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I've never seen the reason people are so upright about gene editing humans.
by psychphysic 4y ago
I've never seen the reason people are so upright about gene editing humans.
- fabian2k 4y agoThe children could not consent, and there is a real danger for various side effects while the benefit was very dubious. The method was also sloppy and didn't produce exactly the intended result but slightly different edits, which again is a recipe for more unintended effects.
- CyberDildonics 4y agoChildren can't consent to being born, what parents they get, or any crucial early decisions in their life.
- fabian2k 4y agoIt still makes a difference for this kind of experiment. There is a difference between experiments and studies on consenting adults and on children, the bar is higher when you are experimenting on children. And it is much clearer that certain types of experiments are unethical when you perform them on children while on consenting adults you could make an argument that the adults do understand the risk and consent.
- CyberDildonics 4y agoThen the issue is really risk, not consent.
- adastra22 4y agoThe children also don’t consent to having inferior genetics that could have been fixed. The argument is purely symmetrical.
- fabian2k 4y agoThe arguments look very different if they had tried to cure a severe genetic disease. The risk/benefit calculation would be entirely different compared to the stunt that was actually performed. My point is that in cases where consent is impossible like for unborn children, the bar is much higher on what kind of experiment could be considered ethical. There must be a clear potential benefit for the child and an acceptable risk compared to that benefit. This experiment fails on both.
- None4U 4y agoTheir "stunt" was when they attempted to make the child immune to HIV because both parents had HIV. Did the children consent to be passed HIV from their mother?
- magicalist 4y agoOn the one hand we have very well validated methods of preventing transmission of HIV from mother to child, on the other we have an experimental gene modification technique attempting to use a blunt instrument to modify a gene that may reduce the chance of contracting HIV. Yes, the stunt was unnecessary, likely ineffective, and incredibly unethical. (wiki at least also disagrees with you and said the mothers were HIV negative, so plain old in vitro fertilization would have been all that was actually needed)
- stickfigure 4y agoEvery day, we run experiments on hundreds of thousands of future babies - we mash sperms and eggs together and they mix up in wildly unpredictable ways. Plus countless random mutations. This process already has an uncomfortably high defect rate.
- dennis_jeeves1 4y agoLol, as I like to say, the biggest mistake that I have made in my life is to pick the wrong parents.
- mo_42 4y agoMost children do not consent to sloppy parenting methods either. Even the most well-intentioned methods have unintended side effects.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoSo maybe we should take extra care with even more permanent and entirely optional changes.
- VeninVidiaVicii 4y agoI’m a bacteriologist who uses CRISPR every day, and the biggest problem with CRISPR editing in eukaryotes is off-targets effects, ie, cutting a gene you didn’t mean to. In fact, there’s still a lot about CRISPR we don’t understand at all, like why some sequences seem to be great sites for CRISPR to cut and others don’t seem to work reproducibly.
- jdksncnskw 4y agoThank you for your service. 1. What are some examples of off-target effects? 2. Are there any examples of them causing adverse effects in organisms?
- VeninVidiaVicii 4y agoThe most straightforward way to answer the question is that off-target is kind of field lingo for “some other gene got targeted” and results in unexpected cell death. Imagine in bacteria, if I guide the CRISPR components to a gene that metabolizes an exotic sugar and the cell just inexplicably dies—whereas targeting that very gene in a different spot does what you expected. In eukaryotes, off-target effects likely occur more often (more genes) but we just don’t see them, because the off-target effect wasn’t immediately fatal. Instead, maybe a tumor suppressor gene got rearranged? It might take decades to see the physiological effect.
- idopmstuff 4y agoI think there's a difference between doing it in theory and the actual implementation in this case. He Jiankui did it using relatively imprecise editing technology with unknown potential issues. That's pretty difference than a theoretical method that would prevent a child from having a disease with a guarantee of no side effects - that's the sort of thing people generally support when polled.
- ted_bunny 4y agoEven if it's perfectly safe, it will deepen disparities.
- ch4s3 4y agoIt may do that, but it may not. Many important traits involve huge numbers of genes that have small individual impacts and are mediated by epigenetics. The kinds of edits people are talking about now are single genes that control specific diseases. Even trying to make someone taller is probably out of reach for the near future. It may aslo become really cheap to do this in the future.
- GreedClarifies 4y agoIt almost certainly will become really cheap to do this in the future. OTOH, selection of embryos, by it's nature, will always be expensive.
- ted_bunny 4y agoInsulin is cheap, too.
- ch4s3 4y agoThis is never a very interesting comment. Older styles of insulin that no one wants to use are dirt cheap. The newer and preferred kind is still under patent, and one can quibble about that but it was very expensive to develop and Eli Lilly & Co. just announced a monthly out of pocket price cap of $35. Other countries have different systems that cap prices, so pharmas try to take profits in the US. It's not a very good system, but it has produced a lot of really impressive drugs in the last 50 years. We can do better of course, but trashing any medical advance with a quip about insulin is just childish and boring.
- ted_bunny 4y agoSlow down, I'm only made of straw here. I'm saying that something being cheap to do/make isn't enough to ensure it's actually affordable equitably.
- _8j50 4y agoYou're really saying that on a site mostly about software dev? "What's the big deal with editing binaries in production anyways", flipping one bit can have disastrous consequences. Can you guarantee your gene editing won't amount to a genetic defect or illness? That's a pretty big deal.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- GreedClarifies 4y agoNo kidding. Most people complain since they like to complain. Many people complain about the distributional effects. What they fail to see if that the alternative technology: selection of embryos has a far greater distributional impact in the limit. ... but they like to complain.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago> selection of embryos has a far greater distributional impact in the limit. Can you ELI5?
- GreedClarifies 4y agoAssuming that (a) we can sequence embryos reliably, (b) we identify a large number of genes that are considered favorable, and (c) we come up with a way of creating large numbers of embryos (eg: artificial ovaries) then the "quality" of the child in such a future will, generally, be dependent upon that amount the child's parent were willing to spend to find their best possible child. Do you want a one in ten baby, a one in a thousand baby, or a one in a million? The price will be proportional to the number of embryos sampled, on average. Since this is a competitive process, no matter how low the price per unit decreases the amount of spend, as a percentage of income/wealth will stay constant.
- Adraghast 4y agoFurther devaluation of our holistic humanity. We already define ourselves largely by the functions we perform in society, but at least current class distinctions are still mostly social. Imagine how much worse it would be if people could literally be bred for certain functions. An engineer will always be a engineer because their traits were optimized for that. A ditch digger will always be a ditch digger because their parents couldn’t afford the engineer package at Build-A-Baby. I can think of few worlds more dystopian than one where there’s a causal, quantifiable relationship between wealth and biological superiority.
- causality0 4y agoIntelligence and ability already have a much weaker correlation with wealth and success than familial wealth and sheer luck do. Also, why would one genetic modification be any more expensive than another? This is going to happen anyway, sooner or later. The "oh no it will make rich people richer" argument could be applied to a good chunk of all the technologies ever invented, from automobiles to the internet.
- int3 4y agoThe fact that there isn't a causal relationship from wealth to biological superiority is the cause of so many of our problems! Imagine if all the people who got positions via nepotism were actually good at their jobs...
- screye 4y agoThe answer is obvious isn't it. If gene editing can make a human smarter & better looking, then you're dooming your own children to a lifetime of inferiority if you have them naturally. Unlike tech or drug enhanced people, there is no way to detect a genetically enhanced person. So they'd be in your midst, better than you in every way, while you'd be stuck with the realization that there is nothing you can do in this life to change your inferiority to these neo-humans. "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable" - 1962, John F. Kennedy Pandora's box is already unlocked, we just won't let anyone open it. At the same time, technology is inevitable, and it's probably better to set up legal pathways to access this technology than let the grey market go wild.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 9dev 4y agoPlaying devils advocate here; wouldn’t that be a prime example of evolutionary displacement of an inferior species with one that has a higher fitness? Those modified, superior humans would mate, obviously, and spread their gene pool faster than non-modified humans, thus replacing them. Isn’t that a good thing, overall?
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y agoHaving one's morality based on the metaphysics of illiterate desert peasants living two thousand years ago will generally have bad consequences for one's perspective on life, now and here. Having said this, CRISPR, for all the good it promises, is the wrong technology. There is little to no reason to change the genes, the hardware: we need to find a way to access the software, the inter-cells communication protocols [1]. [1] Michael Levin | Cell Intelligence in Physiological and Morphological Spaces, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLiHLDrOTW8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLiHLDrOTW8 (The Anatomical Compiler at 17:55: "birth defects, traumatic injury, cancer, aging are problems of information processing")
- slackdog 4y agoNever seen a reason, or never agreed with the reasons? The former strains credibility, but if that is really the case you should watch Gattaca. It's quite good.
- bglazer 4y agoWe understand biology extremely poorly. It’s only been twenty years since we got a decent look at the genome, and like 5 since we could start changing it at all reliably. What we’ve found is that human gene regulation is almost immeasurably complex. There are a few cases where we know exactly what changes to make to fix diseases, but they’re rare. Mostly we just have no idea what would happen if we started messing around with human genes. So, I think a measure of humility and caution is warranted before we start editing human embryos.
- moffkalast 4y agoA measure of humility? From humanity? That's never happened before in history, not even with nukes.
- magicalist 4y agoAre you agreeing here or are you arguing that because humans have shown a lack of restraint in the past they should continue to show a lack of restraint?
- moffkalast 4y agoWell it's unrealistically optimistic is what I'm saying.
- seydor 4y agoand yet we did an almost real-time test of mrna injections in half the population
- nmjohn 4y agomrna vaccines don't modify the human genome - this literally has nothing to do with the CRISPR topic.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- recuter 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
- bastawhiz 4y agoWe might make humans who don't suffer from ailments or who are beautiful. But we might also create people who have terrible, irreparable problems. Those people might die from the problems. Small genetic modifications cause awful, devastating illnesses. Artificial genome modifications can be done pretty reliably, but we know it's not foolproof. We also have no way to check our work or debug potential genetic issues. We're flying entirely blind, and our hubris can (and in all likelihood, will) result in terrible suffering and death until we get FAR better at doing this.
- boh 4y agoBecause mistakes would cause a lifetime of consequences and given our limited knowledge, it is impossible not to make them. When considering the possibilities of gene editing, take into account an Elephant-Man type outcome, not just the Brad Pitt type outcome (since at this point the one is more likely than the other).
- Teever 4y agoI don't believe that you've never tonight about the concept of unintended consequences and applied it to the idea of genetic modification of humans.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago"Junk" DNA. Do you really want the people who can't figure out what 98% of our genes even do start playing God? Chesterton's Fence and all that.
- timbo1642 4y ago[dead]
- zeruch 4y agoBecause it can/will be used by certain groups of privileged classes to perpetuate said privilege, up to and including things that could cast shadows similar to eugenics. It's where the edges are that matter here, not just the basic idea. And when people say "that just couldn't happen" given the last half decade of societal weirdness, is no longer a really acceptable response anymore for many.