3 ms·

I think I would be okay with germline editing too, in selected cases. It's not like a child is going to say "hey, thanks for not fixing my cancer-causing mutati

I think I would be okay with germline editing too, in selected cases. It's not like a child is going to say "hey, thanks for not fixing my cancer-causing mutation when you had the chance, mum".

UweSchmidt 4y ago
Then you have less qualms about it than the author of the article, whose career would benefit a lot from a free-for-all. "The social and political implications of gene editing are also huge unknowns, and unfortunately there’s been scant debate among policy makers and the general public."
- ben_w 4y ago
  Personally I think both are true. There are a lot of genetic defects we can engineer away. There’s a lot of other things that aren’t defects, but social pressure will make people want to engineer them away. For example, when I was a child, British tabloids were saying “Abortion hope after ‘gay genes’ finding”: https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2019/08/30/gay-gene-newspapers-1993-daily-mail-ian-mckellen/ https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2019/08/30/gay-gene-newspapers-19... (Bonus points as the gay gene didn’t really exist; but as I’m bi, people like that would’ve tried to eradicate me before I was born if they’d had a way to do so). As I expect my resistance to social pressure to be exactly average until shown otherwise, I sometimes find myself wondering what things I falsely believe to be real defects that would be moral to eradicate.