
Two-thirds of Americans approve of editing human DNA to treat disease - dvdhnt
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/30/16198594/crispr-gene-editing-survey-public-opinion
======
jawns
I think the article mis-guesses some of the reservations people have.

For instance:

> Scheufele also found that very religious people were less likely to support
> either type of gene editing (for therapy or enhancement) compared to less
> religious people. That could be because altering the human genome — perhaps
> permanently — could be seen as "playing God."

I think the "playing God" aspect might certainly factor into it, especially
when you move beyond merely treating disease/disorders. But perhaps a bigger
reason is the ethics around the research itself, which involves manipulating
human embryos and then essentially discarding them once the research is over.

And then the survey questions themselves have some ambiguity:

> The scientific community is capable of guiding development of new
> technologies in a responsible way

There are several ways to interpret this. Are they talking about a _morally_
responsible way? A _scientifically_ responsible way? One might have full
confidence that a scientist can pursue research in a scientifically sound,
responsible way, but one may have far less confidence that the scientist will
make choices that accord with one's morality. That may not mean violating
Ethics Boards guidelines, but a more fundamental disagreement about what the
Ethics Boards consider to be ethical.

~~~
2017Dude
Well either abortion is unethical or embryo research is ethical.

~~~
hwillis
Devils advocate: Abortion can be ethical and embryo research can be unethical,
since there are additional ethical concerns. There's no consent, if you
believe an embryo is alive. Also the embryo is being kept alive artificially,
which may be seen as cruel.

Also it's possible to oppose both abortion and embryo research.

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3pt14159
We should be cautious, but provided the scientific community is ok with it, I
see no reason to limit editing human DNA to just treating disease.

What is the downside of increasing the number of geniuses? What is the
downside of saving someone from dealing with severe teenage acne? Why should
some men have to worry about their genitalia being well below average in size?
Why should some women never experience an orgasm?

I get the instinctual revulsion to the idea of playing God or reducing our
diversity, but I try to model my ethics as if I didn't know who I was going to
be in the simulation before hand. These are changes that we should be
advocating for if they are possible.

~~~
dontreact
The downside would be that if we modify or select only for intelligence, we
may get morally worse individuals. Perhaps morality and intelligence are
somewhat correlated, but that may break down if we explicitly select only for
intelligence. Imagine flooding the world with ultra-smart ultra-selfish
hackers who manage to break all security systems and steal all the wealth or
otherwise wreak self serving havoc.

~~~
sbierwagen
Your comment is phrased as if antisocial traits don't _already_ confer greater
reproductive success.

[http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138%2814%2900077-4/a...](http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138%2814%2900077-4/abstract)

>Convicted criminal offenders had more children than individuals never
convicted of a criminal offense. Criminal offenders also had more reproductive
partners, were less often married, more likely to get remarried if ever
married, and had more often contracted a sexually transmitted disease than
non-offenders. Importantly, the increased reproductive success of criminals
was explained by a fertility increase from having children with several
different partners.

~~~
dontreact
I wonder if there is a lower chance of success for children with absent
fathers which offsets this. I would be surprised if there wasn't, given the
long term trend of societies becoming more civil and less violent on average.

------
gallerdude
It’s going to be weird, because much like we have standards for what
constitutes a USB cable, we may soon have standards for what a baseline
genetically modified human is. Treating disease is no threshold, the real
question will be IQ or strength - even if you assume equal opportunity to
access peak genetics for everyone.

On one hand, society will be far better off with having smarter people
(imagine what society would be like where everyone had an IQ of 120 - I’d be
very curious). On the other hand, you’ll probably get a Gattaca-like
situation. Interesting times...

~~~
lordCarbonFiber
Except for that small detail in that there aren't a set single or even set
groupings of genes that determine IQ and there's tenuous data to support that
we'll ever find such fixtures.

I really hate how every thread there's someone that jumps from "treating
genetic disease" which is both small scale (in many cases just the expression
of a single gene) and tangible (ready definitions and lack of trade offs in
"not having cystic fibrosis" as opposed to "maybe smarter"). We're so close to
saving real lives it's a waste of time to bring up a terrible dystopia
movie(the reason gattaca's protagonist can't got to space is he's got a heart
condition that's likely to kill him; not because he's lacking the hand-wavy
"genetic ubermench" qualities) to construct an artificial ethical dilemma.

~~~
sbierwagen
>Except for that small detail in that there aren't a set single or even set
groupings of genes that determine IQ

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3182557/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3182557/)

~~~
sqeaky
I don't think any sane person doubts intelligence is genetic and inheritable.

I think the other poster's point was more that there isn't a simple genetic
switch that adds 5 IQ points. There appear to be many complex factors that are
part of intelligence and currently we are not sure how to untangle that mess
to get simple thing we can do to make people smarter.

~~~
lordCarbonFiber
Exactly. It's a fundamentally different problem to solve as compared to
treating genetic illnesses and far more likely to involve some sort of trade
off or side effects due to the number of genes involved.

Considering that approximately half of measured intelligence variation _isn
't_ concluded to be genetic [0] it's my opinion you get a lot more bang for
your buck focusing on social and environmental factors if you want to increase
a populous's overall intellectual acumen.

~~~
sbierwagen
>far more likely to involve some sort of trade off or side effects

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/04/myers-race-car-
versus-t...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/04/myers-race-car-versus-the-
general-fitness-factor/)

>People with high IQ tend to live longer. For example, a person with IQ 115
(85th percentile) is 20% more likely to survive to age 76 than an average
person with IQ 100. [...] People with high IQ tend to be taller. This is
interesting since height is often used as a measure of health and fitness
during childhood, and since taller people get a bunch of advantages including
being rated as more attractive and earning higher income. [...] People with
high IQ may be more attractive. This is the conclusion of a meta-analysis that
finds a positive correlation between intelligence and body symmetry, usually
used as a proxy for attractiveness unaffected by things like hairstyle and
cosmetics [...] People with high IQ commit much less crime [...] People with
high IQ tend to be more physically fit. [...] People with high IQ have lower
rates of heart disease, stroke, circulatory diseases, and diabetes.

Doesn't look like there's much in the way of a tradeoff between high IQ and
biological fitness.

~~~
lordCarbonFiber
First off correlation != causation.

Secondly that's not the point. If we need to edit multiple genes, genes that
are also tied to other traits, that's what's driving the chance of side
effect, not the increased intelligence.

~~~
gwern
> First off correlation != causation.

These are more powerful than the usual designs. For example, the correlation
of intelligence with longevity survives a within-family sibling study which
controls away all effects of family SES and shared environment
[https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/doi/10.1093/ije/dyx168/...](https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/doi/10.1093/ije/dyx168/4085882/Intelligence-
and-allcause-mortality-in-the-6Day) You can also verify this using twin
comparisons eg
[http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/07/24/ije.d...](http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/07/24/ije.dyv112.full.pdf)
.

More importantly, because so much of the underlying genetics of intelligence
has been found and are covered by the GWAS's polygenic scores, it is possible
to compare with the genetics for scores or hundreds of other diseases and
measures of health:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_correlation#Intelligen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_correlation#Intelligence)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_correlation#Education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_correlation#Education)
The correlation is invariably negative: higher genetic potential for
intelligence predicts lower disease and better health.

> If we need to edit multiple genes, genes that are also tied to other traits,
> that's what's driving the chance of side effect, not the increased
> intelligence.

Whether it is horizontal or vertical pleiotropy is irrelevant; it is
irrelevant whether a particular SNP decreases risk of heart disease by
increasing one's level of education so one knows to exercise regularly, or if
it instead avoids a bad mutation which makes mitochondria slightly more
inefficient thereby damaging the brain & heart. You want that SNP regardless
of which causal pathway it is. If intelligence polygenic scores predict lower
risk for disease and better health, then doing embryo selection or editing
based on that will in fact do what it's supposed to.

------
gwern
Fulltext:
[https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2017-scheufele.pdf](https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2017-scheufele.pdf)

See also [https://www.nature.com/news/china-s-embrace-of-embryo-
select...](https://www.nature.com/news/china-s-embrace-of-embryo-selection-
raises-thorny-questions-1.22468)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15039941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15039941)

------
reasonattlm
The killer application for gene therapy is enhancement, not disease treatment.
Genetic diseases are present in only a tiny number of people, and so the
markets that will form there will be miniscule in comparison to those that
improve healthy people.

This will play out over the next decade or two.

Look at, e.g. gene therapy for inherited disorders (lysosomal storage
diseases, DNA repair deficiencies, etc, etc) versus myostatin / follistatin
gene therapy that increases muscle mass, reduces fat tissue, and generally
adjusts metabolism into a better direction.

The first companies to commercialize the former will be successful mid-sized
biotech concerns. The first companies to commercialize the latter will be
behemoths.

The state of development in this field is dependent on methods of delivering
genes that are reliable, tissue specific, and achieve high degrees of cell
coverage. Once that happens, which seems fairly close at hand, then we'll see
a very interesting expansion of the medical tourism marketplace into
enhancement technologies, a market hundreds of times as large as therapies for
sick people.

------
WesleyLivesay
Of course most people are going to support editing it to "treat medical
conditions or improve health" the question becomes what precisely are "medical
conditions" and when should they be treated.

Very few people are going to say that those people with cancer should die
because we shouldn't do something to save them.

~~~
mc32
It's going to be interesting.

At first people may want to treat physical expressions of health, then mental
psychological and then cosmetic.

At some point people will think about the genetics of gender (in multiple
dimensions, not just sex at birth but gender) and race and all the questions
and opinions that will bring.

And of course the desired traits like strength, beauty, height, intelligence.

------
everheardofc
Gene editing beyond treating diseases quickly boils down to doing animal
experiments on humans. Imagine that the gene editor made a mistake and now the
test subject is missing the left ear. How do you deal with these "defects"? Of
course! By putting them to sleep like regular lab animals.

Of course there is nothing inherently wrong about doing experiments on humans
but the problem is you now need to justify that gene editing is good and
eugenics is bad, that the test subjects do not need basic human rights and
therefore can be disposed when convenient.

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thinkcontext
Germline genetic manipulation is unlikely to extend beyond the super rich in
the short or medium term due to cost. Plain IVF is not accessible to most due
to cost and its not likely to get more so any time soon. Hence, IVF + genetic
manipulation will take quite a bit longer to get to a cost where it could be
widespread.

Also, its not clear to me how many therapeutic paths this opens up versus
simply screening preimplantation embryos.

~~~
3pt14159
Not true.

In Net Present Value accounting terms genetic manipulation or screening has a
reasonable chance of becoming mainstream in the medium term. Governments will
start to do it to ease the health burden of some of the more costly diseases,
and if we can simultaneously increase the strength, drive, and intelligence of
our population at the same time why not throw it in for free?

~~~
thinkcontext
Its an interesting idea. I suppose a rich, socialistically inclined country
could undertake such a project, which could set off a chain of dominoes.

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rbjorklin
Maybe start with what the Chinese are trying to achieve and do screening and
selection before inception? Should be a lot lower risk and easier to
accomplish.

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Fjolsvith
My wife has Diabetes and would gladly have a cure from DNA modification.

I would like a DNA modification to make my metabolism return to age 19.

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carbocation
That's a strikingly high number. Do 2/3 of Americans even approve of GMO food?

~~~
altotrees
I feel like there is a strong emotional component at play in these approval
rates. There are many people who have been touched and directly impacted by
disease, terminal or otherwise. It changes your life in a really stark and
eye-opening way, whether you're the afflicted or it is someone you love or
care about. While GMO's certainly draw concern and ridicule from swaths of the
public, many aren't impacted by them in the same immediate (read:empirical I
see it with my own eyes without a shred of doubt) way a serious disease is
capable of. Probably part of the reason, anyway.

~~~
sqeaky
I feel that the same effect is at play with vaccines.

Because few Americans have seen Measles, Mumps and Rubella first hand they are
more willing to take irresponsible risks. Things like a 10% mortality rate
make a disease feel safe because people think they will always be in the 90%.
Anybody with a cursory knowledge of mortality rates knows that 10% is a
horrifying number and that disease must be awful, some strains of Ebola kill
10% of people getting it.

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bigkm
But `we` won't eat gmo food?

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CodeWriter23
Normalizing eugenics has never ended well for any human society.

~~~
purple-again
There is nothing inherently wrong with the goal of eugenics. The problem has
always been unethical treatment of the individual components of the society
implementing them.

Gene editing is a responsible for a society to engage in eugenics without
forced sterilization or killing off undesirable segments.

The 'damage' of this method is opt in. Those who choose to 'stay natural' will
fall behind and become a disadvantaged underclass.

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shadykiller
This is just laziness. Waiting for the next wonder to fix their health than
taking control of it now and live a healthy life.

~~~
emiliobumachar
Quite many genetic diseases manifest independently of lifestyle choices.

