense of ethics, morals and humanity. But that's an answer to a useless question. Are the expected costs of unintended, likely or allowed consequences less than the expected benefits? If so, then states and societies will press ahead as was done with nuclear weapons, bio-weapons, aircraft, rocketry, etc. With exploration comes understanding and sets of ethics for each were developed to guide those inventions.

>China gets to deal with a novel problem Maybe. I don't think we have 100% certainty that positive results will ever be obtained. Millions of years of evolution have not eliminated harmful mutation from reproduction: mutation has been reduced to a low enough level to allow ongoing propagation (birth defects) and survival (cancer) but is certainly not as low as (Western human-judged) ethical and moral values would like.

>China will get novel rewards eventually >because the west let itself get soft My inclination is to agree with the sentiment (if not the vitriol) of your statement but I'm wavering a bit as I learn more about the complexity and messiness. Of course, the US "pushed" ethical and moral bounds when exploring nuclear technology, chemical warfare, bio warfare, missile technologies, etc. Some of those turned out to be existential threats and loosening ethical and moral values might have been warranted by guaranteeing the existence of our society. But most of them turned out not to be existential threats but instead reasonably nice long-term economic benefits.

While I don't think every child should get-a-trophy-for-participation, I'm not sure we should loosen our ethical and moral standards to pursue genetic engineering. A legit question is: other states will pursue genetic engineering aggressively and how do we respond?

And the result is likely not binary: winning this race does not produce world domination; winning is likely a temporary (10-50 year?), slight technological advantage. Even serious existential threats, such as nuclear weapons, were leaked and duplicated by competing states. And those were rare, easily identifiable items (big atomic or nuclear bombs). Exfiltrating a key genetic engineering masterpiece can be done invisibly with a comb or razor in a checked-bag...

And being a second-mover can be a huge advantage. Just ask Japan (PHS), Africa (mobile-first/only), Hong Kong (cable internet), Chattanooga (utility internet), etc. First movers can over-invest in being the first mover and suffer when advantages of scale, learning or technology kick in. The "center" of the tech world (Silicon Valley) had the worst Internet service in the developed world; but we had the best 1970's phone and cable service on the planet.

Re: China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

#60

Post by dang »

hatracksat wrote: post #32
kkwak wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

true, if tech is the only goal. but I would choose to be lower tech in this case. But perhaps my choices would affect those who might come after me... (That too is both ways though). Some might bring up all the medical advances that came out of the tortures and "studies" from Japan and Nazi Germany. Certainly many advances were made... My friend once told me that there are certain medical "study" records available th…

The tech won't exist In a vacuum though. Suppose this eventually gives the Chinese an edge in precision medicine, your hands might be clean as far as the messy work but unless you ban citizens from visiting how are you going to regulate the health products that will emerge eventually? We can bury our heads in the sand but eventually the rising tide will get our socks wet unless we have the foresight to prepare a litt…

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