Should every baby's DNA be sequenced?
economist.com
Should every baby's DNA be sequenced?
1–10 of 96 posts
Re: Should every baby's DNA be sequenced?
#2A science-fictional spin on this was in Hal Clement's quite striking short story "The Mechanic".
Re: Should every baby's DNA be sequenced?
#3This is just one step away from eugenics. When the data is in the machine, you just know it will be used for malicious activities.
Re: Should every baby's DNA be sequenced?
#4This is just one step away from eugenics. When the data is in the machine, you just know it will be used for malicious activities.
You say it like applying that label automatically makes it a bad thing.
See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck for an elaboration.
Re: Should every baby's DNA be sequenced?
#5A science-fictional spin on this was in Hal Clement's quite striking short story "The Mechanic".
Or Gattaca.
Re: Should every baby's DNA be sequenced?
#6I believe this drive to record all the data and control everything (through science or surveillance) is misguided (And perhaps a bit paranoid) and will lead to poor outcomes for everyone.
Re: Should every baby's DNA be sequenced?
#7This is just one step away from eugenics. When the data is in the machine, you just know it will be used for malicious activities.
Is it malicious to abort a baby before it has a heartbeat at six weeks because it will have Downs syndrome?
Re: Should every baby's DNA be sequenced?
#8This is just one step away from eugenics. When the data is in the machine, you just know it will be used for malicious activities.
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Re: Should every baby's DNA be sequenced?
#9This is just one step away from eugenics. When the data is in the machine, you just know it will be used for malicious activities.
You say it like applying that label automatically makes it a bad thing. See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck for an elaboration.
So far, the gathering of great deals of data on people has not been used for purposes that benefit such people. For example, one of the biggest uses of mass surveillance and data collection is to improve the targeting of marketing, which generally does not benefit the people being marketed to, and indeed often is done to their detriment.
And then a side effect of all of this is that this huge mass of data is just sitting there to be used for even more nefarious purposes. I can easily imagine a world where an end user is required to submit their genetic data in order to prove their age for an age-controlled app, for example.
Re: Should every baby's DNA be sequenced?
#10scifi: that would be far far away in the future, when too many people with direct-gene defect mutations will have had children. But with the complexity of genetics, all that may be pointless: beyond our understanding combination of genes will trigger a disease once some conditions/imbalance are/is met in some environments with some specific history.
Humanity may end up as a set of clones of "known" stable genetics over the long run and environments with a "normal" history.