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Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

interestingengineering.com

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Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#191

Post by jonplackett »

cubano wrote: post #186
erickj wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However in the exact same vane that "Nature doesn't care"... We as Humans should and DO care. We are not Nature, and thus these existential defining issues should at least give us some pause to debate and evaluate the moral quandaries and responsibilities that this level of engineering power wields.

How can you possibly even say "We are not Nature"? Of course we are Nature. We came to being the exact same way every other current living species did, thru natural selection. So then how can we be living, as you say, somehow outside this "Nature" you speak of? Hell, I know I may be in a small minority who says, by definition, nothing that we do is "wrong" because we are simply doing what our brains, which are 100% a…

This is really an argument about the definition of natural isn’t it. We’re from nature but personally I believe humans are something different. We’re the only animal with choice - that we know of at least, and if you believe in free will, which some people don’t of course.

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#192

Post by NKosmatos »

Terrifying and terrific news, awesome finding with tremendous ethical questions and dilemmas. For sure we’re living in an interesting era and more similar topics (AI, gene editing, implants, nano/bio alterations...) are going to appear more often.

To lighten up the discussion and with fear of getting downvoted, two funny thoughts that came to my mind while reading about these news. - They surely picked the wrong year/time period to make this announcement. - Our technology has allowed us to increase brains of monkeys but we still don’t have the technology needed for a properly working windows update service.

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#193

Post by procgen »

ativzzz wrote: post #111

So what exactly is inherently unethical about letting this engineered organism live? Is it a violation of "Christian" ethics of playing God? If so, we've already gone way past that point with modern medicine and things like genetic engineering of mosquitoes. If it's a fear of how society reacts to the organism surviving and causing an upheaval of life philosophy, isn't all science then unethical?

I think it's less about any societal reaction and more about the organism's experience.

It would be more useful to perform similar genetic experiments on human beings, in any case. But I imagine that you would be opposed to that?

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#194

Post by fiblye »

whytaka wrote: post #171
belval wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever stopped and thought about why you feel in such way towards these experiments? Why do you see sentience as the line not to cross and even go as far as to call it a "dark path"? You use a lot of wording that are very religious sounding such as "soul", "excommunicated", "dark path", but have you considered that you cannot really excommunicate a scientist, that the mere concept of a soul might be wrong? To…

If there's any science of morality to be done, the most basic quantum of moral value is suffering. Sentient creatures have greater capacity for suffering, being aware of their pain and the injustice of their existence. If we are to bring it into existence, we are responsible for its suffering.

And if a presumably sentient creature is aborted before it attains sentience, has it suffered?

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#195

Post by naptiem »

nwienert wrote: post #113
hohloma wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re missing survivorship bias - nature didn’t just create these balanced ecosystems, it creates anything that goes, and things that don’t work out just die. Humans ruining earth for themselves is just as natural, just that we might die as result. But life won’t - it’s much more resilient than just one species. Or several.

Following this line of logic you can justify anything. If I kill your entire family, that’s natural. Would you be ok with that? I think if you accept at all that there is suffering and there is beauty, then you shouldn’t hide behind “everything’s natural” and instead try and have a backbone and stick up for something more.

Well, from nature’s perspective, yes it is OK. Nature won’t put you in jail. However, do it on a wide scale (you start murdering billions to prove a point) then yes Nature cares and the survival of the species is thrown into jeopardy. As a person, no it’s not OK - acts that do more harm than good are agreed to (by choice) by most as illegal.

Comparing to aborting a human-monkey fetus, the question of is there more good than harm is new. In a scientific setting where few cases are performed and a lot of Nature’s rules are revealed to us, I think that is mostly good. Genetic editing expanded to a large scale can also, I think, be done in a good way (by editing genes to increase intelligence or removing genes to reduce disease). It can also be done in a harmful way - say, raising an army of clones or some nightmare scenario where the rich and wealthy raise super intelligent human children that rules and obsoletes the rest of humanity.

I argue though that those nightmare situations will happen anyway and that human society has always had huge swings in well-being and suffering, with the average standard of living growing.

I think trying to contain the research is useful only up to some point - tracking the research and labeling successes and failures (science) and opening these studies and results to all of humanity is I think ultimately helpful. Keeping some competitive advantage over competing nations or corporations is also helpful. The more we learn, the more we can identify and prevent misuse.

Last thing to point out is humanity, and nature, share in common that we grow by making a ton of mistakes. Whereas Nature learns by not dying entirely, humanity adds a method by learning by thinking - this seems to be faster.

If we apply sentience to Nature, perhaps we were allowed to live in the hopes that we’d help Nature survive the next astroid attack.

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#197

Post by s1artibartfast »

riazrizvi wrote: post #92
s1artibartfast wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unfortunately, the further you move generically from the human, the more extraneous variables you introduce and the lower the relevance of any result. There is a reason drugs and experiments are performed on primates. Any result you saw in say a sea slug would provide no insight into the human function. The ideal experiment would be to delete the gene from a human, but this is unethical for obvious reasons.

I should have also said, I think it is premature to attempt genetic engineering of human brains for medical benefit. Intuitively I believe we are decades behind the amount of conceptual development and experimental validation we need to do to get a proper understanding of genetic brain engineering. So I think the ethics is spot on here, it's ethically wrong IMO because we don't know what we are doing. Ethically I don…

As far as I know, no scientist has attempted the genetic modification of human brains for medical benefit so it seems that nearly the whole world is aligned ethically. The whole world generally aligned that testing on non-human primates is OK if the fetus is not brought to term.

There are companies that offer human embryo screening based on intelligence, but this is more selection that modification.

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#198

Post by intricatedetail »

grawprog wrote: post #46

I find it hard to describe how I feel about this. These scientists essentially created what may have been a new species, that perhaps would have had similar sentience to us and had them terminated after 100 days. The cat's out of the bag with this research so to speak now. Someone's bound to do this again The part about whether they should have been born or not, which was the ethical thing is what tears at me. Is it…

And yet you used the word "terminated". That poor thing was murdered. If we didn't have such technology, those scientists would feel at home in Nazi labs.

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#199

Post by artifact_44 »

grawprog wrote: post #94
vikramkr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're giving nature too much credit. Nature doesn't try and balance life. Nature doesn't care- it throws asteroid impacts and supervolcanos and natural disasters all over the place. Life just happens to be very very resilient and consistently able to jump back and fill new niches. Nature also "created" us - were a product of the universe like everything else. If we are destabilizing, so is nature. And most scientist…

I don't give it credit, like it's trying to gain balance, but functioning ecosystems do maintain a balance. Most of our climate problems have come from humans disrupting this. If you take any functioning healthy ecosystem on earth, one generally less tampered with by humans, you'll find from a microscopic, right up to a macroscopic level, the life in those ecosystems have adapted to function together. If you want to…

Everything is a chaotic riot tumbling down the energy gradient from the Sun.

Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution

#200

Post by vncecartersknee »

If they tried allowing the fetus to grow indefinitely would they have to figure out how to make the skull bigger or would the skull naturally grow along with the brain?

My understanding was that human babies have relatively flexible skulls at a young age?

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