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What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing?

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Re: What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing?

#41

Post by vixen99 »

jobigoud wrote: post #8
technotony wrote: post #2

The main thing* holding back this is that we don't understand the human genome enough to make really useful edits. It's very rare that there's a change that would be better done with germline engineering than somatic cell engineering or gene therapy. One day that won't be true however, and that's when the problems will really begin. To me the strongest non-religious argument against doing this is that it will further…

IMHO if you have the means to make your kids smarter (all other things being equal) it's unethical not to do so.

Ethics won't matter at all if it comes down to our survival on Earth. Among the multitude of reasons for getting several factors smarter very rapidly is the necessity for developing the means to avoid immanent extinction when we detect a suitably-sized lump of rock coming our way from space. If it's one with a diameter of 10-100 km then with current technology it's all over bar nothing (not even shouting). Back to square 1 or maybe 1.1 if we're lucky. You'd think we'd focus on this rather than on some of the issues which seem to obsess us. https://www.sciencealert.com/a-huge-previously-undetected-as...

Re: What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing?

#42

Post by [deleted] »

iguy wrote: post #33
ramblerman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but find this incredibly condescending. You would take away a technological advantage from majorities and minorities alike because their choices might not lead to your ideal of diversity utopia.

Here's a different take, on a different sort of diversity: Suppose it turns out that extremely high-achievers are gambles on the part of nature, which have some chance of going wrong. For example, suppose that every birth of a potential future Nobelist comes with a 10% chance of serious disabling autism. (I stress, I'm not claiming that this is true, just setting up a thought experiment.) Many parents would decline t…

[deleted]

Re: What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing?

#43

Post by chr1 »

iguy wrote: post #33
ramblerman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but find this incredibly condescending. You would take away a technological advantage from majorities and minorities alike because their choices might not lead to your ideal of diversity utopia.

Here's a different take, on a different sort of diversity: Suppose it turns out that extremely high-achievers are gambles on the part of nature, which have some chance of going wrong. For example, suppose that every birth of a potential future Nobelist comes with a 10% chance of serious disabling autism. (I stress, I'm not claiming that this is true, just setting up a thought experiment.) Many parents would decline t…

If we get to the point where we can distinguish genes that cause autism to be able to remove them, we'll also be able to distinguish 10% Nobelist case.

But even if that was not the case, with gene editing some parents who did not have a chance to make that gamble, will be able to make it intentionally.

Re: What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing?

#44

Post by ben_w »

DuskStar wrote: post #7
wetpaws wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone prefer having less intelligent people to having more smart people for the sake of eqality is beyond me.

Especially since regulations won't meaningfully impact the very richest - they'll travel to Thailand or wherever to have their kid's embryo edited and implanted. What it will do is prevent those innovations from coming into the reach of the rest of us.

Hm. Depends how you do it. Given how much it costs childbirth costs in the USA, I’m surprised there isn’t already health tourism from the USA to literally anywhere else. The cost of genetic modification will probably be small compared to the cost of childbirth, if the current existence and price of amateur CRISPR bio-hacking kits is anything to go by[1].

Could this be overcome by requiring all newly registered children to have full genome DNA tests, along with their parents, and prosecute on the basis of clear genetic modification? Or is that likely to get too many false positives?

[1] http://www.the-odin.com/bacterial-crispr-and-fluorescent-yea...

Re: What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing?

#45

Post by chr1 »

ben_w wrote: post #37
ramblerman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but find this incredibly condescending. You would take away a technological advantage from majorities and minorities alike because their choices might not lead to your ideal of diversity utopia.

Monocultures are fragile. They are fragile in agriculture, they are fragile in software development, and they are fragile in political thought. There is no reason to expect we would not be equally fragile if we all changed our genomes to be the “same race”, especially given that “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis” [1], and therefore can be expected to continue to find it easy discriminate against…

Sure monocultures are bad but talking about banning gene editing to avoid monoculture at this point is the equivalent of proposing to ban people who already own cars to buy teslas to avoid electric car monoculture. Because we are not anywhere near a monoculture, and for some traits monoculture is ok (do we miss the old design of vocal tract that gave us ability to not talk?).

Also we won't have a monoculture for whole genome any time soon, because that would mean for everyone to raise someone elses kid which people tend to not like.

There is a possibility that some people will try to make changes to appearance eye/skin/hair color, shape of nose. But that doesn't have that much effect on survivability of human kind (balancing higher rate of skin cancer vs vitamin D deficiency has other methods now) and banning gene editing to prevent that would be the same as banning all surgery to simply not allow plastic surgery.

Re: What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing?

#46

Post by iguy »

chr1 wrote: post #43
iguy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a different take, on a different sort of diversity: Suppose it turns out that extremely high-achievers are gambles on the part of nature, which have some chance of going wrong. For example, suppose that every birth of a potential future Nobelist comes with a 10% chance of serious disabling autism. (I stress, I'm not claiming that this is true, just setting up a thought experiment.) Many parents would decline t…

If we get to the point where we can distinguish genes that cause autism to be able to remove them, we'll also be able to distinguish 10% Nobelist case. But even if that was not the case, with gene editing some parents who did not have a chance to make that gamble, will be able to make it intentionally.

The point of my thought experiment is to imagine that these are the same genes. Remember that about half of population variation is "unshared environment" meaning noise in the translation of DNA into an adult: genes will never allow perfect prediction.

I guess I believe that very few parents would make this gamble, because the risks are very personal and the benefits are mostly to others. But I could be wrong. One real live example is that there's been very little push-back against eliminating Tay-Sachs via testing.

Re: What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing?

#47

Post by iguy »

chr1 wrote: post #35
Thiez wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be pro-choice, but you would probably oppose the right of mothers to end the lives of their children (and descendents of those children) after pregnancy. So I don't see what is strange about the argument; you are allowed to terminate a pregnancy, but you do not necessarily have the right to inflict arbitrary other life changing modifications on your children. Like, no doctor would agree to amputate the legs o…

> but you would probably oppose the right of mothers to end the lives of their children after pregnancy Unfortunately the distinction is not that clear cut. When we have technology to raise several weeks old fetus to maturity in an artificial womb (which we'll have soon), what will be the difference between 'after pregnancy' and 'during pregnancy'? In both cases it will be something that can become a human if someone…

> the point about 'affecting all descendandts' is wrong because if we have a technology to make a change we can easily reverse it too

If we had perfect editing technology (even without perfect knowledge of effects) then as you say we could easily Ctrl-Z the next generation.

But we don't have this yet, so I think it's not unreasonably to worry a bit about inflicting changes (including unintended off-target edits) on grandkids too.

Re: What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing?

#48

Post by iguy »

ben_w wrote: post #44
DuskStar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially since regulations won't meaningfully impact the very richest - they'll travel to Thailand or wherever to have their kid's embryo edited and implanted. What it will do is prevent those innovations from coming into the reach of the rest of us.

Hm. Depends how you do it. Given how much it costs childbirth costs in the USA, I’m surprised there isn’t already health tourism from the USA to literally anywhere else. The cost of genetic modification will probably be small compared to the cost of childbirth, if the current existence and price of amateur CRISPR bio-hacking kits is anything to go by[1]. Could this be overcome by requiring all newly registered childr…

Indeed, there is some health tourism, but much less than I would expect given the prices.

I can't imagine that setting up a "Department Of Prosecuting New Parents" would go down well. Or even be possible. For example, most first-world countries today have millions of residents with no legal right to be there, most of whom the state does not prosecute/deport/fine. I think both for the lack of capacity to do so, and for lack of popular support for doing this at full scale. And deciding where someone was born (and who their parents are) is much much easier than deciding whether they got 100% of their DNA the old-fashioned way.

Re: What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing?

#49

Post by senectus1 »

jobigoud wrote: post #8
technotony wrote: post #2

The main thing* holding back this is that we don't understand the human genome enough to make really useful edits. It's very rare that there's a change that would be better done with germline engineering than somatic cell engineering or gene therapy. One day that won't be true however, and that's when the problems will really begin. To me the strongest non-religious argument against doing this is that it will further…

IMHO if you have the means to make your kids smarter (all other things being equal) it's unethical not to do so.

and what if gene edited children all produce children with autistic conditions?

We dont know enough about it to allow it open slather in the community at large.

Re: What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing?

#50

Post by chr1 »

iguy wrote: post #46
chr1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we get to the point where we can distinguish genes that cause autism to be able to remove them, we'll also be able to distinguish 10% Nobelist case. But even if that was not the case, with gene editing some parents who did not have a chance to make that gamble, will be able to make it intentionally.

The point of my thought experiment is to imagine that these are the same genes. Remember that about half of population variation is "unshared environment" meaning noise in the translation of DNA into an adult: genes will never allow perfect prediction. I guess I believe that very few parents would make this gamble, because the risks are very personal and the benefits are mostly to others. But I could be wrong. One re…

In your thought experiment, even if very few parents made the gamble, it would be enough to keep the gene around until we figured out what in the environment caused autism, after which the many more would want to have it.

For the Tay-Sachs example what would be the reason to push-back against eliminating it? And who should have pushed back? people who had that gene, or people who didn't?

IMO the solution is to simply have more people, if we have 1000 billions on earth (which is possible with seasteading and terraforming deserts), 10 billion on moon 100 billion on mars we'll have enough place to try out all kinds of solutions, for people to decide how much to edit or not to edit their own genes, and many new random mutations arising simply because there are more new people than were in all of the history combined.

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