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Now. There is nothing stopping a rogue country or person from using it to develop super soldiers. Or better bio weapons.
by virmundi 6y ago
Now. There is nothing stopping a rogue country or person from using it to develop super soldiers. Or better bio weapons.
- excalibur 6y agoNothing except biology, chemistry, and physics.
- virmundi 6y agoI don’t think that we can produce a Homelander. We could have people that start producing designer babies. With enough time and low regard for collateral damage, we could have people designed to be highly intelligent. We could have children edited to be male or female. We could have children edited to not manifest African phenotypes regardless of parentage. The sky is the limit.
- mattkrause 6y agoYou don’t need CRISPR for sex selection—-it can already be done as part of the preimplantation screening for IVF. For the other things, the best editing technique in the world is useless without a known and well-defined target. Intelligence is certainly partly heritable, but it’s not like there’s a single switch that needs to be toggled: genome-wide association studies find hundreds or thousands of linked genes—-and many of them likely have multiple functions. I would bet over-expressing any single one of them leads to many, many more problems than it solves.
- virmundi 6y agoVery possible in the early stages. Given time we can probably improve. The only way to know is to experiment.
- ebiester 6y agoSuper soldiers? Were that the issue, we could take LeBron James, Brian Shaw, or any number of intelligent athletes with various advantages and ask for sperm samples. You could have a couple thousand kids to mold from birth. It turns out, as a society we haven't done that already, and neither has any other society. Conceptually, it's interesting to think an adult could have their genetics changed, but we have cheaper ways and we haven't even exploited those.