17 ms·

First gene-edited babies claimed in China

278 points by sjreese 8y ago

carbocation 8y ago
> It's "unconscionable ... an experiment on human beings that is not morally or ethically defensible," said Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a University of Pennsylvania gene editing expert and editor of a genetics journal. This is 100% correct. (COI: Kiran was my postdoc while I was a student in the lab a decade ago.)
- wycs 8y ago
  Perhaps this is true. I do not know. But human enhancement through genetic engineering is coming. Changes in traits, such as IQ, by 5+ standard deviations looks possible. We would be fools to outlaw it here, for we would become as children compared to future citizens of nations that do not share our taboos.
  - carbocation 8y ago
    > Perhaps this is true. I do not know. But human enhancement through genetic engineering is coming. Changes in traits, such as IQ, by 5+ standard deviations looks possible. We would be fools to outlaw it here, for we would become as children compared to future citizens of Asian nations. What is the relevance of "Asian nations?" to this conversation? Also, we're talking about a specific experiment that was allegedly conducted in human beings with (good but error-prone) genome editing mechanisms, outside of the purview of peer review or, from what I can tell, an IRB.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - dqpb 8y ago
      "good but error prone" describes all of medical care right now. Hell, pharmaceuticals aren't even good in many cases.
      - carbocation 8y ago
        That's absolutely not the standard for deciding to conduct an experiment on humans.
        modzu 8y ago
        remember also its an unborn child -- its not an experiment on the living, consenting adult. child grows up, experiences whatever unknown consequences of the genetic experiment. thanks dad!
        barry-cotter 8y ago
        Only true if your country and culture cares about IRBs. China doesn’t, it’s a quarter of the human population and it won’t be long until it’s that of global GDP at least. What a bunch of post Christians with delusions about the universality of their ethical code think does not bother them at all.
        goatlover 8y ago
        Yeah, but then maybe India will counter-balance that. From what I've heard, their ethical code will be against any such modifications.
      - ethbro 8y ago
        "Good but error prone" seems to aptly describe our current method of producing offspring. Gene editing is mandatory, if only because we've managed to turn many previously lethal mutations into livable, and reproducible, ones.
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      "What is the relevance of "Asian nations?" to this conversation?" I would assume it's because the article describes genetically-engineered babies in China, so obviously it's not outlawed there (or if it is, the law is not enforced). Grandparent poster is pointing out that if genetic engineering gives survival or competitive benefits to those who do it, it doesn't matter what your personal ethical, moral, and legal standards are, because your whole society will be outcompeted by societies without those strictures.
      - anvandare 8y ago
        The purists need not be worried. There's always the hope the descendants of those humans who do take the path of editing their own genetic code will, a few centuries from now, give those purists' descendants a nice small patch of land as a reservation. Or maybe a cozy cage in a zoo, with a little sign next to the bars which reads: "homo sapiens inferior".
        coldtea 8y ago
        Or, you know, the purists will be spared untold suffering that those others will have to go through because of "magician's apprentice" style editing...
        anvandare 8y ago
        Of course the first period of experimentation and discovery will lead to unexpected and unpleasant results. All new technology takes time to mature, for the users to get an understanding of its tricky implementation bits and long-term impact. It's not wise to immediately put all your eggs in a brand new basket. But the ones who experiment and adapt will always eventually outperform those who refuse to change and stick to tried-and-tested. That's the very nature of evolution.
        coldtea 8y ago
        >That's the very nature of evolution. Evolution is blind to such concerns. Those who "experiment" might be wiped out because of their experiments gone wrong, and evolution wont care at all. A creature inventing tools might have an evolutionary advantage over others. A creature inventing e.g. biological warfare and nuclear weapons might have less an advantage, it can easily wipe most of its own kind and even collapse its civilization (losing even more advantages).
  - nradov 8y ago
    Genetic engineering might be able to prevent certain inherited diseases, but otherwise major net improvements are unlikely. A boost in one area tends to cause problems in other areas. That's why evolution through natural selection hasn't significantly increased average human intelligence over the past few thousand years. The average human genome appears to be close to a local maximum.
    - wycs 8y ago
      This is not true. Intelligence is polygenic. The average human is no Von Neumann. At the very least genetic engineering could raise average IQ to Von Neumann’s level. We know that phenotype is possible with no ill effects. It will likely take us much further.
      - nradov 8y ago
        You haven't addressed my point. No one disputes that intelligence is partly genetic. However if it was possible to raise intelligence through genetic engineering with no ill effects then why hasn't evolution increased the incidence of that phenotype already?
        wycs 8y ago
        Most likely because it seems to be a phenotype that does not reproduce itself. None of Von Neumann’s children had kids if I recall correctly. This environment does not select for IQ past a certain point; this does not imply we cannot engineer people to be more intelligent any more than it implies we cannot engineer people to be dwarfs.
        ganz 8y ago
        Not my area of expertise, but I think the intuition for why evolution didn't make us all Einstein's comes in two parts: (1) IQ is very polygenetic - a big IQ gene might be 0.1 IQ, and there aren't a lot even that large, if I recall the large genome wide association studies done on this. As GWAS studies get larger we find more, but they're all super small effects. (2) Having an extra 0.1 IQ point is easy to lose in the noise of other effects on having offspring. So even if we assumed IQ was perfectly correlated with more surviving offspring in modern societies, it might take an extremely long time (even longer than a whole planet and a thousand years) to make a detectable difference.
  - skosuri 8y ago
    "Changes in traits, such as IQ, by 5+ standard deviations"... Where in the world are you getting this from? This is unlikely to be true for a long time. Intelligence, as far as genetics controls it, is a complex trait... with few if any large effect (especially positive) mutations.
    - wycs 8y ago
      Though thousands of alleles contribute to intelligence, we would only need to edit a few hundred to get extremely large increases in IQ, especially if you perform a round of embryo selection (or even iterated embryo selection) before editing. Editing hundreds of alleles may sound incredible to you now, but I don’t think it will sound so incredible for long. Even ignoring GM, embryo selection can get us pretty far with current technology: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection
      - krastanov 8y ago
        Just checking: you do know that there is a difference between change of "5 standard deviations" and change of "5 IQ points". 5 standard deviations is equal to "1 in 3.5 million", which makes your claim fairly farfetched with the tech of today or of the future decade or two, especially given how IQ is much more function of nurture than of nature.
        wycs 8y ago
        I am aware of this. Genetic engineering implies far more power than Gwern mentions for one round of embryo selection. 5 standard deviations may sound a lot for you, but in animal breeding we have changed the distribution of various traits by far more than 5 standard deviations. Into the dozens.
      - skosuri 8y ago
        What you are saying is just not supported by evidence. For example, polygenic analysis of the latest meta-analysis from >250K individuals seems to say that the top several hundred variants explain in aggregrate only 5.2% of the variation in intelligence. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0152-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0152-6 (Supplement section 2.3.3 if you don't have access).
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - linkmotif 8y ago
    So be it. Let them have it, if it means not being human.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Changes in traits, such as IQ, by 5+ standard deviations looks possible. This looks totally unlikely. Not to mention generally undesirable (people with IQ over 150 or so often have severe problems in their social life, and a lot of them don't ever even create or discover much, not to mention the insufferable part whose main accomplishment is to be members of MENSA).
    - shubb 8y ago
      They didn't actually specify positive. It would be pretty easy to reduce IQ by 5+ standard deviations. Plenty of monogenic disorders cause learning disabilities, just gotta knock out those genes...
    - nugget 8y ago
      150+ IQ is a lonely place to be because there aren’t many other people to connect with, especially for kids born in more rural areas without resources. It’s easy for these kids to self destruct. Turning a kid that smart into a happy, stable, productive member of society is an intensive 18+ year process that usually involves curated peers and experts with specific domain expertise. Check out Davidson Academy in Reno to read more.
  - yters 8y ago
    "It is inevitable that stumbling blocks come, but woe to him through whom they come!" - Jesus
- feelix 8y ago
  calling an opinion "100% correct" seems 100% indefensible
  - carbocation 8y ago
    Since this implies that you find this action more than 0% defensible, I'm curious to hear your defense of it.
    - dqpb 8y ago
      Here is a simple argument - if you can prevent disease, you should.
      - carbocation 8y ago
        "Can prevent disease" implies that you are not doing experimentation. If you're doing experiments, it means you don't know if you can.
        chr1 8y ago
        You can prevent disease if you make experiments and learn how to prevent it. So in this case experimentation is a first step in preventing disease.
        carbocation 8y ago
        In what ethical framework is experimenting on humans the first step? (The answer is none.)
        throwa789 8y ago
        Ethical frameworks are optional, humans sacrifice other humans to acquire power and knowledge regularly, that's the nature of the world
  - DennisAleynikov 8y ago
- zxcvvcxz 8y ago
  Why? Seriously why? We do so many unnatural things to us through technology. The article discusses editing genes to try and prevent viruses.
  - carbocation 8y ago
    The modern biomedical ethical framework comes out of Nuremburg in response to Nazi atrocities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code
    - barry-cotter 8y ago
      There’s nothing in there that would obviously prohibit the experiment we’re all discussing here. I can see how someone who deals with university IRBs or professional bioethicists might think there is but if we used risk reward thresholds as high as they do, or held to the precautionary principle that strongly we would still be discussing whether fire was a good idea. IRBs are a one way ratchet with tiny incentives to approve and large ones to deny. They are a cancerous growth on science.
      - carbocation 8y ago
        You’re saying that you can see how an expert would think that there is something in the Nuremberg Code that prohibits the experiment we are talking about here, but you know better than the experts?
        barry-cotter 8y ago
        You are an expert in your field of medicine. You are much better at making predictions from data in it than lay people and you are vastly better at effecting changes in your domain of expertise than laymen. That’s real expertise, like engineers, meteorologists, astronomers, microeconomists, or engineers have. Then there are people who are experts on talking about something but have no expertise in doing. Art historians are quite close to astronomers here in that they can be very good at out of sample tests and prediction but have limited ability to do things because their field doesn’t call upon them to do more than render accurate judgments. Then there are people who master a body of lore, who are called upon to discuss things. Ethicists are in this group, like priests, pastors or imams. Ethicists are experts in talking about ethics. They have no special expertise in acting ethically, compared to other philosophers[1]. Ethicists have expertise in what amounts to a body of administrative law, like rabbis, imams or canon lawyers. And we have strong evidence of actual harm caused by them. If bioethicists can’t get their shit together enough to defend compensated kidney or gamete donation they aren’t even broadly neutral. There are people being paid to argue against saving lives, and against helping to bring into the world new lives that are actively wanted. There are ethicists who argue that poor people can’t really consent because the offer of some good to sufficiently poor person qualifies as duress. The Nuremberg Code is good. The system of IRBs and bioethicists built up around it is not just bad, it’s genuinely awful. [1]The moral behavior of ethics professors: Relationships among self-reported behavior, expressed normative attitude, and directly observed behavior Eric Schwitzgebel & Joshua Rust https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHTMB-4 https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHTMB-4
- fooker 8y ago
  > not morally or ethically defensible Sure, that won't stop progress by people who do not follow your flavor of morality or ethics, though.
  - carbocation 8y ago
    What is your evidence that the post-WWII flavor of bioethics inhibits real progress? If that were true, why do we not see other systems leading?
    - jpgvm 8y ago
      We do. In China. Not just in biology but also AI/ML. They are willing (and able) to do the things others find reprehensible. It's already apparent just how far ahead they are in the AI/ML field, I suspect biology/medicine will follow. It's a very real threat and believing that The West has a head start and is more intelligent/better funded/other excuse is not going to end well for us. China achieves goals though brute force with very little regard for ethics or norms.
    - buboard 8y ago
      The west has spent far more brainpower in making up bioethics regulations than actually talking about the procedures themselves. Cue the threads over here. Also note the differences in culture: the chinese parents consented to it. I m not sure how easy it would be to find this in the west.
      - carbocation 8y ago
        The unfamiliarity of random HN commenters with genetics is overwhelmingly clear, but that does not mean that geneticists in the US are not thinking about this.
- nathan_f77 8y ago
  I don't know if I agree with that. Some theists believe that we shouldn't tamper with God's perfect creation, because everything happens for a reason (including miscarriages, birth defects, and genetic diseases.) Atheists might believe that natural selection has got us this far, so it must be a pretty good process. A scientist shouldn't change anything, because they will be adding unnecessary risk to the natural process of evolution. But you have to think about the "baseline". Natural selection is actually a brutal and horrific process where genes are just mutated at random. 50% of all pregnancies end in a miscarriage. Birth defects occur in 3% of all live births, and they account for 21% of all infant deaths. Nature is already a mad scientist that runs random experiments on babies. I read that humans have about 30 genetic mutations per generation [1]. So imagine if a scientist picks 1 gene at random, and they use CRISPR to randomly change that gene. Now the embryo has around ~31 random mutations. Isn't that basically the same result as natural selection? You probably wouldn't even be able to tell that the scientist had changed anything. Is that an accurate way of looking at it, or am I missing something? [1] http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/genetics.html http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/genetics.html
  - freeone3000 8y ago
    It's an accurate way of looking at it, but it assumes humans have a lesser value because lots of them already die, so what's a few more? The difference is a few humans, and that's too big a risk, in my opinion, to take lightly.
    - nathan_f77 8y ago
      Sure, but the scientist is trying to reduce the risk of death and suffering. (They're not just flipping a coin to see what happens.) We already know a lot about certain genes and what they do. For example, mutations in the HBB gene cause sickle cell anemia. Removing the mutation in that HBB gene is a good idea 100% of the time. You can just look at the 99% (?) of healthy people who have an HBB gene without that mutation. Maybe the CRISPR process is risky and can cause lots of unexpected mutations. In that case it's not so black-and-white. But if you can edit a gene to prevent a disease, and it can be done in a safe way, then I don't think it's inherently unethical. (Although you could argue that it might be more ethical for parents to adopt a baby and donate money to charity, instead of spending a lot of money on gene-editing and IVF.)
- buboard 8y ago
  maybe we should be screening couples before we allow them to copulate, then. taking gambles with randomization experiments is 100% ethically indefensible. please, spare us the "100% correct" and certified ethical positions
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- empath75 8y ago
  > is not morally or ethically defensible Based on whose ethics and morals? Eventually a country is going to go all in on robotics and genetic engineering, ethics be damned, and the rest of the world is going to be left in the dust -- economically and militarily.
- parasar1983 8y ago
  The ruling class of China likely operates on different principles, e.g.: "Policies that lead to enormous suffering of individuals are quite acceptable if such policies sufficiently advance the capabilities of the collective." So I expect the demand for "unethical" research will be met there, and perhaps the results of such research will be "laundered" for public consumption (maybe with a process akin to parallel construction).
- jobigoud 8y ago
  You can argue that not fixing biological defects when you have the means to is ethically indefensible. It's not black and white.
skosuri 8y ago
The edited gene is for CCR5, which currently doesn’t have known function, but is the entry point for HIV. So editing for prophylaxis. This was probably done because if there aren’t a ton of loss of function beneficial traits, and probably with the main desire to be first. Except, if the reports are true, this is not just an experiment but a person (or people). I guess the main desire is to normalize editing. Brave new world I guess, whether we like it or not.
- DennisAleynikov 8y ago
  the edit was also confirmed and voluntarily implanted in-vitro in willing participants. It's ethically black as far as I am concerned but it has already happened so we must see where this takes us. IVF born edited zygotes might have serious complications but ideally its a healthy human being. (for everyone's sake)
  - dqpb 8y ago
    > It's ethically black What does that mean?
    - elcomet 8y ago
      Edit: misread
      - NamTaf 8y ago
        No, they mean that ethically it's black in the same way that we describe blackhat vs whitehat hackers.
    - DennisAleynikov 8y ago
      "unethical" would probably have worked better. sorry for the confusion
      - buboard 8y ago
        which part is unethical though? it was voluntary
rm2889 8y ago
This is quite interesting. There is a certain very small percentage of the world's population that is immune to the HIV virus. These people's T-cells have the CD4 receptor, but not the CCR5 receptor. The HIV virus needs both these receptors to successfully affect the host's cells. The absence of the CCR5 receptor still allows the person's T cells to function normally, so if this works, it can pave the way to creating offspring who are immune to HIV
- hanniabu 8y ago
  Does CCR5 have no other purpose? Hard to believe that it'd exist if it wasn't needed.
  - discodave 8y ago
    Not really. There are lots of vestigial things in humans that are no longer needed. Tailbones, for instance.
  - skosuri 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#Potential_costs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#Potential_costs
  - joshvm 8y ago
    Apparently removing it may have other consequences: > Even if editing worked perfectly, people without normal CCR5 genes face higher risks of getting certain other viruses, such as West Nile, and of dying from the flu. Since there are many ways to prevent HIV infection and it's very treatable if it occurs, those other medical risks are a concern, Musunuru said.
  - sanxiyn 8y ago
    There are literally millions of healthy people without CCR5 receptors. (Millions is approximately 0.01% of world population and this mutation's frequency is certainly greater than that.)
    - 8y ago
DennisAleynikov 8y ago
the first edit is HIV resistance, not a bad way to start the black mirror episode that is the rest of our lives from now on.
- pgreenwood 8y ago
  If it works and HIV resistance installed in a population, then it opens the possibility HIV could be then could become an effective bioweapon for that population.
  - learc83 8y ago
    1. If it works, you'd need to wait 50+ years until most of your population was immune. You'd have to hope that in that time HIV vaccines/cures aren't developed. 2. HIV would make a terrible bioweapon. It's difficult to spread, takes a very long time to incapacitate people, and there are generally effective treatments.
walrus01 8y ago
in vitro sex selection (mostly for male children) has been going on for a long time, seems the next logical step: https://www.google.com/search?&q=in+vitro+sex+selection+china&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?&q=in+vitro+sex+selection+chin...
- artellectual 8y ago
  Gender selection, will have adverse effect without a doubt, nature has a healthy balance between the number of men and women in the world, and certain culture preferring boys / girls will lead to us having too much of one and not enough of the other. There is already evidence of this in China and India.
rshm 8y ago
https://apnews.com/4997bb7aa36c45449b488e19ac83e86d https://apnews.com/4997bb7aa36c45449b488e19ac83e86d Has more info
Svexav 8y ago
It’s no surprise this comes from China, the same country that grinds dead babies into pills.
- cyphar 8y ago
  When I first read this comment I thought it was hyperbole (I've heard about the vaccine and melamine scares -- which harmed and killed many thousands of children -- but not about dead babies being put into pills). But no, it's real fucking thing[1,2,3,4]. What the actual fuck. How is a Hacker News comment the first time I've heard of this? [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/horrifyingly-ground-baby-pills-are-real-thing/328490/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/ho... [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-17980177 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-17980177 [3]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-08/south-korea-cracks-down-on-baby-flesh-pills/3999028 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-08/south-korea-cracks-do... [4]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/southkorea/9250438/Pills-filled-with-powdered-human-baby-flesh-found-by-customs-officials.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/southkorea/9...
  - markdown 8y ago
    I don't understand this. They don't advertise the pills as human flesh pills, so why use that material in the first place? Why not dead chickens, or runoff from an abattoir?
  - withhighprod 8y ago
    It’s quite ancient and almost related to cult groups. Well, in some country it’s also part of its religion See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuman_Thong https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuman_Thong. Should I tell you it’s very popular among celebrities?
  - aaron695 8y ago
    Basically it's hyperbole, here's an ok summary - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/9272/did-pills-from-china-seized-in-south-korea-contain-the-powdered-flesh-of-dead-ba https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/9272/did-pills-... What hell it has to do with "First gene-edited babies claimed in China" other than racism is hard to see anyway. In the west it's not unheard of to eat to placenta which is basically the same thing anyway. If it's real it's impossible to know, we only have one source, some doco in Korean which means it must be pretty rare even if it's true, for a country of over a billion that's rare. PS And it was the Koreans in this tale buying them.
wonderwonder 8y ago
There have been a good deal of medical and technological breakthroughs over the last couple decades. Reusable rockets, VR, machine learning, etc. This is the first article I have read that has made me realize that the future is right here, right now and there is a very high probability that things are now going to change rapidly. One thing to consider is that via crispr and stem cell treatments, genetic changes can be affected in adults as well, you just need to wait for the kinks to be worked out now and apply large sums of money. Our definition of 'haves and have nots' is potentially going to change in ways we have never imagined.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >This is the first article I have read that has made me realize that the future is right here, right now and there is a very high probability that things are now going to change rapidly. The future? Compared to 1900 we already live in a widely different world, more diff today - 1900 than diff 1900 - 1000 B.C.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    I think you underestimate the technology we had in 1900 if you think 1900 is less different from 1000 B.C. than it is from today.
  - AznHisoka 8y ago
    If I was transported to my city in 1900 and walk around, I would probably be uncomfortable for a few hours but be adjusted soon afterwards. If I was a 1900’s citizen transported to 1000 BC? holy.. are you kidding me? I would be shell shocked.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      And yet, not match would have changed. Aside from a few major western cities (and specific major areas in them too) most cities in 1900 didn't even fully have electric lighting back then, nor central sewage systems, and tons of other stuff. Technology wise, 1900 cities more like 1000 BC than today. 1000 BC wasn't some cavemen running around, we had established civilizations, with writing, education, math, literature, laws, etc already in place.
cnfteol 8y ago
a giant leap i had thought this wouldnt happen for another few decades this is bad news for tibetans since their high altitude gene is known even the andes high alt adaptations are being discovered which is really one of the closest things to a genetic super ability you can get so it will only be a few decades more until this last barrier to han colonization of tibet falls deep sea diving is another such genetic ability recently investigated
nopinsight 8y ago
Here is a controversial article published in 2013 by an evolutionary psychologist that everyone should give some thoughts on: Disclaimers: I do not have the expertise to evaluate its veracity but if true it will affect everyone in the world in some important ways within a few decades (the effects might already start to appear as we see how fast China has developed technologically. Yes, technology transfer is clearly a factor but few developing nations can absorb and adopt advanced technologies so rapidly). I also have not pondered deeply enough to have a strong position on the complicated ethical implications alluded to in the article and expressed with concerns elsewhere. https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838 > ... > Deng also encouraged assortative mating through promoting urbanization and higher education, so bright, hard-working young people could meet each other more easily, increasing the proportion of children who would be at the upper extremes of intelligence and conscientiousness. ... > But crucially, Comprehensive National Power also includes "biopower": creating the world's highest-quality human capital in terms of the Chinese population's genes, health, and education ... > The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness. ... > My real worry is the Western response. The most likely response, given Euro-American ideological biases, would be a bioethical panic that leads to criticism of Chinese population policy with the same self-righteous hypocrisy that we have shown in criticizing various Chinese socio-cultural policies. But the global stakes are too high for us to act that stupidly and short-sightedly. A more mature response would be based on mutual civilizational respect, asking—what can we learn from what the Chinese are doing, how can we help them, and how can they help us to keep up as they create their brave new world?
thomasfedb 8y ago
Moral frontiers aside, current gene tech is still not where we'd like it to be in order to pull of these sorts of things and know we haven't done harm. Side edits are a big problem with CRISPR-Cas9.
- carbocation 8y ago
  To be fair, that's part of the moral argument.
  - thomasfedb 8y ago
    It's a technical problem in it's own right, it also has significant in the moral argument.
    - carbocation 8y ago
      I agree.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
For the surely upcoming discussion about pros and cons of genetic editing in humans, Kurzgesagt has a basic overview of the space, if you can spare some 15 minutes with your morning coffee. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAhjPd4uNFY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAhjPd4uNFY (not affiliated, just love their videos)
jhowell 8y ago
Looking at how addictive our interactions with technology have become this seems concerning. A future where we can all exist and never look up or leave our thought bubbles could have a dramatic impact on humanity and motivations.
markdown 8y ago
This will be a great tool to help game the social score. More intelligence + less risk-taking + more respect for authority = a high-score child sure to get into the top University and have the freedom to travel there. /s
citilife 8y ago
This sounds super sketchy: > He said the parents involved declined to be identified or interviewed, and he would not say where they live or where the work was done. > There is no independent confirmation of He's claim, and it has not been published in a journal, where it would be vetted by other experts. He revealed it Monday in Hong Kong to one of the organizers of an international conference on gene editing that is set to begin Tuesday, and earlier in exclusive interviews with The Associated Press. To be honest, _if this is true_ it sounds like he modified them without the parents knowledge or consent. Usually, I'm super skeptical of any "research" coming out of China. However, I've suspected that China has been doing this for a while anyway (without sharing it). So I'm left with three possibilities in my mind: 1. Government is releasing this to see how the world will react 2. The doctor excited to share their work, shared it - but did the work without the parents consent 3. Parents did this knowingly and in a controlled way Of those options I'm betting #2 followed by #1. Highly doubt even if the parents consented this was entered into with the knowledge of the risks. Seriously if they are using Cas9 who knows what else could go wrong.
- beefsack 8y ago
  Your quotes also highlight the possibility that this is all fabricated.
- SCAQTony 8y ago
  Exactly. What happens when these babies become toddlers or young children and they start contracting all sorts of weird cancers. See article: Potential DNA damage from CRISPR has been ‘seriously underestimated,’ study finds https://www.statnews.com/2018/07/16/crispr-potential-dna-damage-underestimated/ https://www.statnews.com/2018/07/16/crispr-potential-dna-dam... The results come hard on the heels of two studies that identified a related issue: Some CRISPR’d cells might be missing a key anti-cancer mechanism and therefore be able to initiate tumors.
  - wagutina 8y ago
    China will make sure the world doesn't see the failures of their experiments, this is the very scary part of the story
sanxiyn 8y ago
Hear it from He Jiankui himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th0vnOmFltc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th0vnOmFltc
- baybal2 8y ago
  Oooh, so it is that He, the man used to have a very peculiar reputation on Chinese university BBSes back when China just got internet connectivity. That was what possibly lead to him being ousted from Chinese academia a decade ago. I myself think it was certainly no coincidence that Stanford picked him up. I'm afraid calling up some of his opinions, and in particularly on the topic of race, as they will be a ten megaton flamewar bomb. Google him yourself if you know Chinese.
  - est 8y ago
    https://www.zhihu.com/question/303671507 https://www.zhihu.com/question/303671507 Looks pretty bad.
  - roel_v 8y ago
    C'mon man, you can't leave those of us that don't speak Chinese hanging like that.
  - akfanta 8y ago
    Search result is now flooded with this news. Nothing on Wiki either. What exactly are you talking about? Any keywords?
WheelsAtLarge 8y ago
And we are here, a brave new world. For years I heard and read that we would never need to worry about scientists editing the DNA of a human embryo that would be brought to term. The argument emphasized the fact that professional ethics would prevent it. Well, ethics change and not all professionals will follow them. As a programmer, I know how hard it is to modify a ball of code without having unexpected consequences. We barely know how the human genome functions. I hope we don't do too much damage.
- buboard 8y ago
  Nah we are not in brave new world yet. We are in a world where china is willing to brute force its way into it through very risky experiments, while the west is not willing to own up to the reality that our future is no longer natural, and we are not even going to be a single species.
ttflee 8y ago
The Shenzhen HarMoniCare Women & Children’s Hospital, the medical ethics committee of which gave a permit to this, was one of the so-called Putian-systems, a medical network established by hundreds of people from Putian, Fujian who earned their first bucket of gold by selling “home made remedies and fake medicine at high prices”. https://m.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1940668/baidu-scandal-spotlight-china-military-hospitals https://m.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1940... EDIT: Shenzhen Medical Ethics Expert Committee said that the trial was not reported to before the trial. https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=http://www.bjnews.com.cn/news/2018/11/26/524939.html&xid=17259,15700022,15700124,15700126,15700149,15700186,15700191,15700201&usg=ALkJrhiDehC95dc3xPQZBlTpe4sNP3u-Bg https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...
joejerryronnie 8y ago
I wonder how many of us are totally fine with gene-edited babies but find Facebook morally reprehensible?
Namari 8y ago
We finally reached Gattaca
- gwern 8y ago
  Gattaca was actually embryo selection, not editing.
  - Namari 8y ago
    Oh, was it? A good reason for me to watch it again, I haven't watched that one in ages.
oh-kumudo 8y ago
It already causes quite a debate on Chinese internet as well. People are genuinely concerned about the unknown effects on the babies, and questioning the authors and the hospital's motivation of applying such techniques to human this early without fully understanding its consequences.
- jobigoud 8y ago
  IVF was also very controversial and "unnatural" at the time. I hope the kid is fine.
Traubenfuchs 8y ago
While the western world is whining about irrelevant ethics the Chinese will eventually eradicate countless diseases, engineer the perfect superhuman and take control of their evolution. Transhumanism is here and happening right now. We are committing a crime against our future generations if we decide not to participate in it. We actively decide against prosperity and advancement. We are luddites. Complacent western weakness at its best.
meshr 8y ago
1. Do they grow HIV-resistant people for sex-work industry? 2. Why does China outlaw cloning if it has the same risks?
temptempdog 8y ago
watching a lot of programmers comment on genetics is like watching physicists play with the genome. cs, and for human intents - physics, have predictable structure. biology is far too complex for the human brain to simplify and understand at the level discussed (and practiced) here.
booleandilemma 8y ago
This is how China is going to take the lead. They will start breeding disease-resistant, stronger and smarter humans, and the west will take the moral high ground, tweet about how evil China is on their new phones, and fall behind. Our ethics will be our downfall.
- wagutina 8y ago
  Rather "and do the same" than "fall behind". We are taking the Chinese route for surveillance, data, AI. It's going to be the same for genetics. Maybe even faster because people don't want to be spied on but want to have stronger/resistant/smarter children, especially when they'll see other people getting those advantages.
- nscalf 8y ago
  That's probably not going to happen. What's probably going to happen is they'll take a slight lead for a few years, then we'll take notice and replicate that.
michael_bluth 8y ago
How will we know if it "worked" ?

278 points by sjreese 8y ago

> It's "unconscionable ... an experiment on human beings that is not morally or ethically defensible," said Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a University of Pennsylvania gene editing expert and editor of a genetics journal. This is 100% correct. (COI: Kiran was my postdoc while I was a student in the lab a decade ago.)

wycs 8y ago
Perhaps this is true. I do not know. But human enhancement through genetic engineering is coming. Changes in traits, such as IQ, by 5+ standard deviations looks possible. We would be fools to outlaw it here, for we would become as children compared to future citizens of nations that do not share our taboos.
- carbocation 8y ago
  > Perhaps this is true. I do not know. But human enhancement through genetic engineering is coming. Changes in traits, such as IQ, by 5+ standard deviations looks possible. We would be fools to outlaw it here, for we would become as children compared to future citizens of Asian nations. What is the relevance of "Asian nations?" to this conversation? Also, we're talking about a specific experiment that was allegedly conducted in human beings with (good but error-prone) genome editing mechanisms, outside of the purview of peer review or, from what I can tell, an IRB.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - dqpb 8y ago
    "good but error prone" describes all of medical care right now. Hell, pharmaceuticals aren't even good in many cases.
    - carbocation 8y ago
      That's absolutely not the standard for deciding to conduct an experiment on humans.
      - modzu 8y ago
        remember also its an unborn child -- its not an experiment on the living, consenting adult. child grows up, experiences whatever unknown consequences of the genetic experiment. thanks dad!
      - barry-cotter 8y ago
        Only true if your country and culture cares about IRBs. China doesn’t, it’s a quarter of the human population and it won’t be long until it’s that of global GDP at least. What a bunch of post Christians with delusions about the universality of their ethical code think does not bother them at all.
        goatlover 8y ago
        Yeah, but then maybe India will counter-balance that. From what I've heard, their ethical code will be against any such modifications.
    - ethbro 8y ago
      "Good but error prone" seems to aptly describe our current method of producing offspring. Gene editing is mandatory, if only because we've managed to turn many previously lethal mutations into livable, and reproducible, ones.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    "What is the relevance of "Asian nations?" to this conversation?" I would assume it's because the article describes genetically-engineered babies in China, so obviously it's not outlawed there (or if it is, the law is not enforced). Grandparent poster is pointing out that if genetic engineering gives survival or competitive benefits to those who do it, it doesn't matter what your personal ethical, moral, and legal standards are, because your whole society will be outcompeted by societies without those strictures.
    - anvandare 8y ago
      The purists need not be worried. There's always the hope the descendants of those humans who do take the path of editing their own genetic code will, a few centuries from now, give those purists' descendants a nice small patch of land as a reservation. Or maybe a cozy cage in a zoo, with a little sign next to the bars which reads: "homo sapiens inferior".
      - coldtea 8y ago
        Or, you know, the purists will be spared untold suffering that those others will have to go through because of "magician's apprentice" style editing...
        anvandare 8y ago
        Of course the first period of experimentation and discovery will lead to unexpected and unpleasant results. All new technology takes time to mature, for the users to get an understanding of its tricky implementation bits and long-term impact. It's not wise to immediately put all your eggs in a brand new basket. But the ones who experiment and adapt will always eventually outperform those who refuse to change and stick to tried-and-tested. That's the very nature of evolution.
        coldtea 8y ago
        >That's the very nature of evolution. Evolution is blind to such concerns. Those who "experiment" might be wiped out because of their experiments gone wrong, and evolution wont care at all. A creature inventing tools might have an evolutionary advantage over others. A creature inventing e.g. biological warfare and nuclear weapons might have less an advantage, it can easily wipe most of its own kind and even collapse its civilization (losing even more advantages).
- nradov 8y ago
  Genetic engineering might be able to prevent certain inherited diseases, but otherwise major net improvements are unlikely. A boost in one area tends to cause problems in other areas. That's why evolution through natural selection hasn't significantly increased average human intelligence over the past few thousand years. The average human genome appears to be close to a local maximum.
  - wycs 8y ago
    This is not true. Intelligence is polygenic. The average human is no Von Neumann. At the very least genetic engineering could raise average IQ to Von Neumann’s level. We know that phenotype is possible with no ill effects. It will likely take us much further.
    - nradov 8y ago
      You haven't addressed my point. No one disputes that intelligence is partly genetic. However if it was possible to raise intelligence through genetic engineering with no ill effects then why hasn't evolution increased the incidence of that phenotype already?
      - wycs 8y ago
        Most likely because it seems to be a phenotype that does not reproduce itself. None of Von Neumann’s children had kids if I recall correctly. This environment does not select for IQ past a certain point; this does not imply we cannot engineer people to be more intelligent any more than it implies we cannot engineer people to be dwarfs.
      - ganz 8y ago
        Not my area of expertise, but I think the intuition for why evolution didn't make us all Einstein's comes in two parts: (1) IQ is very polygenetic - a big IQ gene might be 0.1 IQ, and there aren't a lot even that large, if I recall the large genome wide association studies done on this. As GWAS studies get larger we find more, but they're all super small effects. (2) Having an extra 0.1 IQ point is easy to lose in the noise of other effects on having offspring. So even if we assumed IQ was perfectly correlated with more surviving offspring in modern societies, it might take an extremely long time (even longer than a whole planet and a thousand years) to make a detectable difference.
- skosuri 8y ago
  "Changes in traits, such as IQ, by 5+ standard deviations"... Where in the world are you getting this from? This is unlikely to be true for a long time. Intelligence, as far as genetics controls it, is a complex trait... with few if any large effect (especially positive) mutations.
  - wycs 8y ago
    Though thousands of alleles contribute to intelligence, we would only need to edit a few hundred to get extremely large increases in IQ, especially if you perform a round of embryo selection (or even iterated embryo selection) before editing. Editing hundreds of alleles may sound incredible to you now, but I don’t think it will sound so incredible for long. Even ignoring GM, embryo selection can get us pretty far with current technology: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection
    - krastanov 8y ago
      Just checking: you do know that there is a difference between change of "5 standard deviations" and change of "5 IQ points". 5 standard deviations is equal to "1 in 3.5 million", which makes your claim fairly farfetched with the tech of today or of the future decade or two, especially given how IQ is much more function of nurture than of nature.
      - wycs 8y ago
        I am aware of this. Genetic engineering implies far more power than Gwern mentions for one round of embryo selection. 5 standard deviations may sound a lot for you, but in animal breeding we have changed the distribution of various traits by far more than 5 standard deviations. Into the dozens.
    - skosuri 8y ago
      What you are saying is just not supported by evidence. For example, polygenic analysis of the latest meta-analysis from >250K individuals seems to say that the top several hundred variants explain in aggregrate only 5.2% of the variation in intelligence. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0152-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0152-6 (Supplement section 2.3.3 if you don't have access).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- linkmotif 8y ago
  So be it. Let them have it, if it means not being human.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Changes in traits, such as IQ, by 5+ standard deviations looks possible. This looks totally unlikely. Not to mention generally undesirable (people with IQ over 150 or so often have severe problems in their social life, and a lot of them don't ever even create or discover much, not to mention the insufferable part whose main accomplishment is to be members of MENSA).
  - shubb 8y ago
    They didn't actually specify positive. It would be pretty easy to reduce IQ by 5+ standard deviations. Plenty of monogenic disorders cause learning disabilities, just gotta knock out those genes...
  - nugget 8y ago
    150+ IQ is a lonely place to be because there aren’t many other people to connect with, especially for kids born in more rural areas without resources. It’s easy for these kids to self destruct. Turning a kid that smart into a happy, stable, productive member of society is an intensive 18+ year process that usually involves curated peers and experts with specific domain expertise. Check out Davidson Academy in Reno to read more.
- yters 8y ago
  "It is inevitable that stumbling blocks come, but woe to him through whom they come!" - Jesus
feelix 8y ago
calling an opinion "100% correct" seems 100% indefensible
- carbocation 8y ago
  Since this implies that you find this action more than 0% defensible, I'm curious to hear your defense of it.
  - dqpb 8y ago
    Here is a simple argument - if you can prevent disease, you should.
    - carbocation 8y ago
      "Can prevent disease" implies that you are not doing experimentation. If you're doing experiments, it means you don't know if you can.
      - chr1 8y ago
        You can prevent disease if you make experiments and learn how to prevent it. So in this case experimentation is a first step in preventing disease.
        carbocation 8y ago
        In what ethical framework is experimenting on humans the first step? (The answer is none.)
        throwa789 8y ago
        Ethical frameworks are optional, humans sacrifice other humans to acquire power and knowledge regularly, that's the nature of the world
- DennisAleynikov 8y ago
zxcvvcxz 8y ago
Why? Seriously why? We do so many unnatural things to us through technology. The article discusses editing genes to try and prevent viruses.
- carbocation 8y ago
  The modern biomedical ethical framework comes out of Nuremburg in response to Nazi atrocities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    There’s nothing in there that would obviously prohibit the experiment we’re all discussing here. I can see how someone who deals with university IRBs or professional bioethicists might think there is but if we used risk reward thresholds as high as they do, or held to the precautionary principle that strongly we would still be discussing whether fire was a good idea. IRBs are a one way ratchet with tiny incentives to approve and large ones to deny. They are a cancerous growth on science.
    - carbocation 8y ago
      You’re saying that you can see how an expert would think that there is something in the Nuremberg Code that prohibits the experiment we are talking about here, but you know better than the experts?
      - barry-cotter 8y ago
        You are an expert in your field of medicine. You are much better at making predictions from data in it than lay people and you are vastly better at effecting changes in your domain of expertise than laymen. That’s real expertise, like engineers, meteorologists, astronomers, microeconomists, or engineers have. Then there are people who are experts on talking about something but have no expertise in doing. Art historians are quite close to astronomers here in that they can be very good at out of sample tests and prediction but have limited ability to do things because their field doesn’t call upon them to do more than render accurate judgments. Then there are people who master a body of lore, who are called upon to discuss things. Ethicists are in this group, like priests, pastors or imams. Ethicists are experts in talking about ethics. They have no special expertise in acting ethically, compared to other philosophers[1]. Ethicists have expertise in what amounts to a body of administrative law, like rabbis, imams or canon lawyers. And we have strong evidence of actual harm caused by them. If bioethicists can’t get their shit together enough to defend compensated kidney or gamete donation they aren’t even broadly neutral. There are people being paid to argue against saving lives, and against helping to bring into the world new lives that are actively wanted. There are ethicists who argue that poor people can’t really consent because the offer of some good to sufficiently poor person qualifies as duress. The Nuremberg Code is good. The system of IRBs and bioethicists built up around it is not just bad, it’s genuinely awful. [1]The moral behavior of ethics professors: Relationships among self-reported behavior, expressed normative attitude, and directly observed behavior Eric Schwitzgebel & Joshua Rust https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHTMB-4 https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHTMB-4
fooker 8y ago
> not morally or ethically defensible Sure, that won't stop progress by people who do not follow your flavor of morality or ethics, though.
- carbocation 8y ago
  What is your evidence that the post-WWII flavor of bioethics inhibits real progress? If that were true, why do we not see other systems leading?
  - jpgvm 8y ago
    We do. In China. Not just in biology but also AI/ML. They are willing (and able) to do the things others find reprehensible. It's already apparent just how far ahead they are in the AI/ML field, I suspect biology/medicine will follow. It's a very real threat and believing that The West has a head start and is more intelligent/better funded/other excuse is not going to end well for us. China achieves goals though brute force with very little regard for ethics or norms.
  - buboard 8y ago
    The west has spent far more brainpower in making up bioethics regulations than actually talking about the procedures themselves. Cue the threads over here. Also note the differences in culture: the chinese parents consented to it. I m not sure how easy it would be to find this in the west.
    - carbocation 8y ago
      The unfamiliarity of random HN commenters with genetics is overwhelmingly clear, but that does not mean that geneticists in the US are not thinking about this.
nathan_f77 8y ago
I don't know if I agree with that. Some theists believe that we shouldn't tamper with God's perfect creation, because everything happens for a reason (including miscarriages, birth defects, and genetic diseases.) Atheists might believe that natural selection has got us this far, so it must be a pretty good process. A scientist shouldn't change anything, because they will be adding unnecessary risk to the natural process of evolution. But you have to think about the "baseline". Natural selection is actually a brutal and horrific process where genes are just mutated at random. 50% of all pregnancies end in a miscarriage. Birth defects occur in 3% of all live births, and they account for 21% of all infant deaths. Nature is already a mad scientist that runs random experiments on babies. I read that humans have about 30 genetic mutations per generation [1]. So imagine if a scientist picks 1 gene at random, and they use CRISPR to randomly change that gene. Now the embryo has around ~31 random mutations. Isn't that basically the same result as natural selection? You probably wouldn't even be able to tell that the scientist had changed anything. Is that an accurate way of looking at it, or am I missing something? [1] http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/genetics.html http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/genetics.html
- freeone3000 8y ago
  It's an accurate way of looking at it, but it assumes humans have a lesser value because lots of them already die, so what's a few more? The difference is a few humans, and that's too big a risk, in my opinion, to take lightly.
  - nathan_f77 8y ago
    Sure, but the scientist is trying to reduce the risk of death and suffering. (They're not just flipping a coin to see what happens.) We already know a lot about certain genes and what they do. For example, mutations in the HBB gene cause sickle cell anemia. Removing the mutation in that HBB gene is a good idea 100% of the time. You can just look at the 99% (?) of healthy people who have an HBB gene without that mutation. Maybe the CRISPR process is risky and can cause lots of unexpected mutations. In that case it's not so black-and-white. But if you can edit a gene to prevent a disease, and it can be done in a safe way, then I don't think it's inherently unethical. (Although you could argue that it might be more ethical for parents to adopt a baby and donate money to charity, instead of spending a lot of money on gene-editing and IVF.)
buboard 8y ago
maybe we should be screening couples before we allow them to copulate, then. taking gambles with randomization experiments is 100% ethically indefensible. please, spare us the "100% correct" and certified ethical positions
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
empath75 8y ago
> is not morally or ethically defensible Based on whose ethics and morals? Eventually a country is going to go all in on robotics and genetic engineering, ethics be damned, and the rest of the world is going to be left in the dust -- economically and militarily.
parasar1983 8y ago
The ruling class of China likely operates on different principles, e.g.: "Policies that lead to enormous suffering of individuals are quite acceptable if such policies sufficiently advance the capabilities of the collective." So I expect the demand for "unethical" research will be met there, and perhaps the results of such research will be "laundered" for public consumption (maybe with a process akin to parallel construction).
jobigoud 8y ago
You can argue that not fixing biological defects when you have the means to is ethically indefensible. It's not black and white.

skosuri 8y ago

The edited gene is for CCR5, which currently doesn’t have known function, but is the entry point for HIV. So editing for prophylaxis. This was probably done because if there aren’t a ton of loss of function beneficial traits, and probably with the main desire to be first. Except, if the reports are true, this is not just an experiment but a person (or people). I guess the main desire is to normalize editing. Brave new world I guess, whether we like it or not.

DennisAleynikov 8y ago
the edit was also confirmed and voluntarily implanted in-vitro in willing participants. It's ethically black as far as I am concerned but it has already happened so we must see where this takes us. IVF born edited zygotes might have serious complications but ideally its a healthy human being. (for everyone's sake)
- dqpb 8y ago
  > It's ethically black What does that mean?
  - elcomet 8y ago
    Edit: misread
    - NamTaf 8y ago
      No, they mean that ethically it's black in the same way that we describe blackhat vs whitehat hackers.
  - DennisAleynikov 8y ago
    "unethical" would probably have worked better. sorry for the confusion
    - buboard 8y ago
      which part is unethical though? it was voluntary

rm2889 8y ago

This is quite interesting. There is a certain very small percentage of the world's population that is immune to the HIV virus. These people's T-cells have the CD4 receptor, but not the CCR5 receptor. The HIV virus needs both these receptors to successfully affect the host's cells. The absence of the CCR5 receptor still allows the person's T cells to function normally, so if this works, it can pave the way to creating offspring who are immune to HIV

hanniabu 8y ago
Does CCR5 have no other purpose? Hard to believe that it'd exist if it wasn't needed.
- discodave 8y ago
  Not really. There are lots of vestigial things in humans that are no longer needed. Tailbones, for instance.
- skosuri 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#Potential_costs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#Potential_costs
- joshvm 8y ago
  Apparently removing it may have other consequences: > Even if editing worked perfectly, people without normal CCR5 genes face higher risks of getting certain other viruses, such as West Nile, and of dying from the flu. Since there are many ways to prevent HIV infection and it's very treatable if it occurs, those other medical risks are a concern, Musunuru said.
- sanxiyn 8y ago
  There are literally millions of healthy people without CCR5 receptors. (Millions is approximately 0.01% of world population and this mutation's frequency is certainly greater than that.)
  - 8y ago

DennisAleynikov 8y ago

the first edit is HIV resistance, not a bad way to start the black mirror episode that is the rest of our lives from now on.

pgreenwood 8y ago
If it works and HIV resistance installed in a population, then it opens the possibility HIV could be then could become an effective bioweapon for that population.
- learc83 8y ago
  1. If it works, you'd need to wait 50+ years until most of your population was immune. You'd have to hope that in that time HIV vaccines/cures aren't developed. 2. HIV would make a terrible bioweapon. It's difficult to spread, takes a very long time to incapacitate people, and there are generally effective treatments.

walrus01 8y ago

in vitro sex selection (mostly for male children) has been going on for a long time, seems the next logical step: https://www.google.com/search?&q=in+vitro+sex+selection+china&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?&q=in+vitro+sex+selection+chin...

artellectual 8y ago
Gender selection, will have adverse effect without a doubt, nature has a healthy balance between the number of men and women in the world, and certain culture preferring boys / girls will lead to us having too much of one and not enough of the other. There is already evidence of this in China and India.

rshm 8y ago

https://apnews.com/4997bb7aa36c45449b488e19ac83e86d https://apnews.com/4997bb7aa36c45449b488e19ac83e86d Has more info

Svexav 8y ago

It’s no surprise this comes from China, the same country that grinds dead babies into pills.

cyphar 8y ago
When I first read this comment I thought it was hyperbole (I've heard about the vaccine and melamine scares -- which harmed and killed many thousands of children -- but not about dead babies being put into pills). But no, it's real fucking thing[1,2,3,4]. What the actual fuck. How is a Hacker News comment the first time I've heard of this? [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/horrifyingly-ground-baby-pills-are-real-thing/328490/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/ho... [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-17980177 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-17980177 [3]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-08/south-korea-cracks-down-on-baby-flesh-pills/3999028 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-08/south-korea-cracks-do... [4]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/southkorea/9250438/Pills-filled-with-powdered-human-baby-flesh-found-by-customs-officials.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/southkorea/9...
- markdown 8y ago
  I don't understand this. They don't advertise the pills as human flesh pills, so why use that material in the first place? Why not dead chickens, or runoff from an abattoir?
- withhighprod 8y ago
  It’s quite ancient and almost related to cult groups. Well, in some country it’s also part of its religion See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuman_Thong https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuman_Thong. Should I tell you it’s very popular among celebrities?
- aaron695 8y ago
  Basically it's hyperbole, here's an ok summary - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/9272/did-pills-from-china-seized-in-south-korea-contain-the-powdered-flesh-of-dead-ba https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/9272/did-pills-... What hell it has to do with "First gene-edited babies claimed in China" other than racism is hard to see anyway. In the west it's not unheard of to eat to placenta which is basically the same thing anyway. If it's real it's impossible to know, we only have one source, some doco in Korean which means it must be pretty rare even if it's true, for a country of over a billion that's rare. PS And it was the Koreans in this tale buying them.

wonderwonder 8y ago

There have been a good deal of medical and technological breakthroughs over the last couple decades. Reusable rockets, VR, machine learning, etc. This is the first article I have read that has made me realize that the future is right here, right now and there is a very high probability that things are now going to change rapidly. One thing to consider is that via crispr and stem cell treatments, genetic changes can be affected in adults as well, you just need to wait for the kinks to be worked out now and apply large sums of money. Our definition of 'haves and have nots' is potentially going to change in ways we have never imagined.

coldtea 8y ago
>This is the first article I have read that has made me realize that the future is right here, right now and there is a very high probability that things are now going to change rapidly. The future? Compared to 1900 we already live in a widely different world, more diff today - 1900 than diff 1900 - 1000 B.C.
- adrianN 8y ago
  I think you underestimate the technology we had in 1900 if you think 1900 is less different from 1000 B.C. than it is from today.
- AznHisoka 8y ago
  If I was transported to my city in 1900 and walk around, I would probably be uncomfortable for a few hours but be adjusted soon afterwards. If I was a 1900’s citizen transported to 1000 BC? holy.. are you kidding me? I would be shell shocked.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    And yet, not match would have changed. Aside from a few major western cities (and specific major areas in them too) most cities in 1900 didn't even fully have electric lighting back then, nor central sewage systems, and tons of other stuff. Technology wise, 1900 cities more like 1000 BC than today. 1000 BC wasn't some cavemen running around, we had established civilizations, with writing, education, math, literature, laws, etc already in place.

cnfteol 8y ago

a giant leap i had thought this wouldnt happen for another few decades this is bad news for tibetans since their high altitude gene is known even the andes high alt adaptations are being discovered which is really one of the closest things to a genetic super ability you can get so it will only be a few decades more until this last barrier to han colonization of tibet falls deep sea diving is another such genetic ability recently investigated

nopinsight 8y ago

Here is a controversial article published in 2013 by an evolutionary psychologist that everyone should give some thoughts on: Disclaimers: I do not have the expertise to evaluate its veracity but if true it will affect everyone in the world in some important ways within a few decades (the effects might already start to appear as we see how fast China has developed technologically. Yes, technology transfer is clearly a factor but few developing nations can absorb and adopt advanced technologies so rapidly). I also have not pondered deeply enough to have a strong position on the complicated ethical implications alluded to in the article and expressed with concerns elsewhere. https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838 > ... > Deng also encouraged assortative mating through promoting urbanization and higher education, so bright, hard-working young people could meet each other more easily, increasing the proportion of children who would be at the upper extremes of intelligence and conscientiousness. ... > But crucially, Comprehensive National Power also includes "biopower": creating the world's highest-quality human capital in terms of the Chinese population's genes, health, and education ... > The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness. ... > My real worry is the Western response. The most likely response, given Euro-American ideological biases, would be a bioethical panic that leads to criticism of Chinese population policy with the same self-righteous hypocrisy that we have shown in criticizing various Chinese socio-cultural policies. But the global stakes are too high for us to act that stupidly and short-sightedly. A more mature response would be based on mutual civilizational respect, asking—what can we learn from what the Chinese are doing, how can we help them, and how can they help us to keep up as they create their brave new world?

thomasfedb 8y ago

Moral frontiers aside, current gene tech is still not where we'd like it to be in order to pull of these sorts of things and know we haven't done harm. Side edits are a big problem with CRISPR-Cas9.

carbocation 8y ago
To be fair, that's part of the moral argument.
- thomasfedb 8y ago
  It's a technical problem in it's own right, it also has significant in the moral argument.
  - carbocation 8y ago
    I agree.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

For the surely upcoming discussion about pros and cons of genetic editing in humans, Kurzgesagt has a basic overview of the space, if you can spare some 15 minutes with your morning coffee. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAhjPd4uNFY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAhjPd4uNFY (not affiliated, just love their videos)

jhowell 8y ago

Looking at how addictive our interactions with technology have become this seems concerning. A future where we can all exist and never look up or leave our thought bubbles could have a dramatic impact on humanity and motivations.

markdown 8y ago

This will be a great tool to help game the social score. More intelligence + less risk-taking + more respect for authority = a high-score child sure to get into the top University and have the freedom to travel there. /s

citilife 8y ago

This sounds super sketchy: > He said the parents involved declined to be identified or interviewed, and he would not say where they live or where the work was done. > There is no independent confirmation of He's claim, and it has not been published in a journal, where it would be vetted by other experts. He revealed it Monday in Hong Kong to one of the organizers of an international conference on gene editing that is set to begin Tuesday, and earlier in exclusive interviews with The Associated Press. To be honest, _if this is true_ it sounds like he modified them without the parents knowledge or consent. Usually, I'm super skeptical of any "research" coming out of China. However, I've suspected that China has been doing this for a while anyway (without sharing it). So I'm left with three possibilities in my mind: 1. Government is releasing this to see how the world will react 2. The doctor excited to share their work, shared it - but did the work without the parents consent 3. Parents did this knowingly and in a controlled way Of those options I'm betting #2 followed by #1. Highly doubt even if the parents consented this was entered into with the knowledge of the risks. Seriously if they are using Cas9 who knows what else could go wrong.

beefsack 8y ago
Your quotes also highlight the possibility that this is all fabricated.
SCAQTony 8y ago
Exactly. What happens when these babies become toddlers or young children and they start contracting all sorts of weird cancers. See article: Potential DNA damage from CRISPR has been ‘seriously underestimated,’ study finds https://www.statnews.com/2018/07/16/crispr-potential-dna-damage-underestimated/ https://www.statnews.com/2018/07/16/crispr-potential-dna-dam... The results come hard on the heels of two studies that identified a related issue: Some CRISPR’d cells might be missing a key anti-cancer mechanism and therefore be able to initiate tumors.
- wagutina 8y ago
  China will make sure the world doesn't see the failures of their experiments, this is the very scary part of the story

sanxiyn 8y ago

Hear it from He Jiankui himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th0vnOmFltc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th0vnOmFltc

baybal2 8y ago
Oooh, so it is that He, the man used to have a very peculiar reputation on Chinese university BBSes back when China just got internet connectivity. That was what possibly lead to him being ousted from Chinese academia a decade ago. I myself think it was certainly no coincidence that Stanford picked him up. I'm afraid calling up some of his opinions, and in particularly on the topic of race, as they will be a ten megaton flamewar bomb. Google him yourself if you know Chinese.
- est 8y ago
  https://www.zhihu.com/question/303671507 https://www.zhihu.com/question/303671507 Looks pretty bad.
- roel_v 8y ago
  C'mon man, you can't leave those of us that don't speak Chinese hanging like that.
- akfanta 8y ago
  Search result is now flooded with this news. Nothing on Wiki either. What exactly are you talking about? Any keywords?

WheelsAtLarge 8y ago

And we are here, a brave new world. For years I heard and read that we would never need to worry about scientists editing the DNA of a human embryo that would be brought to term. The argument emphasized the fact that professional ethics would prevent it. Well, ethics change and not all professionals will follow them. As a programmer, I know how hard it is to modify a ball of code without having unexpected consequences. We barely know how the human genome functions. I hope we don't do too much damage.

buboard 8y ago
Nah we are not in brave new world yet. We are in a world where china is willing to brute force its way into it through very risky experiments, while the west is not willing to own up to the reality that our future is no longer natural, and we are not even going to be a single species.

ttflee 8y ago

The Shenzhen HarMoniCare Women & Children’s Hospital, the medical ethics committee of which gave a permit to this, was one of the so-called Putian-systems, a medical network established by hundreds of people from Putian, Fujian who earned their first bucket of gold by selling “home made remedies and fake medicine at high prices”. https://m.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1940668/baidu-scandal-spotlight-china-military-hospitals https://m.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1940... EDIT: Shenzhen Medical Ethics Expert Committee said that the trial was not reported to before the trial. https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=http://www.bjnews.com.cn/news/2018/11/26/524939.html&xid=17259,15700022,15700124,15700126,15700149,15700186,15700191,15700201&usg=ALkJrhiDehC95dc3xPQZBlTpe4sNP3u-Bg https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...

joejerryronnie 8y ago

I wonder how many of us are totally fine with gene-edited babies but find Facebook morally reprehensible?

Namari 8y ago

We finally reached Gattaca

gwern 8y ago
Gattaca was actually embryo selection, not editing.
- Namari 8y ago
  Oh, was it? A good reason for me to watch it again, I haven't watched that one in ages.

oh-kumudo 8y ago

It already causes quite a debate on Chinese internet as well. People are genuinely concerned about the unknown effects on the babies, and questioning the authors and the hospital's motivation of applying such techniques to human this early without fully understanding its consequences.

jobigoud 8y ago
IVF was also very controversial and "unnatural" at the time. I hope the kid is fine.

Traubenfuchs 8y ago

While the western world is whining about irrelevant ethics the Chinese will eventually eradicate countless diseases, engineer the perfect superhuman and take control of their evolution. Transhumanism is here and happening right now. We are committing a crime against our future generations if we decide not to participate in it. We actively decide against prosperity and advancement. We are luddites. Complacent western weakness at its best.

meshr 8y ago

1. Do they grow HIV-resistant people for sex-work industry? 2. Why does China outlaw cloning if it has the same risks?

temptempdog 8y ago

watching a lot of programmers comment on genetics is like watching physicists play with the genome. cs, and for human intents - physics, have predictable structure. biology is far too complex for the human brain to simplify and understand at the level discussed (and practiced) here.

booleandilemma 8y ago

This is how China is going to take the lead. They will start breeding disease-resistant, stronger and smarter humans, and the west will take the moral high ground, tweet about how evil China is on their new phones, and fall behind. Our ethics will be our downfall.

wagutina 8y ago
Rather "and do the same" than "fall behind". We are taking the Chinese route for surveillance, data, AI. It's going to be the same for genetics. Maybe even faster because people don't want to be spied on but want to have stronger/resistant/smarter children, especially when they'll see other people getting those advantages.
nscalf 8y ago
That's probably not going to happen. What's probably going to happen is they'll take a slight lead for a few years, then we'll take notice and replicate that.

michael_bluth 8y ago

How will we know if it "worked" ?