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> 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

> 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...

Frost1x 4y ago

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...