9 ms·

House spending panel drops U.S. ban on gene-edited babies

71 points by okket 7y ago

chipperyman573 7y ago
>The provision was dropped because it was inserted in private 3 years ago and has never been subject to public debate I've heard about this law before (so it's not obscure) but I never knew this. I wonder how many other common laws were just inserted into other laws behind closed doors that affect us every day.
- jschwartzi 7y ago
  Most of these are riders on the appropriations bills because the congressperson in question knows there's no other way to get their pet ideology past the house. For example if this ban were just a bill it probably wouldn't make it past the committee. But by attaching it as a rider to the appropriations bill they make sure that anyone voting against the rider looks like they're voting against funding the federal government.
- rayiner 7y ago
  There was nothing "closed door" about it. Congress held a contemporaneous hearing on the issue: https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2015/06/mcnally-testifies-on-gene-editing-at-congressional-hearing https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2015/06/mcnally-testi.... It was included in house bundle of amendments: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/2029/text/eah https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/2029.... That set of amendments then had to be reconciled between the house and senate versions before it was ultimately voted on. It made sense to include it in a budget bill, because the ban only precludes using federal funding to do such experiments.
hardchoices 7y ago
Ugh. This is going to head in a really bad direction. We're getting pushed into a new territory, and the results could be disastrous. The world is putting us up against some ugly decisions and the collective choice isn't going to unanimous. There's a lot of ethics getting tossed aside with the "someone else is going to do it" argument, and the bald truth that the world is unprepared and currently incapable of regulating anything at all. You have elitists, you have military medicine, you have other countries (usually China, but others as well), you have the wealthy, you have private corporate labs, all splitting a dilemma. And then you have regular people, and the unwashed masses. If this goes the wrong way, it threatens to prove itself as a problem thousands of times worse than anything the 20th century could have imagined. A war may be fought over this. A big one. Who will be on the wrong side of history?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ZhuanXia 7y ago
Anyone paying attention to cognitive genomics knows wide-spread germ-line engineering is inevitable. The gains are just too great. Once we know the causal variants, raising IQ by 5+ standard deviations will be very feasible. In the short term (next 5-10 years) half a standard deviation is possible with single-trait embryo selection. And iterated embryo selection (which does not require knowing the causal variants, just the predictive ones) will also be possible, and offers 5+ SDs. Gwern has a great write about about it here: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection With this in mind, does anyone really think China and Singapore will not embrace this? And if they do it and we do not we would be as children compared to them.
- Max_aaa 7y ago
  All it takes is for one group to start. Then the rest would either have to follow or be overtaken.
  - zapita 7y ago
    Actually all it takes is for one group to make the assumption you just made.
    - reallydude 7y ago
      Takes less than that. My baby can be better (healthier, safer, smarter, whatever) is sufficient.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - Dirlewanger 7y ago
      It's already started. The China of the last 20 years has repeatedly demonstrated they don't give a shit about the morality/future ramifications of any of their actions regarding science's unexplored territories.
Max_aaa 7y ago
The Gattaca future is slowly turning into reality.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  Mixed with Brave New World.
- quotemstr 7y ago
  Gattaca is a favorite of mine, but I've always thought of it more as a utopian film than a dystopian one.
  - Max_aaa 7y ago
    If you think about it, there really not much difference. As one person's utopia would at the same time be another's dystopia. It is all a matter of perspective.
Ancalagon 7y ago
I know this article is more about the political dance than actual gene-edited babies, but modified human embryos is a whole can-of-worms and is such a game changer I feel the need to worry about it. We don't even fully understand the consequences of much of the technology we use today. Altering gene lines is such a huge power, we'd literally be playing god, and probably rolling the dice on so many aspects of the future for generations to come. If ever there were a technology humanity needed to think conservatively about, this is it.
- okket 7y ago
  > but modified human embryos is a whole can-of-worms and is such a game changer I feel the need to worry about it. Playing random lottery and hoping not to draw the gene-defect ticket while only evolve on a scale of 1,000s of generations is better? We might not even have 1,000 generations left on this planet.
  - Ancalagon 7y ago
    Well notice I said conservatively. I do think gene-editing for very specific diseases should be permissible, given societal approval and control. Allowing enhancements for things in more ethically gray areas (height, intelligence, good-looks, etc.) will in the short run quickly make you and me obsolete. In the long run edits like those will make the current wealth stratification of society look cute in comparison.
  - Y-bar 7y ago
    I believe it is more about who get to have access to this and the social consequences of that. It could conceivably create a permanent class structure where those who can afford to have “perfect” healthy, smarter, longer living, and so on offspring will inevitably exploit that position. It could make me the wealth and class divides with better care and better schools the rich can afford we see today seem quaint in comparison.
    - philipkglass 7y ago
      Why are genetic medical technologies going to remain exclusive to the rich any more than prior revolutionary medical technologies like vaccines, hormonal birth control, or antibiotics? Genetic technologies in general have undergone prolonged cost decreases that don't look to be anywhere near exhausted. Patents restrict access for a couple of decades at most. If the enabling technology is affordable and patents are expired, I see no reason that genetic technology use cannot become widespread. "Not dying of infectious diseases in childhood" used to be a luxury of the rich too, but it didn't ossify into a permanent class marker.
mtgx 7y ago
Companies have argued before that they own the products created with their modified genes. Will they try to claim ownership of these babies, too?
- hello_friendos 7y ago
  Yes. Nestle has tried to patent a plant before.
- gaogao 7y ago
  Eh, the baby is probably enough of a transformative work to be covered under fair use.
carbocation 7y ago
Here is the view on germline gene editing from the discoverer of CRISPR, the one who brought it into human cells, the director of the Broad Institute, and other scientists who actually work with gene editing technology: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00726-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00726-5 Title: "Adopt a moratorium on heritable genome editing"
ourmandave 7y ago
Will Alabama have to amend their anti-abortion bill to include no exclusions if your designer baby is genetically defective?
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  If you want to terminate on demand anywhere in Jesusland, you need to genetically engineer your babies to not have souls. One might argue that this has already been done, and the results are now running the legislature.
  - ars 7y ago
    There are plenty of atheists who are opposed to abortion. Atheists do not believe adults have souls either, but are opposed to killing them. All you have to do is consider the unborn child alive to be opposed to killing it, it's not necessarily a religious argument.
    - logfromblammo 7y ago
      Some atheists are opposed to killing adults. There exists at least one that believes one's right to life is not an absolute moral principle, but predicated upon a reciprocal respect for the rights of others. Thus, it is morally acceptable to kill an adult that violates the moral compact for human rights, or threatens its continued existence. Without a religious mandate, there is no guarantee that any single atheist would share any specific belief with another atheist, other than the one that defines them as a class--that either supernatural entities do not exist, or they exist but also lack the authority to be considered gods rather than ordinary persons, morally equal to all other persons. As a fetus does not yet possess a capacity for moral reasoning, and a pregnant mother likely does, I find that fetuses do not qualify as people, and have no inherent rights, possessing only those derived from their relationship with their mother, and from any other persons who may have a contractual relationship with her. So in a contest of rights between a fetus and its mother, I believe the latter has exclusive and uncontested right to do anything she likes to the former, to include destroying it or editing its DNA, and no state has any interest whatsoever in interfering. A uterus is the exclusive property of the woman; the fetus is incompetent to lease, and has no squatter's rights. The only other persons who might even have standing would be the biological father of the fetus and any persons in an implicit or explicit reproductive contract with the mother, such as a marriage or surrogacy agreement, made prior to pregnancy. And none of those could restrain the actions of the mother; they could only sue in civil court for remedy following a breach. As secular moralities go, I'd expect vegans to oppose abortion and gene-editing, and libertarians to oppose any form of state control over those. No others come to mind that have principles coherent across the entire class with respect to unborn fetuses.
program_whiz 7y ago
I doubt we have the moral discipline to correctly control this technology. Look at how our genetic engineering of dogs and cats, and food has gone. Those with power have used those to permute that which they control for their own good. Think its just going to be "super smart kids"? Probably for those that are rich enough to afford the treatment, but it will probably also mean "workers without emotion", and "super soliders" who are willing to kill anyone on command. This is assuming that any train can easily be manipulated like intelligence, and that it is isn't polygenic (there are over 500 genes), and that by editing them you won't cause other problems along the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
- quotemstr 7y ago
  Who are you to define what counts as correct use of this technology? What's immoral in my book is slowing the deployment of this extremely beneficial technology on specious ethical grounds. If you don't get to decide for other people the criteria for pairing up and having children, why should you get to decide for them which fertilized embryos they choose to implant and raise? As for genetic engineering of food? All domestication is genetic engineering. GMO just accelerates the process, and it's allowed us to maintain extremely high yields that feed the world population. Would you kill half the people on the planet to undo the green revolution? Is biotechnology that much of a moral offense to you?
  - program_whiz 7y ago
    No biotech isn't a moral offense to me, I see the usefulness of it. I'm just pointing out that we don't view the natural state of things as sacrosanct -- once given the tools we will attempt to engineer ourselves into a new vision of perfection. The most likely outcome is total disaster (see almost every bioengineering attempt around the world by introducing or modifying species). There are 99 ways to fail for every 1 that improves the situation (and most of the "improvements" are short-term and from one limited perspective e.g. GMO corn prevents short-term starvation, but has other unexpected consequences on water / land / politics). Given our lack of moral / ethical maturity as a species in general (just look back at the early days of any tech and the experiments on humans), I'm just projecting out the likely outcome of having this at hand. While most of us wouldn't abuse this, you're giving the tools to do this out to a species with 7 billion members, so even if 1 smart person in 7 billion or any person in the future decides to abuse this tech to harm humanity somehow, then it can / will happen. And even if every single person who ever uses it only tries to "improve things", then at best we can expect something like our current environmental engineering efforts (e.g. some good, mostly disaster).
devereaux 7y ago
Reading the comments here, all I see is doom and gloom. Not a single positive view. It is sad to read that on HN of all places. Will some bad things happen? Yes, like when humanity learned about atom fission. But the overall result is a net positive: lots of energy for everyone (and yes, that includes Iran) and no world war since then, even with major tensions like during the cold war. As someone else said, there seems to be a curious wrapped view in the West that did not exist some generation before. Just even looking at old tv shows (Star Trek TOS) you can see people had faith that the future would be better. And the future kept its promises - lower mortality, longer lifespan, a dramatic reduction in poverty worldwide, etc. But the very few movies where you still see this positive stance are usually not made in the West. For some reason it has fashionable to signal the future will be a dystopia. Sorry, no - there is no future, just what we are doing. If you do not like what you do, maybe do something else to make the world a better place? Or at least, don't complain about your own choices. Fortunately, many countries in say Asia do not have the binders the West has. And please, do not say that they are "backwards" and will "evolve" their morals to see the light and adopt your own biased views. In my book, it's the West that's getting backwards and entering into some new middle age based on the new religion of environmentalism and naturalism. Whatever. I personally do not care which country furthers humanity scientific progress, and I will take any advance as a "win" for team humanity.
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  You could've picked so many examples to support your thesis, and you went with fission? That is the worst possible choice. > Will some bad things happen? Yes, like when humanity learned about atom fission. But the overall result is a net positive: lots of energy for everyone (and yes, that includes Iran) and no world war since then, even with major tensions like during the cold war. The fact that we haven't (yet) destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons is mostly thanks to sheer dumb luck, which becomes obvious when you start really looking at the history of nuclear weapons: all the close calls, the combination locks on warheads set to 000000, etc. Using fission as your go-to example of "See? It's OK, we can handle world-ending technologies" is just appallingly wrong, it actually demonstrates precisely the opposite. We can't be trusted with fission and only still have it because political realities mean we can't get rid of it. Or to put it another way, in any given year there is an X% chance we destroy civilization with fission. X is probably considerably less than 1%, but it isn't zero, and so the Law of Large Numbers essentially demands if we keep rolling the dice without total disarmament, sooner or later they will come up snake eyes. What you want here is to introduce new ELE-enabling technologies, essentially multiplying X by a constant. Madness.
DanielBMarkham 7y ago
Interesting discussion here. I don't care what you do with your genes or your kids' genes. Having said that, there's this slippery-slope we get on where we say something like "Here's this new thing that gives us X. We've never done it before and we're really not sure what the side effects are, but X is pretty cool! Since other people are doing X, we have to do it as well!" You can run that line of argument with dozens of cutting-edge scientific topics. At the extreme, you end up with some version of "Anything that might make us better than the other guys, we are forced to do -- even if it has terrible consequences" Since that extreme does not work for me, there must be some limiting factor here that we're not talking about. I do not know what that factor is. It does make sense, however, that asking for public funding along these lines doesn't look like a good way to keep the peace. Eugenics wasn't a good idea, was it? Forced sterilization? How about encouraged or paid-for sterilization? Please keep these as rhetorical questions -- the only reason I brought them up is to show that "better humans through genetics" doesn't have a very happy history.
Hasz 7y ago
Speaking only of intelligence modification. Everyone seems to be making a leap from high IQ --> dominating the world. Sure, your average world leader is probably has a higher IQ, on average, than her constituents. But this relationship is not causal, nor is it reversible. Simply making babies "smarter" is not going to result in them ruling the world in a few years and causing massive generational strife. If you'd like examples, I recommend checking out a MENSA meeting (Kidding, there's some perfectly nice people there). But the point still stands -- social standing, zip code, parental achievement, and even height are all important factors in success; intelligence is only one facet of a successful individual. This is, of course, assuming that we can freely increase intelligence with no repercussions -- are these high IQ individuals at risk of [schizophrenia](http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/000607.html http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/000607.html), or other mental disease? I would also like to point out that the biggest real gains will come to those who move first. You can't be 5 sigma out when everyone else has the same gene modifications as you.
- ZhuanXia 7y ago
  >This is, of course, assuming that we can freely increase intelligence with no repercussions -- are these high IQ individuals at risk of [schizophrenia](http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/000607.html http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/000607.html), or other mental disease? The whole "IQ is a curse" thing is mostly cherry picking. IQ basicly improves everything about a person: https://www.gwern.net/iq https://www.gwern.net/iq It is not associated with any illnesses, save for poor eyesight.
  - Analemma_ 7y ago
    You're responding to an argument the parent didn't make. They weren't saying IQ is bad, they're saying it's not sufficient to rule. Charisma, sociopathy, parents' socioeconomic status, and physical attractiveness all seem to correlate with political power much more strongly than IQ does.
    - DuskStar 7y ago

71 points by okket 7y ago

>The provision was dropped because it was inserted in private 3 years ago and has never been subject to public debate I've heard about this law before (so it's not obscure) but I never knew this. I wonder how many other common laws were just inserted into other laws behind closed doors that affect us every day.

jschwartzi 7y ago
Most of these are riders on the appropriations bills because the congressperson in question knows there's no other way to get their pet ideology past the house. For example if this ban were just a bill it probably wouldn't make it past the committee. But by attaching it as a rider to the appropriations bill they make sure that anyone voting against the rider looks like they're voting against funding the federal government.
rayiner 7y ago
There was nothing "closed door" about it. Congress held a contemporaneous hearing on the issue: https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2015/06/mcnally-testifies-on-gene-editing-at-congressional-hearing https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2015/06/mcnally-testi.... It was included in house bundle of amendments: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/2029/text/eah https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/2029.... That set of amendments then had to be reconciled between the house and senate versions before it was ultimately voted on. It made sense to include it in a budget bill, because the ban only precludes using federal funding to do such experiments.

hardchoices 7y ago

Ugh. This is going to head in a really bad direction. We're getting pushed into a new territory, and the results could be disastrous. The world is putting us up against some ugly decisions and the collective choice isn't going to unanimous. There's a lot of ethics getting tossed aside with the "someone else is going to do it" argument, and the bald truth that the world is unprepared and currently incapable of regulating anything at all. You have elitists, you have military medicine, you have other countries (usually China, but others as well), you have the wealthy, you have private corporate labs, all splitting a dilemma. And then you have regular people, and the unwashed masses. If this goes the wrong way, it threatens to prove itself as a problem thousands of times worse than anything the 20th century could have imagined. A war may be fought over this. A big one. Who will be on the wrong side of history?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ZhuanXia 7y ago

Anyone paying attention to cognitive genomics knows wide-spread germ-line engineering is inevitable. The gains are just too great. Once we know the causal variants, raising IQ by 5+ standard deviations will be very feasible. In the short term (next 5-10 years) half a standard deviation is possible with single-trait embryo selection. And iterated embryo selection (which does not require knowing the causal variants, just the predictive ones) will also be possible, and offers 5+ SDs. Gwern has a great write about about it here: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection With this in mind, does anyone really think China and Singapore will not embrace this? And if they do it and we do not we would be as children compared to them.

Max_aaa 7y ago
All it takes is for one group to start. Then the rest would either have to follow or be overtaken.
- zapita 7y ago
  Actually all it takes is for one group to make the assumption you just made.
  - reallydude 7y ago
    Takes less than that. My baby can be better (healthier, safer, smarter, whatever) is sufficient.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - Dirlewanger 7y ago
    It's already started. The China of the last 20 years has repeatedly demonstrated they don't give a shit about the morality/future ramifications of any of their actions regarding science's unexplored territories.

Max_aaa 7y ago

The Gattaca future is slowly turning into reality.

52-6F-62 7y ago
Mixed with Brave New World.
quotemstr 7y ago
Gattaca is a favorite of mine, but I've always thought of it more as a utopian film than a dystopian one.
- Max_aaa 7y ago
  If you think about it, there really not much difference. As one person's utopia would at the same time be another's dystopia. It is all a matter of perspective.

Ancalagon 7y ago

I know this article is more about the political dance than actual gene-edited babies, but modified human embryos is a whole can-of-worms and is such a game changer I feel the need to worry about it. We don't even fully understand the consequences of much of the technology we use today. Altering gene lines is such a huge power, we'd literally be playing god, and probably rolling the dice on so many aspects of the future for generations to come. If ever there were a technology humanity needed to think conservatively about, this is it.

okket 7y ago
> but modified human embryos is a whole can-of-worms and is such a game changer I feel the need to worry about it. Playing random lottery and hoping not to draw the gene-defect ticket while only evolve on a scale of 1,000s of generations is better? We might not even have 1,000 generations left on this planet.
- Ancalagon 7y ago
  Well notice I said conservatively. I do think gene-editing for very specific diseases should be permissible, given societal approval and control. Allowing enhancements for things in more ethically gray areas (height, intelligence, good-looks, etc.) will in the short run quickly make you and me obsolete. In the long run edits like those will make the current wealth stratification of society look cute in comparison.
- Y-bar 7y ago
  I believe it is more about who get to have access to this and the social consequences of that. It could conceivably create a permanent class structure where those who can afford to have “perfect” healthy, smarter, longer living, and so on offspring will inevitably exploit that position. It could make me the wealth and class divides with better care and better schools the rich can afford we see today seem quaint in comparison.
  - philipkglass 7y ago
    Why are genetic medical technologies going to remain exclusive to the rich any more than prior revolutionary medical technologies like vaccines, hormonal birth control, or antibiotics? Genetic technologies in general have undergone prolonged cost decreases that don't look to be anywhere near exhausted. Patents restrict access for a couple of decades at most. If the enabling technology is affordable and patents are expired, I see no reason that genetic technology use cannot become widespread. "Not dying of infectious diseases in childhood" used to be a luxury of the rich too, but it didn't ossify into a permanent class marker.

mtgx 7y ago

Companies have argued before that they own the products created with their modified genes. Will they try to claim ownership of these babies, too?

hello_friendos 7y ago
Yes. Nestle has tried to patent a plant before.
gaogao 7y ago
Eh, the baby is probably enough of a transformative work to be covered under fair use.

carbocation 7y ago

Here is the view on germline gene editing from the discoverer of CRISPR, the one who brought it into human cells, the director of the Broad Institute, and other scientists who actually work with gene editing technology: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00726-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00726-5 Title: "Adopt a moratorium on heritable genome editing"

ourmandave 7y ago

Will Alabama have to amend their anti-abortion bill to include no exclusions if your designer baby is genetically defective?

logfromblammo 7y ago
If you want to terminate on demand anywhere in Jesusland, you need to genetically engineer your babies to not have souls. One might argue that this has already been done, and the results are now running the legislature.
- ars 7y ago
  There are plenty of atheists who are opposed to abortion. Atheists do not believe adults have souls either, but are opposed to killing them. All you have to do is consider the unborn child alive to be opposed to killing it, it's not necessarily a religious argument.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    Some atheists are opposed to killing adults. There exists at least one that believes one's right to life is not an absolute moral principle, but predicated upon a reciprocal respect for the rights of others. Thus, it is morally acceptable to kill an adult that violates the moral compact for human rights, or threatens its continued existence. Without a religious mandate, there is no guarantee that any single atheist would share any specific belief with another atheist, other than the one that defines them as a class--that either supernatural entities do not exist, or they exist but also lack the authority to be considered gods rather than ordinary persons, morally equal to all other persons. As a fetus does not yet possess a capacity for moral reasoning, and a pregnant mother likely does, I find that fetuses do not qualify as people, and have no inherent rights, possessing only those derived from their relationship with their mother, and from any other persons who may have a contractual relationship with her. So in a contest of rights between a fetus and its mother, I believe the latter has exclusive and uncontested right to do anything she likes to the former, to include destroying it or editing its DNA, and no state has any interest whatsoever in interfering. A uterus is the exclusive property of the woman; the fetus is incompetent to lease, and has no squatter's rights. The only other persons who might even have standing would be the biological father of the fetus and any persons in an implicit or explicit reproductive contract with the mother, such as a marriage or surrogacy agreement, made prior to pregnancy. And none of those could restrain the actions of the mother; they could only sue in civil court for remedy following a breach. As secular moralities go, I'd expect vegans to oppose abortion and gene-editing, and libertarians to oppose any form of state control over those. No others come to mind that have principles coherent across the entire class with respect to unborn fetuses.

program_whiz 7y ago

I doubt we have the moral discipline to correctly control this technology. Look at how our genetic engineering of dogs and cats, and food has gone. Those with power have used those to permute that which they control for their own good. Think its just going to be "super smart kids"? Probably for those that are rich enough to afford the treatment, but it will probably also mean "workers without emotion", and "super soliders" who are willing to kill anyone on command. This is assuming that any train can easily be manipulated like intelligence, and that it is isn't polygenic (there are over 500 genes), and that by editing them you won't cause other problems along the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

quotemstr 7y ago
Who are you to define what counts as correct use of this technology? What's immoral in my book is slowing the deployment of this extremely beneficial technology on specious ethical grounds. If you don't get to decide for other people the criteria for pairing up and having children, why should you get to decide for them which fertilized embryos they choose to implant and raise? As for genetic engineering of food? All domestication is genetic engineering. GMO just accelerates the process, and it's allowed us to maintain extremely high yields that feed the world population. Would you kill half the people on the planet to undo the green revolution? Is biotechnology that much of a moral offense to you?
- program_whiz 7y ago
  No biotech isn't a moral offense to me, I see the usefulness of it. I'm just pointing out that we don't view the natural state of things as sacrosanct -- once given the tools we will attempt to engineer ourselves into a new vision of perfection. The most likely outcome is total disaster (see almost every bioengineering attempt around the world by introducing or modifying species). There are 99 ways to fail for every 1 that improves the situation (and most of the "improvements" are short-term and from one limited perspective e.g. GMO corn prevents short-term starvation, but has other unexpected consequences on water / land / politics). Given our lack of moral / ethical maturity as a species in general (just look back at the early days of any tech and the experiments on humans), I'm just projecting out the likely outcome of having this at hand. While most of us wouldn't abuse this, you're giving the tools to do this out to a species with 7 billion members, so even if 1 smart person in 7 billion or any person in the future decides to abuse this tech to harm humanity somehow, then it can / will happen. And even if every single person who ever uses it only tries to "improve things", then at best we can expect something like our current environmental engineering efforts (e.g. some good, mostly disaster).

devereaux 7y ago

Reading the comments here, all I see is doom and gloom. Not a single positive view. It is sad to read that on HN of all places. Will some bad things happen? Yes, like when humanity learned about atom fission. But the overall result is a net positive: lots of energy for everyone (and yes, that includes Iran) and no world war since then, even with major tensions like during the cold war. As someone else said, there seems to be a curious wrapped view in the West that did not exist some generation before. Just even looking at old tv shows (Star Trek TOS) you can see people had faith that the future would be better. And the future kept its promises - lower mortality, longer lifespan, a dramatic reduction in poverty worldwide, etc. But the very few movies where you still see this positive stance are usually not made in the West. For some reason it has fashionable to signal the future will be a dystopia. Sorry, no - there is no future, just what we are doing. If you do not like what you do, maybe do something else to make the world a better place? Or at least, don't complain about your own choices. Fortunately, many countries in say Asia do not have the binders the West has. And please, do not say that they are "backwards" and will "evolve" their morals to see the light and adopt your own biased views. In my book, it's the West that's getting backwards and entering into some new middle age based on the new religion of environmentalism and naturalism. Whatever. I personally do not care which country furthers humanity scientific progress, and I will take any advance as a "win" for team humanity.

Analemma_ 7y ago
You could've picked so many examples to support your thesis, and you went with fission? That is the worst possible choice. > Will some bad things happen? Yes, like when humanity learned about atom fission. But the overall result is a net positive: lots of energy for everyone (and yes, that includes Iran) and no world war since then, even with major tensions like during the cold war. The fact that we haven't (yet) destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons is mostly thanks to sheer dumb luck, which becomes obvious when you start really looking at the history of nuclear weapons: all the close calls, the combination locks on warheads set to 000000, etc. Using fission as your go-to example of "See? It's OK, we can handle world-ending technologies" is just appallingly wrong, it actually demonstrates precisely the opposite. We can't be trusted with fission and only still have it because political realities mean we can't get rid of it. Or to put it another way, in any given year there is an X% chance we destroy civilization with fission. X is probably considerably less than 1%, but it isn't zero, and so the Law of Large Numbers essentially demands if we keep rolling the dice without total disarmament, sooner or later they will come up snake eyes. What you want here is to introduce new ELE-enabling technologies, essentially multiplying X by a constant. Madness.

DanielBMarkham 7y ago

Interesting discussion here. I don't care what you do with your genes or your kids' genes. Having said that, there's this slippery-slope we get on where we say something like "Here's this new thing that gives us X. We've never done it before and we're really not sure what the side effects are, but X is pretty cool! Since other people are doing X, we have to do it as well!" You can run that line of argument with dozens of cutting-edge scientific topics. At the extreme, you end up with some version of "Anything that might make us better than the other guys, we are forced to do -- even if it has terrible consequences" Since that extreme does not work for me, there must be some limiting factor here that we're not talking about. I do not know what that factor is. It does make sense, however, that asking for public funding along these lines doesn't look like a good way to keep the peace. Eugenics wasn't a good idea, was it? Forced sterilization? How about encouraged or paid-for sterilization? Please keep these as rhetorical questions -- the only reason I brought them up is to show that "better humans through genetics" doesn't have a very happy history.

Hasz 7y ago

Speaking only of intelligence modification. Everyone seems to be making a leap from high IQ --> dominating the world. Sure, your average world leader is probably has a higher IQ, on average, than her constituents. But this relationship is not causal, nor is it reversible. Simply making babies "smarter" is not going to result in them ruling the world in a few years and causing massive generational strife. If you'd like examples, I recommend checking out a MENSA meeting (Kidding, there's some perfectly nice people there). But the point still stands -- social standing, zip code, parental achievement, and even height are all important factors in success; intelligence is only one facet of a successful individual. This is, of course, assuming that we can freely increase intelligence with no repercussions -- are these high IQ individuals at risk of [schizophrenia](http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/000607.html http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/000607.html), or other mental disease? I would also like to point out that the biggest real gains will come to those who move first. You can't be 5 sigma out when everyone else has the same gene modifications as you.

ZhuanXia 7y ago
>This is, of course, assuming that we can freely increase intelligence with no repercussions -- are these high IQ individuals at risk of [schizophrenia](http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/000607.html http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/000607.html), or other mental disease? The whole "IQ is a curse" thing is mostly cherry picking. IQ basicly improves everything about a person: https://www.gwern.net/iq https://www.gwern.net/iq It is not associated with any illnesses, save for poor eyesight.
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  You're responding to an argument the parent didn't make. They weren't saying IQ is bad, they're saying it's not sufficient to rule. Charisma, sociopathy, parents' socioeconomic status, and physical attractiveness all seem to correlate with political power much more strongly than IQ does.
  - DuskStar 7y ago