10 ms·

Editing humanity

40 points by jeo1234 11y ago

annoyingdisb 11y ago
Yes, it's Gattaca.
- BillTheCat 11y ago
  I just realized that Gattaca contains only the letters G, A, T, and C.
  - civilian 11y ago
    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.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
redthrowaway 11y ago
>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.
- smacktoward 11y ago
  > Quite successfully, thank you very much. The many victims of the various eugenics movements of the 19th and 20th centuries might disagree with this sentiment.
  - redthrowaway 11y ago
    And the countless people whose lives were saved by medical research might disagree with yours. "Playing God" simply means changing the universe to better suit our needs. It is a synonym for "maximizing human agency", and it's a damned good thing.
    - thesimpsons1022 11y ago
      You must admit though that humans will sometimes do misguided things with good intentions? There are many examples of us thinking that we fully understand a process, when in reality we don't. This can and has led to terrible consequences in the past. One concern I harbor is that perhaps with gene modification we will lose the genetic variability that allows animals to adapt and survive and evolve further. Variability also allows species to survive black swan events.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    > 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.
    - puredemo 11y ago
      >You now have a generation that can't effectively socialize and communicate. Not just one generation -- Crispr changes are passed down inter-generationally.
- Chickenosaurus 11y ago
  I agree with you that editing the human genome is not generally ethically objectionable and should be allowed, but I also think that tinkering with our genome will create a whole new set of societal issues that will reinforce the current ones, which humanity has been historically bad at solving. Imagine a world where genetical engineering is very effective, but not cheap. The already advantaged can create designer babies and therefore have the ability to give their offspring an additional edge. Social mobility could be seriously limited if unmodified humans have a worse chance to get good work or work at all. Even today, many people see the poor as inferior because they often have a bad education. In the future, they could be legitimately genetically inferior. Gattaca (1997) is an excellent movie with a similar theme: “A genetically inferior man assumes the identity of a superior one in order to pursue his lifelong dream of space travel“.
  - vectorjohn 11y ago
    I'm always pretty skeptical of the worry that this will be restricted to wealthy. For one, I don't think it would (or at least not for long), but additionally, won't that just mean that the people with these benefits will just out compete the rest? So over time everyone alive will have whatever the benefits are even if slowly. This is just a much faster version of natural selection. In other words, in the long run it won't matter is all I'm saying.
    - redthrowaway 11y ago
      Vaccines and clean drinking water used to be restricted to the wealthy, too.
hyperion2010 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
  - joaq 11y ago
    So what if someone's more intelligent? There was an experiment showing that super smart people don't have much of an advantage over smart people. Past a certain point it doesn't matter. Most other human attributes that we perceive as desirable like height have their downsides (every extra centimeter takes 3 months away from your life plus many other health problems). I see the opportunity more along the lines of removing health problems such as schizophrenia, etc.
  - hyperion2010 11y ago
    http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp2014105a.html http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp201410...
cryoshon 11y ago
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.
AnonNo15 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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 11y ago
        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.
grdeken 11y ago
This seems like a rip of this month's Wired cover piece (which was fantastic).
djscram 11y ago
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.
Mz 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.

Editing humanity

40 points by jeo1234 11y ago

annoyingdisb 11y ago

Yes, it's Gattaca.

BillTheCat 11y ago
I just realized that Gattaca contains only the letters G, A, T, and C.
- civilian 11y ago
  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.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

redthrowaway 11y ago

>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.

smacktoward 11y ago
> Quite successfully, thank you very much. The many victims of the various eugenics movements of the 19th and 20th centuries might disagree with this sentiment.
- redthrowaway 11y ago
  And the countless people whose lives were saved by medical research might disagree with yours. "Playing God" simply means changing the universe to better suit our needs. It is a synonym for "maximizing human agency", and it's a damned good thing.
  - thesimpsons1022 11y ago
    You must admit though that humans will sometimes do misguided things with good intentions? There are many examples of us thinking that we fully understand a process, when in reality we don't. This can and has led to terrible consequences in the past. One concern I harbor is that perhaps with gene modification we will lose the genetic variability that allows animals to adapt and survive and evolve further. Variability also allows species to survive black swan events.
cryoshon 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > 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.
  - puredemo 11y ago
    >You now have a generation that can't effectively socialize and communicate. Not just one generation -- Crispr changes are passed down inter-generationally.
Chickenosaurus 11y ago
I agree with you that editing the human genome is not generally ethically objectionable and should be allowed, but I also think that tinkering with our genome will create a whole new set of societal issues that will reinforce the current ones, which humanity has been historically bad at solving. Imagine a world where genetical engineering is very effective, but not cheap. The already advantaged can create designer babies and therefore have the ability to give their offspring an additional edge. Social mobility could be seriously limited if unmodified humans have a worse chance to get good work or work at all. Even today, many people see the poor as inferior because they often have a bad education. In the future, they could be legitimately genetically inferior. Gattaca (1997) is an excellent movie with a similar theme: “A genetically inferior man assumes the identity of a superior one in order to pursue his lifelong dream of space travel“.
- vectorjohn 11y ago
  I'm always pretty skeptical of the worry that this will be restricted to wealthy. For one, I don't think it would (or at least not for long), but additionally, won't that just mean that the people with these benefits will just out compete the rest? So over time everyone alive will have whatever the benefits are even if slowly. This is just a much faster version of natural selection. In other words, in the long run it won't matter is all I'm saying.
  - redthrowaway 11y ago
    Vaccines and clean drinking water used to be restricted to the wealthy, too.

hyperion2010 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.
- joaq 11y ago
  So what if someone's more intelligent? There was an experiment showing that super smart people don't have much of an advantage over smart people. Past a certain point it doesn't matter. Most other human attributes that we perceive as desirable like height have their downsides (every extra centimeter takes 3 months away from your life plus many other health problems). I see the opportunity more along the lines of removing health problems such as schizophrenia, etc.
- hyperion2010 11y ago
  http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp2014105a.html http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp201410...

cryoshon 11y ago

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.

AnonNo15 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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.

grdeken 11y ago

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

djscram 11y ago

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.

Mz 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.