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A new type of genetic profiling
- rolltiide 7y agoI think the thing that scares people about these concepts is that they know everyone will choose it. This article chose to use the word "profiling" People choose to refrain from other loaded words like "eugenics" but this is exactly what people do pursuing others that they consider attractive. nobody would say they are, with the idea of eugenics reserved for 1930s state sanctioned medical pogroms, but their actions of "choosing inheritable traits" undermine that.
- sysbin 7y agoPeople happen to do what's best for their offspring. Any kid that has parents doing the opposite will either be disappointed or angered. Being born into wealth & good genetics is already a huge advantage and society doesn't seem to care about it. I mean look at current day and the past centuries. Nothing has been done about being born into privilege vs misfortune. Similar it's not like anyone has any control over how their birth will be and it will be similar for whats to come. Aesthetics is grossly desired because psychologically they matter among the majority. Intelligence has too many advantages to list. No reason to go into why the bad traits would want to be removed.
- naringas 7y agopeople are not born into this world, we are born out of (or from) it
- sysbin 7y agoI used "born into wealth & good genetics" & "born into privilege vs misfortune" and I disagree with your interpretation.
- naringas 7y agodo you disagree with the general statement "we are born out of this world"? does that mean you think that we "are born into this world" (nevermind if we are born with good or bad fortune)?
- sysbin 7y agoI disagreed with your interpretation of what I wrote. I don't think it's worthwhile for me to have an opinion on what you're implying.
- naringas 7y agofair enough. I agree that my statement wasn't really related to what you said. I'm just nitpicky about the tacit implications of that common phrase "born into the world"
- hanniabu 7y agoWhat they won't tell you is they will also select ones that are signal greater civil obedience so you're easier to control takes tin foil hat off
- mattnewton 7y agoOne thing an adolescence of reading dystopian sci fi didn't prepare me for is the seemingly sheer incompetence of Western governments in the real world compared to the ones of Orwell and Huxley. If we needed to be further bred for complacency it would have to compete with bread and circuses for cost effectiveness.
- hcarvalhoalves 7y agoYou're comparing free-will to state policy. There's a huge difference. The state has the monopoly of force and can absolutely enforce any kind of selection, to the benefit of state heads.
- ip26 7y agoEugenics has pretty strong connotations, but eradicating tay-sachs is also eugenics. Perhaps it could be thought of as positive & negative eugenics (like positive & negative rights)? E.g. killing people and telling them who they are allowed to marry and whether they can have kids is negative (taking away), while growing embryos free of genetic diseases is positive (giving)? Just rolling the idea around in my head. Of significance to me, if we had the capability to completely eliminate diseases like tay-sachs in a positive way (e.g. embryo selection), it might be inhumane not to.
- haihaibye 7y agoPositive & negative eugenics were the terms used by Galton in the 19th century.
- rtkwe 7y agoI think the crucial moral difference here is the old eugenics was preventing people from having kids because their genes were 'bad' in some way. These new things are superficially similar but don't rely on preventing people from having kids and their goals are focused on improving particular individuals instead of it being an outside attempt to improve society as a whole.
- pjscott 7y agoThe obligatory article on this subject is, as always: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection It's long, but there's a concise summary at the top that's definitely worth a read. Embryo selection works best when there are a very small number of genetic variants that you want to select over. Want a child to not be born with Tay-Sachs disease? Can do! Want a child to be smarter or better-looking? That's going to be a lot harder, since those traits are influenced by a huge number of genetic variants, each with small effect, and we've only got a handful of embryos to choose between, which limits the amount of influence we can have here.
- Accujack 7y agoAlso, we honestly don't understand what "smarter" or "better looking" mean in genetic terms... we don't really even agree on what they mean between individuals. So, doing embryo culling works for specific, simple, detectable conditions, but the idea that it could be anything else without a lot of knowledge we as a species don't have is delusional at this point in time.
- klipt 7y ago> we don't really even agree on what they mean between individuals. Individual people can always disagree, but average opinion can be quantified. Take a bunch of pictures, throw them on Tinder and see how many matches they get. Although for men height is often a bigger factor than small variations in looks. Allow embryo selection for 6'+ sons, that's where the real money will be!
- jakobegger 7y ago> Allow embryo selection for 6'+ sons, that's where the real money will be! Yes, but height is influenced by hundreds of genes, each with a minuscule influence, which will make it all but impossible to create a model that predicts height accurately. Additionally, since all the embryos you can select from are from the same two parents, models created from population samples are going to be a lot less useful. So I guess you won't be able to select for tall sons, at best you might be able to pick the larger of two embryos with slightly higher than random chance.
- rtkwe 7y agoOften when topics of genetic modification and screening like this come up comparisons get made to eugenics which I kind of get but ultimately the big moral distinction between the two for me comes down to the distinction between eugenics which seeks improvements by forcing people not to have kids and the newer techniques that just modify particular embryos. I do think we need to be supremely careful on things that go beyond screening since there people are making decisions that will stick with someone the rest of their life.
- haihaibye 7y ago>> people are making decisions that will stick with someone the rest of their life. The minimum possible effect time, if they have no descendants.
- searine 7y agoLooks are subjective. There isn't and will never be a SNP for "attractive". Tall yes, but not hot. Also, the understanding isn't there yet to detect casual SNPs. We know roughly where these SNPs are, but not which ones they are. We can tell that if you have this region of the genome you may be taller, but along with it might come linked diseases. So no, no designer babies yet, but some kinds of selection are possible in theory.
- umvi 7y agoHopefully this can be used to make babies with ghost-white skin which is considered attractive ("better looking") in Asia /s
- Tehdasi 7y agoTallness is in and of itself will get you more heart disease since it put more strain on the heart to pump blood ever further. And tallness as an attractive trait only works in comparison, if everyone was 7 foot high, then they are all of average height, and equally attractive from that perspective.
- klipt 7y ago> tallness as an attractive trait only works in comparison In real life yes, because people see your height relative to others. In online dating it's all in comparison to nice round numbers like 6'. 80% of men are under 6' in real life, because the literal average is below that. But online 6' becomes the magic marker and anyone shorter is judged "below average".
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kylek 7y ago"We didn't want... Diseases, yes, but-" "We were just wondering if it's good to leave a few things to chance?" "We want to give your child the best possible start. Believe me, we have enough imperfection built in already. Your child doesn't need any more additional burdens. Keep in mind, this child is still you. Simply the best of you. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result." -- Gattaca
- wang_li 7y agoNot that anyone here cares, but this is my favorite movie.
- scrumbledober 7y agoI hated it when made to watch it in high school biology class, probably because i hated anything my teachers made me do, but coming back to it years later i was pulled right in.
- renke1 7y agoIt's one of my favorite movies, too. Frightening but also inspiring at the same time.
- conception 7y agoI love talking about this film because you can argue its theme really either way. There's the standard "you can't gene edit heart" or whatever: hard work means more than what you're told you can be at birth. However - The story of the film tells us time and time again that Vincent -isn't- able to compete and measure up to the standards needed for space travel. He fails his cardio tests, he can't see well enough to cross the street. But his vanity and pride causes him to cheat the system to make it seem like he passes all the tests. He has the heart of a fighter figuratively but not literally and I always imagined after the end of the movie that his actual faults would come to light and it would cost someone their lives in space. What if he lost a contact lens in space? They don't have more. What if there was an emergency and they needed someone with an expected amount of endurance to help save everyone? Gattaca for me always told a different, darker story. I think the story they wanted was a caste story - if he was just as able and strong but beat out the genetically superior people on their terms then that would have been the story they were trying to tell. In the end, they told the story of a clever cheater who put his own wants above those in a delicate mission and it's left to a guess if that cost lives or no. During a talk with another person on this, he supposed that this is why Jerome incinerates himself at the end. He needed a lowly sort as such as Vincent to fulfill his own dream, and in the end just could not reconcile how he may have just destroyed and polluted the whole of his pure society for his own selfish reasons.
- lyqwyd 7y agoGATTACA
- nwah1 7y agoOnce genetic editing becomes more fully developed, the approach of selecting only modal genetic variants is another not-so-risky approach because it would be relying on existing selection criteria and simply removing the mutations. Like a genetic spell-checker. https://archive.md/cD1fn https://archive.md/cD1fn
- bprater 7y agoLots of paywall entries in Hacker News today. How are you folks viewing the articles?
- brenden2 7y agoI don't think anyone reads the articles. I certainly don't, I'm just here for the comments.
- buboard 7y agoSame, some paywalls have become too hard to overcome
- mixologic 7y agothis one is a "disable javascript" one
- tzs 7y agoMost paywalled submissions are to major sites that no doubt many people here subscribe to. I'm sure that there are a lot of Economist subscribers. Same for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Probably a good number of Bloomberg and Forbes subscribers, too. Enough of those people typically read and comment on the article, often quoting the parts that they reply to, to make the comments interesting and informative to those of us who have not read the article. Also, HN comments often go off on a tangent, and those tangents are often the best part of the discussion. If a person can't read the article and the comments aren't useful without having read the article--my recommendation is to move on to another story. HN has sufficient volume that there is no way most people have time to read more than a fraction of it anyway. Finally, if you notice that there are a lot of submissions that you really do want to read coming from the same paywalled source, that's a good indication that maybe that is a site you should subscribe to, either directly or as part of some aggregator like Apple's News+ service.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- whack 7y agoI know this stuff scares the heck out of everyone, but how is this really different from: - Hiring childhood development specialists - Pre-K programs - Kindergarten enrollment - Providing kids with excellent nutrition - Providing kids with a home that is safe and free from abuse Every single factor listed above is demonstrably correlated with lifetime intelligence, body development, mental/physical health and athleticism. Is it fair that some kids get to grow up in a safe and loving environment, while other kids worldwide grow up in malnourished or abusive households. Is it fair that some kids get best-in-class schooling and attention thanks to rich parents, while others are left watching TV all day. If we're going to ban genetic profiling because it is unfair, should we be banning all of the above as well. Instead of trying to pull everyone down to the lowest common denominator, perhaps we should instead focus on pulling everyone up to their highest potential. I for one welcome a world of universal access to genetic improvements, and generations of kids who are healthier and smarter than we can ever hope to be.
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago"I for one welcome a world of universal access to genetic improvements" The stuff that's scary is not that there is universally accessible genetic improvements. The fear is that these improves are not universally accessible.
- buboard 7y agoWhat if they were part of universal healthcare?
- Kalium 7y agoEvery one of the above improvements started as not universally accessible. Knowing that they're improvements and available is how we start down the path of making them universally accessible. Demanding perfection or nothing is perhaps only an ideal approach in scenarios where nothing is, in fact, an acceptable answer. In a world where Tay-Sachs exists, I think that would be an ethically abominable outcome.
- 7y ago
- brenden2 7y agoHumans have also been doing this for many years through a process colloquially known as "dating".
- tasogare 7y agoYes but let's pretend dating is only about love instead, and that intelligence is not well defined so that everyone can feel good.
- buboard 7y agoMany of these mutations can be edited with crispr/cas9 techniques which are becoming increasingly better
- designium 7y agoOne of the biggest issue is that the traits and the genetic selection will be passed down to future generations and that is a permanent advantage for that individual and his/her offsprings. When we compare to Pre-K programs and other current enhancement that can be bought with money, they are no guarantee that the enhancement will go to the next generations, unless the family can keep paying for those things in the future. So the issue is the starting point of the human life. Today, we still can believe that all human are born "equal"; but the moment a whole set of human beings are enhanced on a genetic level, a lot of our moral values will be changed forever. No longer we can say that "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." if that happens, it will upend things like the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" and many other concepts that today's society relies on to organize itself. Imagine to live in a society where you are genetically "inferior" and there is no way you can "change" or upgrade who you are.
- buboard 7y agoWhy would it? People are already quite the unequal genetically, sometimes unequivocally so (e.g. women are less strong than men) but we accept that we have the same rights.
- ahje 7y agoThe LGBTQ-movement, for example, is extremely vocal about any technique that could potentially be used to determine the sexual orientation of a person. They've spent a huge amount of time and resources in order to get society to redefine homosexuality from an illness and into a personal matter which should be included in societal norms. If someone discovered a reliable way to detect the future sexuality of a child then those efforts would suddenly be contradicted, because 1) it would be harder to argue that it's not just a condition, and 2) no matter how controversial, there would be a demand for such screenings, and the LGBTQ-community would most likely interpret it as an existential threat. Obviously, I chose sexuality as an example as it's an easy metaphor that most people get, but this reasoning can be applied to quite a few other things that are (possibly) caused by genetical factors and where there's a community involved. As an example, I've heard people mention an on-going "genocide" of people with Downs syndrome, simply because pre-natal screenings are quite effective at detecting it and that parents therefore terminate the pregnancy instead of having a child with Downs. EDIT: Simply put: If you start screening for X, thereby allowing it to be prevented or treated in any way, then you imply that the X is something negative. People with X might take offence to that.
- jahaja 7y agoThis is after all, and always will be, a symptom of our sick society. In a competitive environment the traits that are socially desirable will be sought after. Currently these are, among others, being attractive, tall, male, white and so on.
- neonate 7y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20191107203831/https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/11/09/a-new-type-of-genetic-profiling-promises-cleverer-better-looking-children https://web.archive.org/web/20191107203831/https://www.econo...
- Zenst 7y agoI'm sure this will become the next drama to play out in sports and genetic enhancement becoming the next doping scandal. I say next, but looking at 20-30 years from now.
- Merrill 7y agoIt's already routine to do genetic screening of in vitro embryos before selection for implantation. It is done to check for some of the more common deleterious genetic variations. But there is no reason that they couldn't check for other things like eye color. Eventually, of course, the embryos could also be modified by CRISPR or some similar technique, and those for which the genetic modification was successful would then be chosen for implantation. Outlawing this sort of thing is likely to have two effects: - ordinary folks will do it illegally in back street genetic engineering operations, and - rich folks will engage in medical tourism to some place set up to cater to their needs - a Cayman Islands of genetic engineering. PS - I'm not sure what the problem with cloning is, since identical twins, triplets, ... are naturally occurring clones.
- raven105x 7y agoTo classify mutation as "artificial" or "natural" is a fool's errand. Nature makes mistakes all the time, just like us humans - the only difference is we don't have hundreds of millions of years to even ours out. In the current age this may still be a "but religion and ethics" argument. This is conjecture, alas it will be a "if your nation isn't doing this, it is obsolete" fact by no later than 2100.
- Darth_Hobo 7y agoGood news. I hope it will be very expensive, so that only smart and hard working people can afford it for their children. Eventually we will need to leave lazy and stupid people behind, and creating a class of genetically superior humans is a good way to do it, because it will create a group identity and they won't consider themselves as normal humans. And when it is US vs THEM the hard choices are much easier to make.