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If 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 woul

If 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 ago
  I'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 ago
    For 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 ago
      Yep, 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 ago
    I'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.
akira2501 4y ago
> What a miserable life that would almost certainly be What criteria are you using to make this judgement? > towards near-eradication of genetic diseases My concern would be that we might be unable to distinguish useful genetic adaptations from disease. How do we actually make these decisions? Examine the DNA and then look for SNPs of concern? Is that a perfect process, or one dominated by statistics? How likely is it that this method will arrive at the expected goal?
- Frost1x 4y ago
  >My concern would be that we might be unable to distinguish useful genetic adaptations from disease. How do we actually make these decisions? Examine the DNA and then look for SNPs of concern? Is that a perfect process, or one dominated by statistics? How likely is it that this method will arrive at the expected goal? We sort of do this at a high level and with less empiricism anyways. We are often trained what characteristics in a mate we find attractive and use selection based on those attributes or make our own independnet choices, discarding these trends. Sometimes we make good choices, sometimes we make bad choices. The concern I would have more here is that the decision process would be fairly standardized and start to lack diversity more than us making the "wrong" choices as we currently do. We're going to make the wrong choices, period, because we don't have a crystal ball to predict all future cases where some attributes we deem harmful turn out to be more useful. The way we currently fight this and thrive is through a wide degree of diversity in the selection amd decision process, allowing for a fairly wide diversity of attributes. If the process becomes methodical, we're likely to start converging on fewer and fewer "acceptable" mutations. If we're advanced enough that we somehow can tell good and bad genetic attributes from a survival standpoint then maybe this isn't terrible but I think that is a challenging problem in and of itself. Just assume you can arbitrarily change human attributes around, what is the ideal human? Then we have the social implications. All of this reminds me of the movie GATACCA.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  > My concern would be that we might be unable to distinguish useful genetic adaptations from disease. How do we actually make these decisions? Examine the DNA and then look for SNPs of concern? Is that a perfect process, or one dominated by statistics? How likely is it that this method will arrive at the expected goal? For a good example of where this can wrong and have unintended side effects, look at the babies that had their genetics edited with CRISPR by He Jiankui. Their genes were edited to make them less susceptible to HIV, yet that genetic modification has biological consequences[1][2] outside of preventing HIV, as the edited gene coded for a receptor protein on cells. Many factors were overlooked when doing the gene editing[2], and the kids' genes were edited both incorrectly and not optimally. The edits also affect their germline, meaning that their future kids could potentially inherit similar genetic errors. As a result, the HIV susceptibility "benefit" might not actually be so beneficial, and even if it was, there are strains of HIV that don't use that receptor protein as vector for infection, as well. Research has even suggested that they might be more susceptible to HIV, now, and that their particular mutations could result in shorter lifespans than people without the mutations. I wouldn't feel too well about having my genome botched for profit before I was even born, learning that I have an outdated version of an edited gene that might kill me, and being told that my kids would potentially inherit some alpha version of a gene that doesn't even work right. The same feelings would apply to lab selected natural mutations, as well. I think we're at a stage where we do not have a complete, or even satisfactory, understanding of our genome and biology, and the same goes for both our understanding of gene editing and selection, and their consequences. For example, we have a very primitive understanding of how the brain works, and editing, or selecting, genes that are expressed in the nervous system could have serious deleterious effects, which is something that is hypothesized to have accidentally happened with the CRISPR twins[3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#Potential_costs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#Potential_costs [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair#Scientific_basis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair#Scientific_b... [3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/21/137309/the-crispr-twins-had-their-brains-altered/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/21/137309/the-crisp...
spicymaki 4y ago
You might have been able to make a contribution to humanity before death. Think of the great contribution to physics from Stephen Hawking. What if he was eradicated because they could test for ALS?
- yadaeno 4y ago
  Think about the genius scientists that was not born because someone with ALS was instead. Youre not more likely to be a genius if you have ALS so might as well roll the dice with someone with less health problems.
  - tsol 4y ago
    In that case why not abort people who are autistic? Yeah they tend to be smart in some areas, but neurotypical would be less annoying.
    - pkaye 4y ago
      There is no genetic test for autism to even consider aborting.
      - cjbgkagh 4y ago
        There are a lot of candidate genes.
    - cjbgkagh 4y ago
      I’m assuming ALS and intelligence are not correlated so statistically they would be independent events.
      - tsol 4y ago
        So then my point still stands-- why not eliminate all the autistic people if intelligence is an independent event anyways?
tengbretson 4y ago
Assuming you are a young adult right now, would you currently consider your life up until this point to be a net-negative experience?
tsol 4y ago
What I find interesting is that most actual people with cancer don't feel that way. They find meaning in their life, however short, and are glad to have gotten experienced it. It's only cynical people online that think life would be so unredeemably awful that it's better to have never existed. Similarly, you'll often see people on the internet say they don't believe God could possibly exist because there are many people starving around the world. Yet most of the starving poor in the world is religious, often very much so.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Many religious people are born into it. Converting educated adults is an uphill battle. Church planters will admit as much. So not sure asking starving masses is the best evidence that atheism based on the problem of evil is somehow illegitimate. All that said, once people are born they deserve the digity to decide themselves whether they live or die. With a lot of help and emotional support before making any permanent choices. Before people are born parent's likewise should have as much information as possible before they have to make a permanent choice for someone else. IMO that should include the option to abort a pregnancy very likely to lead to a lifetime of suffering.
  - irrational 4y ago
    What is a church planter? I’m imagining a flower planter out in front of a church, but that can’t be what you mean.
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      It's a worker/missionary whose explicit goal is to create a church where there wasn't one before.
      - irrational 4y ago
        In the USA? Everywhere I’ve ever lived in the USA already has a plethora of churches. Why are they making more?
chrisco255 4y ago
Nonsense. By the way, you could die at any time, you realize that right? Death does not make a life pointless. Quite the contrary.
wfhordie 4y ago
I don’t understand this sentiment. I have no preference for whether I was born or not. It is an immutable fact of the universe that I cannot change. I was a pro-abortion rally (as a supporter of abortion) and an old man asked me, “Aren’t you glad your mother didn’t abort you?” And I told him “not really.”
olliej 4y ago
Except a lot of human conditions have at various points been considered “diseases”, and now are not. Also with the soon revocation of Roe vs Wade, what is the reason for this testing, other than to increase the health insurance costs for you children?
inglor_cz 4y ago
A cancer deadly in 2022 may be completely and easily curable by 2042. Or it may not. But medicine is progressing at quite a fast pace. It is dangerous to make such decisions in advance on behalf of people not yet born. My wife was born in the 1980s with a rather problematic heart condition. She is now completely fine aside from a few things she cannot do. I am glad that she is alive and that we were able to meet.

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 ago
I'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 ago
  For 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 ago
    Yep, 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 ago
  I'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.

akira2501 4y ago

> What a miserable life that would almost certainly be What criteria are you using to make this judgement? > towards near-eradication of genetic diseases My concern would be that we might be unable to distinguish useful genetic adaptations from disease. How do we actually make these decisions? Examine the DNA and then look for SNPs of concern? Is that a perfect process, or one dominated by statistics? How likely is it that this method will arrive at the expected goal?

Frost1x 4y ago
>My concern would be that we might be unable to distinguish useful genetic adaptations from disease. How do we actually make these decisions? Examine the DNA and then look for SNPs of concern? Is that a perfect process, or one dominated by statistics? How likely is it that this method will arrive at the expected goal? We sort of do this at a high level and with less empiricism anyways. We are often trained what characteristics in a mate we find attractive and use selection based on those attributes or make our own independnet choices, discarding these trends. Sometimes we make good choices, sometimes we make bad choices. The concern I would have more here is that the decision process would be fairly standardized and start to lack diversity more than us making the "wrong" choices as we currently do. We're going to make the wrong choices, period, because we don't have a crystal ball to predict all future cases where some attributes we deem harmful turn out to be more useful. The way we currently fight this and thrive is through a wide degree of diversity in the selection amd decision process, allowing for a fairly wide diversity of attributes. If the process becomes methodical, we're likely to start converging on fewer and fewer "acceptable" mutations. If we're advanced enough that we somehow can tell good and bad genetic attributes from a survival standpoint then maybe this isn't terrible but I think that is a challenging problem in and of itself. Just assume you can arbitrarily change human attributes around, what is the ideal human? Then we have the social implications. All of this reminds me of the movie GATACCA.
heavyset_go 4y ago
> My concern would be that we might be unable to distinguish useful genetic adaptations from disease. How do we actually make these decisions? Examine the DNA and then look for SNPs of concern? Is that a perfect process, or one dominated by statistics? How likely is it that this method will arrive at the expected goal? For a good example of where this can wrong and have unintended side effects, look at the babies that had their genetics edited with CRISPR by He Jiankui. Their genes were edited to make them less susceptible to HIV, yet that genetic modification has biological consequences[1][2] outside of preventing HIV, as the edited gene coded for a receptor protein on cells. Many factors were overlooked when doing the gene editing[2], and the kids' genes were edited both incorrectly and not optimally. The edits also affect their germline, meaning that their future kids could potentially inherit similar genetic errors. As a result, the HIV susceptibility "benefit" might not actually be so beneficial, and even if it was, there are strains of HIV that don't use that receptor protein as vector for infection, as well. Research has even suggested that they might be more susceptible to HIV, now, and that their particular mutations could result in shorter lifespans than people without the mutations. I wouldn't feel too well about having my genome botched for profit before I was even born, learning that I have an outdated version of an edited gene that might kill me, and being told that my kids would potentially inherit some alpha version of a gene that doesn't even work right. The same feelings would apply to lab selected natural mutations, as well. I think we're at a stage where we do not have a complete, or even satisfactory, understanding of our genome and biology, and the same goes for both our understanding of gene editing and selection, and their consequences. For example, we have a very primitive understanding of how the brain works, and editing, or selecting, genes that are expressed in the nervous system could have serious deleterious effects, which is something that is hypothesized to have accidentally happened with the CRISPR twins[3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#Potential_costs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#Potential_costs [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair#Scientific_basis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair#Scientific_b... [3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/21/137309/the-crispr-twins-had-their-brains-altered/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/21/137309/the-crisp...

spicymaki 4y ago

You might have been able to make a contribution to humanity before death. Think of the great contribution to physics from Stephen Hawking. What if he was eradicated because they could test for ALS?

yadaeno 4y ago
Think about the genius scientists that was not born because someone with ALS was instead. Youre not more likely to be a genius if you have ALS so might as well roll the dice with someone with less health problems.
- tsol 4y ago
  In that case why not abort people who are autistic? Yeah they tend to be smart in some areas, but neurotypical would be less annoying.
  - pkaye 4y ago
    There is no genetic test for autism to even consider aborting.
    - cjbgkagh 4y ago
      There are a lot of candidate genes.
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    I’m assuming ALS and intelligence are not correlated so statistically they would be independent events.
    - tsol 4y ago
      So then my point still stands-- why not eliminate all the autistic people if intelligence is an independent event anyways?

tengbretson 4y ago

Assuming you are a young adult right now, would you currently consider your life up until this point to be a net-negative experience?

tsol 4y ago

What I find interesting is that most actual people with cancer don't feel that way. They find meaning in their life, however short, and are glad to have gotten experienced it. It's only cynical people online that think life would be so unredeemably awful that it's better to have never existed. Similarly, you'll often see people on the internet say they don't believe God could possibly exist because there are many people starving around the world. Yet most of the starving poor in the world is religious, often very much so.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Many religious people are born into it. Converting educated adults is an uphill battle. Church planters will admit as much. So not sure asking starving masses is the best evidence that atheism based on the problem of evil is somehow illegitimate. All that said, once people are born they deserve the digity to decide themselves whether they live or die. With a lot of help and emotional support before making any permanent choices. Before people are born parent's likewise should have as much information as possible before they have to make a permanent choice for someone else. IMO that should include the option to abort a pregnancy very likely to lead to a lifetime of suffering.
- irrational 4y ago
  What is a church planter? I’m imagining a flower planter out in front of a church, but that can’t be what you mean.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    It's a worker/missionary whose explicit goal is to create a church where there wasn't one before.
    - irrational 4y ago
      In the USA? Everywhere I’ve ever lived in the USA already has a plethora of churches. Why are they making more?

chrisco255 4y ago

Nonsense. By the way, you could die at any time, you realize that right? Death does not make a life pointless. Quite the contrary.

wfhordie 4y ago

I don’t understand this sentiment. I have no preference for whether I was born or not. It is an immutable fact of the universe that I cannot change. I was a pro-abortion rally (as a supporter of abortion) and an old man asked me, “Aren’t you glad your mother didn’t abort you?” And I told him “not really.”

olliej 4y ago

Except a lot of human conditions have at various points been considered “diseases”, and now are not. Also with the soon revocation of Roe vs Wade, what is the reason for this testing, other than to increase the health insurance costs for you children?

inglor_cz 4y ago

A cancer deadly in 2022 may be completely and easily curable by 2042. Or it may not. But medicine is progressing at quite a fast pace. It is dangerous to make such decisions in advance on behalf of people not yet born. My wife was born in the 1980s with a rather problematic heart condition. She is now completely fine aside from a few things she cannot do. I am glad that she is alive and that we were able to meet.