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Two-thirds of Americans approve of editing human DNA to treat disease
- 3pt14159 9y agoWe 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.
- Retric 9y agoIMO, the core issue is we simply don't understand DNA that well and are likely to introduce many problems potentially across a huge swath of the population. Disease treatments on the other hand are likely a lot more straightforward and the net gains are also likely larger.
- sqeaky 9y agoThere are risks with all activities. The kind of gaps in our knowledge are smaller than ever and there if the experts say there is no obvious risk we would remiss to disregard them. There will always be the risk of the unknown, there is still the risk of the unknown with seemingly every day things like cars. The utility of cars and gene therapies is so large that we really can't afford for all the data to come in.
- Retric 9y agoIt's a question of sum(risk * each downside) vs benefit. Large scale genetic editing for cosmetic reasons has minimal benefit and several high risks with large associated downsides. Protein folding as a tiny example is something we have trouble simulating, expanding to multi cellular mechanisms across a lifetime is basically impossible without directly testing it. And those tests will be done on people. Prions are just an example of the kind of issues people will be dealing with. It’s really not just about inserting some code from somewhere else it’s a question of how physical structures interact and degrade. Long term I have no problem with it. But, right now we could give children blue hair for example but we have no idea what else that might cause. PS: That said, copying things from other humans is probably significantly safer and this editing will take place. I just don't think we should introduce it at the society level without at least a lifetime of test data and significant sample sizes.
- waiquoo 9y agoThe issue as I see it is that this is effectively an advanced form of eugenics. The idea behind eugenics (improving the lives of future people) is probably not bad, as you say, what is the downside in increasing the number of geniuses and reducing the incidence of defects? Who doesn't want their children to be strong, beautiful, smart, and happy? The problem is that people are dicks and we will probably end up in an arms race to some sort of superhuman masterrace. It will be like going to college, where before not everyone needed to go to college, but now you have to get a 4 year degree to compete for entry level jobs (I realize there are exceptions, but you know what I mean). We need to be cautious not to end up in a GATTACA situation.
- mooseburger 9y agoThe only real problem with the GATTACA world was that not everyone got the genetic enhancements, creating an underclass. If everyone got the mods, what's the downside? Well, I guess Jude Law's character couldn't live with the idea of being completely engineered for winning, and still losing. But his problem seems orthogonal to widespread genetic engineering. Everyone has their ambitions thwarted at some point. It has always been a problem humans faced. Hell, maybe even that can be engineered away, by being created with low propensity for self-loathing.
- emmab 9y ago> If everyone got the mods, what's the downside? You can't get germline gene therapy if you're not a zygote.
- sqeaky 9y agoYet? There is not property of physics that stop us from making the tech. It won't e in the first gen tech, but with all those 20 something geniuses coming out of college they can start working on that tech before too many generations pass.
- waiquoo 9y agoSo we should eliminate all the undesirables? Or manipulate the undesirables until they are desirable? Who chooses what traits are desirable, even if they are universally applied. I'm not arguing that this isn't amazing technology that could potentially cure a lot of disabling diseases, that possibility is very exciting. I am just stating that there are some tricky ethical dilemmas involved.
- vbuwivbiu 9y agoThere's no downside. It's only the same as what we did with smallpox and polio. I'm all for it: I'd get genedrives for all kinds of genetically-determined diseases. What concerns me is how genes affect personality. I don't want a world of geniuses if a side-effect is they're all nasty people. Now I like to think that smarter people are also nicer, on the whole. And violence is often associated with frontal-lobe defects. I would like to live in a happier more secure world, and if that means engineering people to be nicer, less murderous people then so be it. But that's Clockwork Orange territory.
- dontreact 9y agoThe 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.
- BearGoesChirp 9y agoCompared to the current qualities we select for? Breeding among humans is by no means random, and I think selecting for intelligence would be an improvement. I think the bigger concern is how we select for intelligence. Doing it based on a few genes that correlate strongly with intelligence can lead to an increased vulnerability to health issues related to those genes we don't know about, but I think this applies to any gene level selection based on any characteristics.
- dontreact 9y agoRight I guess that part of my point is that even if you resolve all those issues you would still really want to select for is intelligence and pro-social/moral behavior in order to optimize the positive impact of a person.
- sbierwagen 9y agoYour comment is phrased as if antisocial traits don't already confer greater reproductive success. http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138%2814%2900077-4/abstract http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138%2814%2900077-4/a... >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.
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- carbocation 9y agoThat's a strikingly high number. Do 2/3 of Americans even approve of GMO food?
- altotrees 9y agoI 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 9y agoI 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.
- protomyth 9y agoI don't think its such a high number. I've seen the religious argument, but have met very few (one to be specific) religious folks that would not move heaven and earth to fix some of the problems with children before birth. Love and protection of the children extends quite far. Its really a small fringe that doesn't participate in modern medicine.
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- shadykiller 9y agoThis is just laziness. Waiting for the next wonder to fix their health than taking control of it now and live a healthy life.
- tree_of_item 9y agoThis is just a lazy comment. Who says these people aren't living a healthy life right now?
- emiliobumachar 9y agoQuite many genetic diseases manifest independently of lifestyle choices.
- KGIII 9y agoBecause genetic defects can be solved by healthy living?
- WesleyLivesay 9y agoOf 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.
- Lordarminius 9y agoScience by consensus. Let's see how that works out.
- mc32 9y agoIt'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.
- rbjorklin 9y agoMaybe 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.
- gallerdude 9y agoIt’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...
- vkjv 9y agoNitpick: IQ is based on a normal distribution with 100 as the mean. If everyone had an IQ of today's 120, then it would no longer be an IQ of 120.
- SerLava 9y agoMeta nitpick: he's clearly referring to the future relative to now, so it makes sense in that context.
- bpodgursky 9y agoI don't think it gets recalibrated year to year.
- Lyle-Cantor 9y agoIQ enhancement is almost the only thing that matters in the genetic engineering story. If we don't allow it, somewhere else will; and it is they who will control future technological progress. Strength matters little in comparison.
- reasonattlm 9y agoThe 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.
- gwern 9y agoFulltext: 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-selection-raises-thorny-questions-1.22468 https://www.nature.com/news/china-s-embrace-of-embryo-select... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15039941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15039941
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- jawns 9y agoI 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 9y agoWell either abortion is unethical or embryo research is ethical.
- hwillis 9y agoDevils 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.
- CodeWriter23 9y agoNormalizing eugenics has never ended well for any human society.
- 2017Dude 9y agoAs if anyone tried it at meaningful scale using manageable tools.
- purple-again 9y agoThere 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.
- thinkcontext 9y agoGermline 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 9y agoNot 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 9y agoIts an interesting idea. I suppose a rich, socialistically inclined country could undertake such a project, which could set off a chain of dominoes.
- bigkm 9y agoBut `we` won't eat gmo food?
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- Fjolsvith 9y agoMy 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.
- everheardofc 9y agoGene 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.