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If someone in the year 2050 was to pick out the most important news article from 2025, I won't be surprised if they choose this one. For those who don't unders

If someone in the year 2050 was to pick out the most important news article from 2025, I won't be surprised if they choose this one. For those who don't understand this stuff - we are now capable of editing some of a body's DNA in ways that predictably change their attributes. The baby's liver now has different (and better) DNA than the rest of its body. We still are struggling in most cases with how to deliver the DNA update instructions into the body. But given the pace of change in this space, I expect massive improvements with this update process over time. Combined with AI to better understand the genome, this is going to be a crazy century. Further reading on related topics: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JEhW3HDMKzekDShva/significantly-enhancing-adult-intelligence-with-gene-editing https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JEhW3HDMKzekDShva/significan... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-make-superbabies https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-mak... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yT22RcWrxZcXyGjsA/how-to-have-polygenically-screened-children https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yT22RcWrxZcXyGjsA/how-to-hav...

bglazer 1y ago
The “How to make superbabies” article demonstrates a couple of fundamental misunderstandings about genetics that make me think the authors don’t know what they’re talking about at a basic level. Zero mention of linkage disequilibrium. Zero mention of epistasis. Unquestioned assumptions of linear genotype-phenotype relationships for IQ. Seriously, the projections in their graphs into “danger zone” made me laugh out loud. This is elementary stuff that theyre missing but the entire essay is so shot through with hubris that I don’t think they’re capable of recognizing that.
- gr_norm 1y ago
  The EA community is generally incapable of self-awareness. The academic-but-totally-misinformed tone is comparable to reading LLM output. I've stopped trying to correct them, it's too much work on my part and not enough on theirs.
  - Kuinox 1y ago
    What does EA means here ?
    - gr_norm 1y ago
      "Effective Altruism", something I find myself aligned with but not to the extremes taken by others.
      - alexey-salmin 1y ago
        Technically lesswrong is about rationalists not effective altruists, but you're right in a sense that it's the same breed. They think that the key to scientific thinking is to forego the moral limitations, not to study and learn. As soon as you're free from the shackles of tradition you become 100% rational and therefore 100% correct.
        stogot 1y ago
        Except no one is 100% rational nor 100% correct
        cnity 1y ago
        That community is basically the "r/iamverysmart" types bringing their baggage into adulthood. Almost everything I've read in that sphere is basically Dunning–Kruger to the nth degree.
        jaidhyani 1y ago
        Approximately no one in the community thinks this. If you can go two days in a rationalist space without hearing about "Chesterton's Fence", I'll be impressed. No one thinks they're 100% rational nor that this is a reasonable aspiration. Traditions are generally regarded as sufficiently important that a not small amount of effort has gone into trying to build new ones. Not only is the case that no one thinks that anyone including themselves is 100% correct, but the community norm is to express credence in probabilities and convert those probabilities into bets when possible. People in the rationalist community constantly, loudly, and proudly disagree with each other, to the point that this can make it difficult to coordinate on anything. And everyone is obsessed with studying and learning, and constantly trying to come up with ways to do this more effectively. Like, I'm sure there are people who approximately match the description you're giving here. But I've spent a lot of time around flesh-and-blood rationalists and EAs, and they violently diverge from the account you give here.
- concordDance 1y ago
  Do you have some further reading where one can understand the basics of the subject?
- tuna-piano 1y ago
  Thanks for the healthy skepticism. I still think there's a lot to learn from those articles for most folks uninvolved in this area, even if some of their immediate optimism has additional complications. I think what I mostly took away is a combination of technologies is likely to dramatically change how we have babies in the future. 1. We'll make sperm/egg from skin cells. This has already been done in mice[1], so it is not science fiction to do it in people. 2. When we're able to do this inexpensively, we could create virtually unlimited embryos. We can then select the embryos that have the most optimal traits. Initially, this may be simple things like not choosing embryos with certain genes that give higher risk of certain diseases. This may involve selecting traits like intelligence and height (there are already companies that offer this embryo selection capability [2]). 3. Instead of creating a lot of embryos and selecting the best ones, we could instead create just one embryo and edit the DNA of that embryo, which has already been done in humans [3]. Alternatively, we could edit the DNA of the sperm/egg prior to creating the embryo. The fact that none of this is science fiction is just wild. All of these steps have already been done in animals or people. Buckle up, the future is going to be wild. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/27/1177191913/sperm-or-egg-in-lab-breakthrough-in-reproduction-designer-babies-ivg https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/27/1177191... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/18/us-startup-charging-couples-to-screen-embryos-for-iq https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/18/us-startup-c... [3] https://www.science.org/content/article/chinese-scientist-who-produced-genetically-altered-babies-sentenced-3-years-jail https://www.science.org/content/article/chinese-scientist-wh...
andreygrehov 1y ago
Are there any age restrictions?
fendy3002 1y ago
the usual next questions will be: - how further can we push this to make the best, most optimized human? - what are moral implication of this? - what are the side effects / downsides?
- Panzer04 1y ago
  Can it be applied to adults? Useless for this particular disorder, but what about others?
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  Low hanging fruit is very low hanging in this case. There are many point mutations for example that confer risk to disease and cancer. Lynch syndrome which confers significant risk for colorectal cancer for example is something that could he cured with transgenic humans today even with todays technology. Just a matter of screening gametes for the mutation (usually one base in the case of Lynch in heterozygous state with wild type healthy allele and that wild type healthy allele gets a second hit mutation as the cancer develops and things just go off the rails from there) and editing that base back to wildtype. No downside only upside with that. What gets harder are polygenic traits that even today we don’t have great data on what are the causal alleles. But that is also not a technological limitation either but a statistical one from insufficient sampling of these polygenic phenotypes.
- flakeoil 1y ago
  I also wonder what happens if this kid one day has kids. In this case it was a very rare genetic disease, but if the same was applied to a less rare genetic disease (where it is also more beneficial to have a treatment as more people have use of it) wouldn't the end result be that more and more kids will be born with these diseases?
  - eimrine 1y ago
    I hope we can not just heal a disease for one phenotype, but cure it for the whole breed.
- xvilka 1y ago
rob74 1y ago
That's all very cool, but there are also articles like this one: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/20/trump-nih-cuts https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/20/trump-nih-cu... - I'm not able to read the Times article because it's paywalled, but as other commenters have mentioned, this research was funded by the NIH, which the Trump administration is currently in the process of defunding. So, if further progress along this road will be made, it'll probably be much slower and less likely to be in the US.
- cnity 1y ago
  Or, it means that funding will be secured in the private sector. Basically by investors that focus on revenue streams (read: extremely expensive private healthcare).
  - rob74 1y ago
    Yeah, maybe for stuff like this which (now) has direct applications, yes. But for basic research (and it took decades of basic research on genetics, gene editing etc. etc. to get to this point)? No way...
- top_sigrid 1y ago
  https://archive.ph/VNYzA https://archive.ph/VNYzA
RandallBrown 1y ago
Is all the DNA in the liver different, or just a percentage of the cells?
kjkjadksj 1y ago
Easiest way to do this stuff is before fertilization when you have one egg and one sperm to work with. Delivering change through a multicellular organism is very challenging. All this stuff like transgenic mice are set up in mutant crosses before this stage, before mating really. Eventually this will be the outcome of our species to edit the gametes themselves. The issue to overcome for this again won’t be technological as that is pretty much solved but getting people over their own “ick” factor.
- something098 1y ago
  >>>Easiest way to do this stuff is before fertilization when you have one egg and one sperm to work with. Yes. But it seems, that nature so far is still better than we at picking better quality cells in laboratory environment. Not all eggs and sperms are equal - the difference in DNA quality varies. >>>Eventually this will be the outcome of our species to edit the gametes themselves. The issue to overcome for this again won’t be technological as that is pretty much solved but getting people over their own “ick” factor. This is a new fear unlocked, as this will be like another cosmetic surgery procedure, which from my minimal understanding does not affect DNA that is delivered to offsprings - that could be changed but require a lot more work, but like you mentioned - it is easier to do before fertilization :). It is catch22 situation rn.
- DoctorOetker 1y ago
  >The issue to overcome for this again won’t be technological as that is pretty much solved but getting people over their own “ick” factor. Probably requires getting investors over their profit incentive first, why treat a heritable disease for the offspring if you can charge them on a per person basis?
nextaccountic 1y ago
> For those who don't understand this stuff - we are now capable of editing some of a body's DNA in ways that predictably change their attributes. The baby's liver now has different (and better) DNA than the rest of its body. How to avoid having only parts of the liver with the new DNA, and some other parts with the old DNA? Like a chimeric liver - isn't this something bad?

bglazer 1y ago

The “How to make superbabies” article demonstrates a couple of fundamental misunderstandings about genetics that make me think the authors don’t know what they’re talking about at a basic level. Zero mention of linkage disequilibrium. Zero mention of epistasis. Unquestioned assumptions of linear genotype-phenotype relationships for IQ. Seriously, the projections in their graphs into “danger zone” made me laugh out loud. This is elementary stuff that theyre missing but the entire essay is so shot through with hubris that I don’t think they’re capable of recognizing that.

gr_norm 1y ago
The EA community is generally incapable of self-awareness. The academic-but-totally-misinformed tone is comparable to reading LLM output. I've stopped trying to correct them, it's too much work on my part and not enough on theirs.
- Kuinox 1y ago
  What does EA means here ?
  - gr_norm 1y ago
    "Effective Altruism", something I find myself aligned with but not to the extremes taken by others.
    - alexey-salmin 1y ago
      Technically lesswrong is about rationalists not effective altruists, but you're right in a sense that it's the same breed. They think that the key to scientific thinking is to forego the moral limitations, not to study and learn. As soon as you're free from the shackles of tradition you become 100% rational and therefore 100% correct.
      - stogot 1y ago
        Except no one is 100% rational nor 100% correct
      - cnity 1y ago
        That community is basically the "r/iamverysmart" types bringing their baggage into adulthood. Almost everything I've read in that sphere is basically Dunning–Kruger to the nth degree.
      - jaidhyani 1y ago
        Approximately no one in the community thinks this. If you can go two days in a rationalist space without hearing about "Chesterton's Fence", I'll be impressed. No one thinks they're 100% rational nor that this is a reasonable aspiration. Traditions are generally regarded as sufficiently important that a not small amount of effort has gone into trying to build new ones. Not only is the case that no one thinks that anyone including themselves is 100% correct, but the community norm is to express credence in probabilities and convert those probabilities into bets when possible. People in the rationalist community constantly, loudly, and proudly disagree with each other, to the point that this can make it difficult to coordinate on anything. And everyone is obsessed with studying and learning, and constantly trying to come up with ways to do this more effectively. Like, I'm sure there are people who approximately match the description you're giving here. But I've spent a lot of time around flesh-and-blood rationalists and EAs, and they violently diverge from the account you give here.
concordDance 1y ago
Do you have some further reading where one can understand the basics of the subject?
tuna-piano 1y ago
Thanks for the healthy skepticism. I still think there's a lot to learn from those articles for most folks uninvolved in this area, even if some of their immediate optimism has additional complications. I think what I mostly took away is a combination of technologies is likely to dramatically change how we have babies in the future. 1. We'll make sperm/egg from skin cells. This has already been done in mice[1], so it is not science fiction to do it in people. 2. When we're able to do this inexpensively, we could create virtually unlimited embryos. We can then select the embryos that have the most optimal traits. Initially, this may be simple things like not choosing embryos with certain genes that give higher risk of certain diseases. This may involve selecting traits like intelligence and height (there are already companies that offer this embryo selection capability [2]). 3. Instead of creating a lot of embryos and selecting the best ones, we could instead create just one embryo and edit the DNA of that embryo, which has already been done in humans [3]. Alternatively, we could edit the DNA of the sperm/egg prior to creating the embryo. The fact that none of this is science fiction is just wild. All of these steps have already been done in animals or people. Buckle up, the future is going to be wild. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/27/1177191913/sperm-or-egg-in-lab-breakthrough-in-reproduction-designer-babies-ivg https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/27/1177191... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/18/us-startup-charging-couples-to-screen-embryos-for-iq https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/18/us-startup-c... [3] https://www.science.org/content/article/chinese-scientist-who-produced-genetically-altered-babies-sentenced-3-years-jail https://www.science.org/content/article/chinese-scientist-wh...

andreygrehov 1y ago

Are there any age restrictions?

fendy3002 1y ago

the usual next questions will be: - how further can we push this to make the best, most optimized human? - what are moral implication of this? - what are the side effects / downsides?

Panzer04 1y ago
Can it be applied to adults? Useless for this particular disorder, but what about others?
kjkjadksj 1y ago
Low hanging fruit is very low hanging in this case. There are many point mutations for example that confer risk to disease and cancer. Lynch syndrome which confers significant risk for colorectal cancer for example is something that could he cured with transgenic humans today even with todays technology. Just a matter of screening gametes for the mutation (usually one base in the case of Lynch in heterozygous state with wild type healthy allele and that wild type healthy allele gets a second hit mutation as the cancer develops and things just go off the rails from there) and editing that base back to wildtype. No downside only upside with that. What gets harder are polygenic traits that even today we don’t have great data on what are the causal alleles. But that is also not a technological limitation either but a statistical one from insufficient sampling of these polygenic phenotypes.
flakeoil 1y ago
I also wonder what happens if this kid one day has kids. In this case it was a very rare genetic disease, but if the same was applied to a less rare genetic disease (where it is also more beneficial to have a treatment as more people have use of it) wouldn't the end result be that more and more kids will be born with these diseases?
- eimrine 1y ago
  I hope we can not just heal a disease for one phenotype, but cure it for the whole breed.
xvilka 1y ago

rob74 1y ago

That's all very cool, but there are also articles like this one: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/20/trump-nih-cuts https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/20/trump-nih-cu... - I'm not able to read the Times article because it's paywalled, but as other commenters have mentioned, this research was funded by the NIH, which the Trump administration is currently in the process of defunding. So, if further progress along this road will be made, it'll probably be much slower and less likely to be in the US.

cnity 1y ago
Or, it means that funding will be secured in the private sector. Basically by investors that focus on revenue streams (read: extremely expensive private healthcare).
- rob74 1y ago
  Yeah, maybe for stuff like this which (now) has direct applications, yes. But for basic research (and it took decades of basic research on genetics, gene editing etc. etc. to get to this point)? No way...
top_sigrid 1y ago
https://archive.ph/VNYzA https://archive.ph/VNYzA

RandallBrown 1y ago

Is all the DNA in the liver different, or just a percentage of the cells?

kjkjadksj 1y ago

Easiest way to do this stuff is before fertilization when you have one egg and one sperm to work with. Delivering change through a multicellular organism is very challenging. All this stuff like transgenic mice are set up in mutant crosses before this stage, before mating really. Eventually this will be the outcome of our species to edit the gametes themselves. The issue to overcome for this again won’t be technological as that is pretty much solved but getting people over their own “ick” factor.

something098 1y ago
>>>Easiest way to do this stuff is before fertilization when you have one egg and one sperm to work with. Yes. But it seems, that nature so far is still better than we at picking better quality cells in laboratory environment. Not all eggs and sperms are equal - the difference in DNA quality varies. >>>Eventually this will be the outcome of our species to edit the gametes themselves. The issue to overcome for this again won’t be technological as that is pretty much solved but getting people over their own “ick” factor. This is a new fear unlocked, as this will be like another cosmetic surgery procedure, which from my minimal understanding does not affect DNA that is delivered to offsprings - that could be changed but require a lot more work, but like you mentioned - it is easier to do before fertilization :). It is catch22 situation rn.
DoctorOetker 1y ago
>The issue to overcome for this again won’t be technological as that is pretty much solved but getting people over their own “ick” factor. Probably requires getting investors over their profit incentive first, why treat a heritable disease for the offspring if you can charge them on a per person basis?

nextaccountic 1y ago

> For those who don't understand this stuff - we are now capable of editing some of a body's DNA in ways that predictably change their attributes. The baby's liver now has different (and better) DNA than the rest of its body. How to avoid having only parts of the liver with the new DNA, and some other parts with the old DNA? Like a chimeric liver - isn't this something bad?