15 ms·
DNA testing for embryos promises to predict genetic diseases
- SneakyTornado29 4y agothe ethics of this may not be forgotten
- melony 4y agoYou won't be complaining anymore when it's your child with the disease.
- nerbert 4y agoIt’s not an all or nothing problem. It’s perfectly doable to find a balance and we’re already doing it.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y agowhat ethics? a 26-week old fetus is considered to be a bundle of cells, and it is perfectly acceptable to dispose of it for any reason or no reason at all. given that, I see no rationale to prohibit or condemn disposing of undesirable embryos
- thepasswordis 4y agoA 26 week old fetus is practically indistinguishable from a human baby. Survival at that point is common.
- mjbeswick 4y agoWhile that's true, few born earlier than 32 weeks survive without neonatal intensive care. 20% of babies that do survive birth at 26 weeks develop lifelong health problems.
- NateEag 4y agoYou, too, can be considered a bundle of cells. A bigger bundle, but still a bundle. Sure, you don't need a womb to survive, but you still need a pretty specialized environment. See all the concerns about global warming - mangle our environment just a relatively little bit and we're toast. You're both humans with your own unique DNA. One of you is a lot younger than the other. I wouldn't kill a thirty-year-old because they're doomed to get cancer, nor a one-year-old, nor a negative-six-month-old.
- anamax 4y ago> a 26-week old fetus is considered to be a bundle of cell "For 26 weeks of gestation, the percentages were significantly higher with a survival rate of 81.4% and survival without impairment rate of 75.6%." https://www.verywellfamily.com/premature-birth-and-viability-2371529 https://www.verywellfamily.com/premature-birth-and-viability...
- tsol 4y agoThis seems just bad faith. As if this isn't one of the most controversial issues of our time
- throwaway0x7E6 4y agowhat controversy? everything has long since been decided, and all detractors have been assigned their designated labels. have you not been consuming the news from reputable sources and correct twitter opinions in the past few months?
- screeconc 4y agoThe ethical dilemmas associated with this won't be in doing it, but in doing it for whom, and its implications for fundamental ideas underlying society, like merit, compensation, and justice. Where does fault lie for something like criminality, if someone is environmentally disadvantaged and denied low-risk genotype for it? Doesn't the fault then lie in the state? If you live in a society where embryos can be selected for very low risk of criminality, but someone is born without that opportunity, and then causes you harm, isn't that a form of neglect on the part of society?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- beebmam 4y agoIf I knew for a fact that I'd get terminal cancer by the time I was a young adult, I'd certainly prefer to have never been born. What a miserable life that would almost certainly be, for myself, those who got to know me and then lose me, and for those I would be dependent on. This, I hope, is another step we take towards near-eradication of genetic diseases. And good riddance
- dane-pgp 4y ago> I'd certainly prefer to have never been born. What if your parents found out when you were 12 months old? Would you wish that they had euthanised you at that age, before you were really self-aware, and before they got too emotionally attached to (or financially invested in) you?
- bonniemuffin 4y agoI'm guessing maybe you don't have kids? By the time my kid was 12 months old, I was emotionally attached enough that losing her would've been a life-destroying level of devastation. I don't think your thought exercise works, because losing a year-old kid is such a horrible tragedy for the parents.
- NateEag 4y agoFor many, many parents, losing an unborn kid to a miscarriage is a tragedy, too. Not as hard as losing a one-year-old, I'm pretty sure, but also not just a blip.
- bonniemuffin 4y agoYep, I totally agree. Terminating a much-wanted pregnancy for medical reasons is also tragic. There's no good way to lose a child.
- dane-pgp 4y agoI'm glad that you were emotionally attached to your child when they were 12 months old, and that is completely normal. I apologise if I gave the impression that I thought parents would find it easy to lose a child at that age. The point of my thought experiment, though, was not to imagine what a parent would do, but what someone with a terminal diagnose would wish their parents had done. I accept that this is not an easy thing to talk about, nor are there any easy answers, so I'm not trying to start an argument. If someone wants to think about it, they can, and it's just a difficult hypothetical that came to my mind when I read the original comment.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoIn Denmark almost everyone born with a genetic disease was a false negative: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-last-children-of-down-syndrome/616928/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-las... Will be interesting to see how these passive eugenics affects humanity centuries from now from a gene pool standpoint.
- klipt 4y agoIt's just one more selection pressure added to all the existing selection pressures.
- throwawaysleep 4y agoI would be curious to ask those who did not abort whether they came to regret the decision and vice versa.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoThey talk about this somewhat in the article
- refurb 4y agoWould be interesting to see if we find other "socially undesirable" traits and if those can be selectively removed - no more crime! No more riots, just a compliant population of workers.
- yucky 4y agoSounds quite progressive!
- folli 4y agoConversely, you can argue that modern medicine affects humanity's gene pool much stronger in the opposite direction by giving people with diverse genetic diseases a much longer lifespan than they would have had a century ago.
- 4y ago
- spicymaki 4y agoWait until they find out that prenatal screening tests are not infallible: https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/prenatal-screenings-can-lead-false-positives-heightened-anxiety https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/prenatal-screenings-can-l...
- hgarg 4y agoStrong Gattaca vibes.
- dontbenebby 4y agoGood movie, bad reality.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cjbgkagh 4y agoIt would have been a different kind of movie if Vincent had a heart attack during the flight.
- polski-g 4y agoJust got my embryos sampled by this company. AMA.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- temporallobe 4y agoWhoah there, Gattaca!
- nootropicat 4y agoRight now it appears unreliable, but once it's eventually proven to be nearly perfect, it should be compulsory with penalties for child cruelty if not followed. Birthing a child with genetic defects that would be detectable by common methods is morally equivalent to harming a healthy child in the exact same way. In both cases the end state is a damaged human that wouldn't exist if not for the actions of (presumably...) adults. Legal consequences should therefore be equivalent. I'm aware it's outside of the Overton window now, but so was legal homosexuality not that far ago (in many Western countries) - support was fundamentally religious in nature and eventually disappeared. Assuming general progress in genetics, the situation is going to repeat here. Eventually only a tiny fringe will think it should be legal to make a new kid with no genetic tests during pregnancy (or before implantation). Fixing found problems with genetic engineering is also fine, if feasible.
- yucky 4y ago[flagged]
- shkkmo 4y ago>so was legal homosexuality not that far ago Which is precisely the point. Mandating eugenics inevitably harms the out groups. The definition of "birth defect" is highly cultural and you will be imposing your definition on others. You might be comfortable saying that a cleft palate is defect , but what about down syndrom, autism, bipolar disorder, deafness, gender disphoria, below average intelligence etc? There is no easy place to draw the line and even a conservatively drawn line will means extinction for whole groups of people. That is such a drastic choice that of it is to be made, it must happen organically through collective individual choices not an autocratic mandate. Doing it the later way is simply Evil, and I don't use that word for many things. Even the former way carries risks and shouldn't be taken lightly.
- jk20 4y ago
- wfhordie 4y agoI’m a pretty liberal guy, but IVF has never sat right with me. Thousands of dollars to produce a baby when living ones already exist. Of course adoption is no cakewalk and itself costs many thousands of dollars (plus the emotional toll). In the end, though, the entire idea of having kids at all is repulsive to me. Why bring another life into this fucked up world? You’re just going to get divorced and traumatize the kid anyway. Better instead to make robots to do the jobs those kids would do when they grow up. At the very least, leave the baby making to the immigrant families.
- Infinitesimus 4y agoThose are some very strong assumptions you're making about why people have children. I'm glad you've figured out that that's not for you so definitely don't have kids and continue (hopefully?) to contribute to the betterment of those alive today. People have children for all sorts of reasons. Nowadays they are more emotional decisions or influenced by biological desires but those are still valid. For those who enjoy having and raising children to lead good lives, it is rewarding and makes existence more enjoyable. The beauty is that most of us can make our own decisions though there is still societal pressure to have kids. Which is obvious because our species will die out without them.
- wfhordie 4y agoI don’t make any assumptions about why people have children because those reasons are entirely irrational. I also don’t care if our species dies out. That will happen long after I am gone
- inglor_cz 4y agoIt is interesting how most of the commenters, even here, automatically think about a dystopian future where "a bad result => eliminate the embryo, abort it". This is a specific kind of dystopia in which genetic damage is "read only" and cannot be altered. But genetic therapies are being developed, too. One day, we will be able to fix quite a lot of those problems already in utero. This may yet breed another kind of dystopic nightmares, but I would expect a much more mixed scenarios; a better future for some people who would either be aborted or suffer from debilitating conditions for all their lives.