71–80 of 150 posts
Man, those racist are gonna have a hard time deciding what they hate more... other races or other species... do they side with the Neo-Neanderthals cooked up by accident in china or with the Mexican immigrants??
It seems like a dead certainty that gene editing creates unintended mutations, since to do otherwise would require the technique to be 100% controllable and verifiable, and it is neither. So the only question is whether those unintended mutations are harmful or not, either to the immediate generation or subsequent ones. Because there is so much uncertainty around that question, these kinds of experiments are ethicall…
What I would worry about is:
a) Short term suffering from failed experiments.
b) Reduced genetic diversity as everyone scrambles to get "the best" genes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The concerns about the LHC were a hell of a lot more hypothetical than about germline editing, and that did change the calculus. We know that current genome editing techniques have off-target effects. You're arguing from some abstract philosophical perspective, but the practical situation is much simpler. Nobody is drawing categorical conclusions and saying that we should never edit the germline, and at the same time…
I return to my original point: Demanding perfection [and omniscience] is unreasonable and unnecessary. All of these other concerns are typical of any medical procedure: you attempt as best you can to integrate known risks as well as unknowns (known unknowns and unknown unknowns) into a cost and you compare it to the benefit, and if the benefit outweighs the cost then go for it. For germline editing in particular the costs will likely outweigh the potential benefits in most cases for some time, but we still need to make that determination regularly, honestly, and in context (actual proposed cases), without our fingers on the scale.
Issues like consent are ancillary. And they exist regardless of gene therapy. People don't consent to be born. Or consent to be "identified" through family members choosing to publish their genetic information. Social engineering experiments have lead to holocausts, even when they began innocently; if you go back far enough in the causal chain, they're all innocent and completely unintended. These problems, high-stakes consequences, and paradoxes already exist; we already struggle with them. Gene therapy, not even germline therapy, create fundamentally de novo issues. That's the real hubris, the delusion that we're not already playing with fire.
At the end of the day what the Chinese researcher did was reprehensible, but mostly for very particular reasons. I'd wager big money that a significant plurality of medical scientists, if not a majority, are today already prepared to approve germline editing given a good candidate therapy--patient, vector, payload, etc. As for medical ethicists, as scholars they tend to splinter into radical advocates or skeptics because that's how you get tenure and attention; and unlike doctors they don't get fired (or "disappeared") when they're wrong.
[1] "Oral conception. Impregnation via the proximal gastrointestinal tract in a patient with an aplastic distal vagina. Case report", http://img2.timg.co.il/CommunaFiles/21227065.pdf
Unintended mutations happen all the time naturally. Some are beneficial, and some are harmful. This just speeds up the process a bit. Life has natural processes to error-correct, otherwise it would not have survived for millions of years.
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…
It seems like a dead certainty that gene editing creates unintended mutations, since to do otherwise would require the technique to be 100% controllable and verifiable, and it is neither. So the only question is whether those unintended mutations are harmful or not, either to the immediate generation or subsequent ones. Because there is so much uncertainty around that question, these kinds of experiments are ethicall…
Random harmful mutations have happened all day every day as long as life has existed. We are basically designed for dealing with it. But worst case, we can eliminate harmful mutations from being passed on to subsequent generations through screening. I wouldn't worry about the long term problems of that, it's fairly easy to solve. What I would worry about is: a) Short term suffering from failed experiments. b) Reduced…
And the truly bad mutations should self-correct before passing to subsequent generations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The concerns about the LHC were a hell of a lot more hypothetical than about germline editing, and that did change the calculus. We know that current genome editing techniques have off-target effects. You're arguing from some abstract philosophical perspective, but the practical situation is much simpler. Nobody is drawing categorical conclusions and saying that we should never edit the germline, and at the same time…
If you believe that germline gene editing is so risky and potentially costly as to be absolutely unwarranted, then you shouldn't support somatic gene therapy as there remains a very real and non-negligible risk of germline integration. Some vectors might be safer than others, but proving the impossibility of gene integration into the germline seems extremely costly and possibly unprovable. I mean, heck, there's at le…
You can think of the one child policy as a precursor experiment to letting people select genetic attributes (gender in that case). People selected the trait that they thought was “better” (male). The unintended consequence wasn’t that it turned out men are not good, but that too many men instead of woman was bad for the population in general.