
Editing humanity - jeo1234
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21661651-new-technique-manipulating-genes-holds-great-promisebut-rules-are-needed-govern-its
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redthrowaway
>But here, too, the right approach is to be cautiously liberal: the burden is
on society to justify when and why it is wrong to edit the genome.

I think this sentiment hits the right note. I am wholly unpersuaded by moral
arguments about "playing God". We've been doing that for our entire existence.
Quite successfully, thank you very much.

But tinkering with our genome and that of our children _does_ present ethical
quandaries that need to be discussed and resolved. By allowing by default
except where there is a compelling objection, we can both avoid the majority
of the negative consequences while embracing the real positives that gene
modification will bring.

~~~
cryoshon
Sure, it's an ethical quandry to play with an unborn child's genes, but keep
in mind, these children will be born to the same parents who elect to modify
them. A parent who wants to genetically modify their child is a parent who has
plenty of resources to raise a child, and plenty of good-will toward their
child to the point where they are trying to intervene even before the child is
born. These children who are genetically modified would likely grow up being
sent to piano lessons, math tutors, and little league.

So what if they're genetically modified to be good at these things? That's a
child who will grow up with a leg up on the world already. This is the next
step of our species evolution.

~~~
maratd
> This is the next step of our species evolution.

The ethical problem isn't necessarily with the individual or even the family.

Genetic engineering isn't so simple. Genes frequently have multiple functions.
You might edit a few genes and give someone a high IQ, but those same set of
genes now make them socially inept.

So let's say tons of parents do this. You now have a generation that can't
effectively socialize and communicate. How does that affect our species as a
whole?

Most of humanity's accomplishments are a direct result of our ability to work
together. We may worship the individual, but it's groups of people that
actually get things done. So by tweaking that one little tidbit to increase
IQ, you completely threw the delicate balance out of whack and sent everybody
back to the stone age.

That's just one hypothetical example.

By bringing gene selection purely to the parent level, you're excluding
millions of years of evolutionary pressure for the sake of whatever happens to
be fashionable in that moment.

The good news is that most genetic modifications will have immediate and nasty
consequences. You can dick around with corn and have fields upon fields that
go bad and simply pick out the winners ... try doing that with human beings
and there will be a huge outcry, very quickly.

~~~
tired_man
There is room for evil, but also for some good.

How about they start by testing parents for matching recessives that cause
genetic disorders so they can know to have an Amniocentesis to make a decision
on the child's viability?

Being able to edit out the bits for hemophilia, Downs Syndrome, Parkinson's,
or <the genetic disorder you're familiar with here>?

It isn't all about trying to create some designer super race. Some parents
knowing that they both carry dangerous recessive genes decide it isn't worth
the risk of creating a child only to watch it suffer. More testing is good and
IMHO ought to be strongly advised.

~~~
maratd
> Being able to edit out the bits for hemophilia, Downs Syndrome, Parkinson's,
> or <the genetic disorder you're familiar with here>?

Don't misunderstand, I'm totally for this. In the cases you mention we have a
proper baseline. We know exactly what will happen when we do the edits, on
average. We are returning to the norm, not deviating from it.

The issue is all this super race talk that crops up around these discussions.
It's just stupid.

~~~
tired_man
I agree, but the super human stuff is anathema to the majority. I think it is
only because of the conditioning they've had from reading novels (or from
someone else's opinion after they read such a novel) where editing resulted in
disaster and war.

It'll take time to defeat the bad publicity from fiction.

------
Mz
_Deaf parents may prefer their offspring to be deaf too, say; pushy parents
might want to boost their children’s intelligence at all costs, even if doing
so affects their personalities in other ways._

I have read enough to know that certain serious genetic disorders tend to
correlate to high IQ. So, yeah, this is very much a two-edged sword situation.
It may not be possible to just select for all "positive" qualities.

My concern is not exactly ethics per se. My concern is that genes are
complicated and my suspicion is we aren't as clever as we think we are and
this could lead to bigger problems than the ones we hope to resolve via this
path.

~~~
joshmarlow
Well this brings up an interesting question: if a given gene/gene expression
correlates with multiple effects, some good and some bad, would it be possible
with sufficient knowledge to engineer the desired effect from scratch in a way
that avoids the undesired effect?

I assume that no one currently has the knowledge of how to do this and won't
for decades at least... But interesting to consider!

~~~
notahacker
Interesting to consider, but we're not reprogramming human DNA so much as
adding and removing bytes to the compiled output by trial and error.

In practice, there's good reason to be concerned that we might achieve the
opposite: popularise a modification with a reasonably well understood
"positive" characteristic and then discover the negative effects on many
thousands of humans that have had the modification some time afterwards. Of
course this happens with conventional medicine too, but it's a little easier
to trial a remedy when you don't have to _create_ new humans for each trial,
and negative effects are less likely to be irreversible when they're caused by
something sufferers take rather than something sufferers _are_.

------
AnonNo15
I feel enraged that option NOT to enhance humanity is even in the picture.

I guess that's the inevitable part of any new medical advance, be it vaccines,
anaesthesia or even washing hands when dealing the pregnant women after
working with corpses.

~~~
rubidium
Please consider that a decision NOT to change genetic material of "germ line"
cells may be because humanity decides it would actually cause a decline of
humanity, not an enhancement.

Real social, economic and political factors are going to come into play here.
As the author concludes: "Gene editing raises the spectre of parents making
choices that are not obviously in the best interests of their children. Deaf
parents may prefer their offspring to be deaf too, say; pushy parents might
want to boost their children’s intelligence at all costs, even if doing so
affects their personalities in other ways. And if it becomes possible to tweak
genes to make children smarter, should that option really be limited to the
rich?"

~~~
guylhem
Let selection and mating sort it out.

Maybe very intelligent deaf humans would outcompete the rest of mankind in a
few generations? _You_ may not like that, but why exactly should _I_ care?

Parents do have the best interest of their children in mind. Let them be free
of making the best choices instead of government imposed ones.

~~~
ashark
I think one of the more realistic fears of this technology is that there won't
really _be_ a choice. The option "remain unmodified and live an OK life"
simply won't exist.

Moloch[1] may demand sacrifice.

[1] [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-
moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

~~~
vectorjohn
If that is the case, that it's so successful you pretty much have to do it,
that sounds like an absolute success. Sounds like the process pretty much
works and is good.

~~~
ashark
The tricky bit is that "successful" does not _necessarily_ have to mean "makes
people happier".

------
cryoshon
I'm a molecular biologist and know a couple of things about CRISPR. I'm also a
philosopher, and know a couple of things about ethics. In college, I minored
in bioethics.

"Germ line" editing and production of designer babies as well as genetic re-
tooling of already living people is going to happen with 100% probability.
Right now there's already embryonic screening for certain (mostly pathogenic)
traits, but this will be supplanted by writing and editing of desired traits.

There are not going to be any long term barriers whatsoever; the future of
mankind is one of directed synthetic genetics. There will be roadblocks from
the regressive factions, of course, but they'll ultimately fail. The
millenials will be the ones to start to integrate this technology from the
laboratory into normal human existence. Many members of generations that come
after millenials will likely be heavily genetically modified, which brings us
to an interesting place: the people who are currently being born right now are
some of the last humans with fully "organic" genomes. This also means that our
future as a species is radically more uncharted at this juncture than it has
been since start of the industrial revolution.

Opening the door to synthetic genetics is going to also create new gulfs
between the peoples of the world, as the norms that different societies have
regarding genome editing will be different. Think Indians behave weird
relative to Westerners? Well, you haven't even met the Indian whose parents
decided that his genome would be engineered to be the most effective medical
doctor. Not only is this guy foreign, he's literally made for a different
purpose than you or I. It's extremely likely that his biological intelligence
and focus will surpass unaugmented people, and that will breed jealousy and
hatred. Among certain populations of people, genetic augmentation will be
taboo, so there will be a new undercurrent of "maybe he's augmented" when a
newcomer seems to perform strongly. Weird to think about these small details,
but they're coming. As I briefly mentioned before, it'll be possible to
engineer people for a certain purpose. Even right now, the knowledge of the
genetics of intelligence is advanced enough to give this a very good shot.
There's always room for unintended consequuences, but we'll wait and see.

As usual, the technology itself is neither good nor evil, but the usages of it
will serve both ends and likely remake future human generations moving
forward. The next thing that comes to mind is price: affording gene screening
and editing is out of bounds for most people right now, so it'll only be the
rich, for a time. Eventually the technology will be cheap and ubiquitous, with
most middle class people deciding whether or not to genetically modify
themselves and their prospective children broken mostly along ethnic
religious/political lines. My immediate expectation is that the major powers
(US, Russia, China, and EU) will allow for wild "abuses" such as allowing or
subsidizing the intentional genetic extinction of certain undesirable traits
or malignancies. Some of the worst abuses will probably occur when a
government edits the genomes of certain minorities to prevent them from
reproducing. It's extremely unlikely that any race of people or any negative
trait will go completely extinct, though.

Exciting time ahead, to be sure. I really hope that there are people working
on viral vectors to use with this technology so that currently living people
can have their genomes edited too.

~~~
chiph
What if your parents chose a genome for a career that became obsolete? You
could have been engineered to be the world's best buggy-whip maker, but if no
one wants buggy-whips anymore (and they know you were targeted for that
particular skill set from before birth), would you be employable in a
different field?

Because buggy-whip making is in your genes, and that'd be tough to overcome.

~~~
rtkwe
That's not a problem we're likely to face though. Beyond encoding a physical
dependance on some facet or condition of a job, there's very little we can
conceivably do genetically to lock someone into just one job. Learnable skills
rather than raw genetic aptitude are the requirements for most jobs anyways.

------
hyperion2010
I was talking about this with a friend a few weeks ago, and my conclusion is
that this is going to be like giving a bunch of 12 year olds shotguns:
beautiful and messy.

We can talk about 'rules' all we want here in the west but there is no way you
are going to be able to regulate this stuff and trying to ban the ingredients
is just going to lead to people buying it from less reputable sources that
have impurities so you will end up with spliced up babies that have a bunch of
additional defects instead of just spliced up babies.

We can try to explain to our fellow citizens that there is in fact no such
thing as an intelligence gene, but that won't stop them from wanting it and
certainly won't stop the snake oil salesmen from selling it. We've never been
here before and we learn by trial and error, just like evolution.

~~~
svachalek
There are genes associated with intelligence, they are what makes humans so
much more dangerous than any other creature on earth, and octopi so much more
interesting than fish.

More to your point, there are some intelligence genes that some people have
and other people don't. They don't solely determine IQ, it's a complex
interaction of environment, diet, education, personality, etc., but that's not
to say they don't exist.

~~~
hyperion2010
[http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp201410...](http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp2014105a.html)

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annoyingdisb
Yes, it's Gattaca.

~~~
BillTheCat
I just realized that Gattaca contains only the letters G, A, T, and C.

~~~
civilian
It took me 2-3 years and a biology teacher casually mentioning it in a lecture
for me to get it. So you're in good company.

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grdeken
This seems like a rip of this month's Wired cover piece (which was fantastic).

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djscram
One issue is gene diversity. Even if most parents are making ethical
decisions, at some point there will be standard, best choices. But a species
with a gene pool that is not diverse is more vulnerable.

