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> It's "unconscionable ... an experiment on human beings that is not morally or ethically defensible," said Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a University of Pennsylvania gen

• 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
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• 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.