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Wouldn't it be significantly easier to just use the donor's egg here ? Or adopt? This feels a bit narcissistic. If you and your partner determine you have gen

Wouldn't it be significantly easier to just use the donor's egg here ? Or adopt? This feels a bit narcissistic. If you and your partner determine you have genetic traits you'd rather not have, you have the option of not having biological children. This just feels like it's going to open Pandora's box. You and your partner are short and near sighted, edit in some height and vision. You're partner has ethnic traits they don't want to pass on ? Just edit those out. This feels like something that's going to start well intentioned, but snowball into very strange outcomes. God forbid this ever comes to America's profit driven health system. The rich would have the option to edit in "better" traits. Gattica here we come

gedy 1y ago
I doubt problems would be unique to America, many parts Asia are more aggressive with selective births and distorting sex ratios already, I suspect this will be readily embraced and with the much larger populations will be more an impact.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  I think Fisher's Principle will assert itself in those cases where the balance is disturbed currently. People will see how "excess males" don't have as good outcomes as "scarce females".
- morkalork 1y ago
  It's definitely not unique to America, in fact America is in some ways only catching up to other countries. What is considered legal and ethical in say Mexico or Brazil if you have money is a lot looser than in the USA. IVF clinics happily advertise that they let you do sex selection.
laurent_du 1y ago
Why is any of that a bad thing?
HPsquared 1y ago
Mate selection is, consciously or otherwise, based on these considerations already.
inglor_cz 1y ago
"near sighted, edit in some vision" And? I suspect that when the first glasses were made, someone complained about people playing God, too: why do you want to correct your eyesight when you were not intended to see well by the Almighty? Correction of genetic problems early on seems a lot better than various complicated treatments down the line. "Strange" often means just "we are not used to it", but the next generations will take such things for absolutely granted. It is no less strange that I, a Central European, am talking to an American in almost real time and free of charge, and can read his replies. That would be indeed very strange to anyone prior to 1995 or so. And yeah, this connectedness has downsides as well, but we may work on them.
- 999900000999 1y ago
  What's a genetic "problem" ? In some Asian countries modifying your eyes to look white is a common practice. You could easily end up with biracial people editing out some of their more ethnic features for the next generation. Not to mention their might be some mistakes along the way. You can't git reset --hard a human. As imperfect as humans are, that's what makes us human. Now if as a consenting adult you want to modify yourself, laser eye surgery, etc, go ahead.
  - inglor_cz 1y ago
    What about leaving this to the parents? Does the rest of the society (in practice: busibodies who have enough time to care) have a standing to stop them? Why should anyone worship their ethnic features? That strikes me as extra dystopian. Obviously there are degrees to what is considered a problem. Few people would argue for leaving Huntington's or ALS-related code in. That is just cruel. There are deaf activists who protest any attempts to cure deafness, but I would say most people won't agree with them either. Eye color may not be a problem per se, but does not strike me as particularly important either - unless the state is based on some neo-racist ideology, it probably should not regulate this. IMHO the real zone of shadows begins at outright enhancements, especially those that will have downsides. Maybe a certain gene sequence taken from bats or whales will confer high resistance to cancer, but at the cost of XXX or YYY. This is the sort of decision that will be really hard.
mrweasel 1y ago
> Or adopt? Adopt who? There is almost no children available for adoption, only highly handicapped children who needs an auxiliary family. Might be easier with a donor egg, but where are you going to get that? Egg donation is highly regulated and many would find it hard to get a donor. Of course this solution also requires a donor egg, so you'd already need to have that available.
- stephendause 1y ago
  > There is almost no children available for adoption This is not true, at least in the United States. For one thing, there are many children in foster care who want to be adopted. It is also possible, though difficult and expensive, to adopt infants from mothers giving up their children for adoption as well. I am not saying it's an easy option or that everyone should do it, but it is an option.
- mousethatroared 1y ago
  Sick kids need parents too. And there's plenty of foster kids, like Dave Thomas who was adopted as a foster kid. So was my friend D. D's adopted parents asked the state of NJ for the kid that needed parents the most. And boy did the state of NJ deliver. D had a foster home raided by the FBI. Another foster house beat him. He didn't know how to read until grade 5. Now he has masters in microbiology from a top 20 program, a job as a data scientist and he's making the better part of $200k to take care of his wife and three kids. As annoying as he is (he is from Jersey), I know he's a guy I can call who will show up to help. All because a couple of God fearing parents asked NJ for the most messed up kid in the system. For me, D's parents are saints. It's sick that our society thinks people deserve children instead of the other way around.
  - 999900000999 1y ago
    One of my uncles adopted a kid. He's now a well paid classical musician. He's just like any other cousin. If anything he's MORE successful than the rest of us! Once I spoke with a woman who was annoyed she wasn't able to adopt a child from a specific country that matches her ethic/cultural background. Like she's shopping or something. She's too good to adopt from the community she actually lives in. >It's sick that our society thinks people deserve children instead of the other way around. My feelings exactly. Their are absolutely no shortage of kids who very much need good homes. They aren't perfect, a lot of them are going to need a bit of help like your friend.
daedrdev 1y ago
Humanity has discarded natural selection thanks to modern medicine. Gene mutations that would have meant someone didn't survive now can be treated. The cold truth is that it is thus inevitable that in the future humanity will need gene modification to avoid the spreading of harmful mutations. This is what they are doing here, especially since mitochondrial DNA is inherited directly from the mother means that any problems will be propagated to all future generation unlike normal genes.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  It's not really a "cold" truth: eugenics isn't inherently bad, it's just us humans have an annoying cultural problem where we do horrible horrible things (including, but not limited to, genocide) whenever anyone tries to attempt eugenics. (It might be "human nature" preventing us from ever doing eugenics ethically, but all the evil eugenicists have a shared cultural background, so it's hard to tell.) From this perspective, techniques that are technically eugenics, but can't feasibly be used in evil ways, are unambiguous progress. I'm wary of gene editing, but the technique described in the article doesn't seem like a slippery slope to me.
  - daedrdev 1y ago
    I just think people are going to heavily disagree what is moral and immoral eugenics. Like there was an article here recently about how there was drama with gene editing to remove blindness in one's children in the blind community
    - wizzwizz4 1y ago
      When I've investigated why there's drama (though there isn't actually much for blindness, afaik: HN comments by sighted people are not primary sources), I've found that it's mainly concerns about the eradication of culture – which are understandable: the way the world's currently organised, all non-normative cultural expression is penalised.
    - squigz 1y ago
      Can you link to that? This is particularly interesting to me because, as I've commented in the past, I've never encountered this feeling in the blind community, while it's relatively common in the deaf community,
mpalmer 1y ago
This feels like something that's going to start well intentioned, but snowball into very strange outcomes. So it's like most technology, then.

gedy 1y ago

I doubt problems would be unique to America, many parts Asia are more aggressive with selective births and distorting sex ratios already, I suspect this will be readily embraced and with the much larger populations will be more an impact.

HPsquared 1y ago
I think Fisher's Principle will assert itself in those cases where the balance is disturbed currently. People will see how "excess males" don't have as good outcomes as "scarce females".
morkalork 1y ago
It's definitely not unique to America, in fact America is in some ways only catching up to other countries. What is considered legal and ethical in say Mexico or Brazil if you have money is a lot looser than in the USA. IVF clinics happily advertise that they let you do sex selection.

laurent_du 1y ago

Why is any of that a bad thing?

HPsquared 1y ago

Mate selection is, consciously or otherwise, based on these considerations already.

inglor_cz 1y ago

"near sighted, edit in some vision" And? I suspect that when the first glasses were made, someone complained about people playing God, too: why do you want to correct your eyesight when you were not intended to see well by the Almighty? Correction of genetic problems early on seems a lot better than various complicated treatments down the line. "Strange" often means just "we are not used to it", but the next generations will take such things for absolutely granted. It is no less strange that I, a Central European, am talking to an American in almost real time and free of charge, and can read his replies. That would be indeed very strange to anyone prior to 1995 or so. And yeah, this connectedness has downsides as well, but we may work on them.

999900000999 1y ago
What's a genetic "problem" ? In some Asian countries modifying your eyes to look white is a common practice. You could easily end up with biracial people editing out some of their more ethnic features for the next generation. Not to mention their might be some mistakes along the way. You can't git reset --hard a human. As imperfect as humans are, that's what makes us human. Now if as a consenting adult you want to modify yourself, laser eye surgery, etc, go ahead.
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  What about leaving this to the parents? Does the rest of the society (in practice: busibodies who have enough time to care) have a standing to stop them? Why should anyone worship their ethnic features? That strikes me as extra dystopian. Obviously there are degrees to what is considered a problem. Few people would argue for leaving Huntington's or ALS-related code in. That is just cruel. There are deaf activists who protest any attempts to cure deafness, but I would say most people won't agree with them either. Eye color may not be a problem per se, but does not strike me as particularly important either - unless the state is based on some neo-racist ideology, it probably should not regulate this. IMHO the real zone of shadows begins at outright enhancements, especially those that will have downsides. Maybe a certain gene sequence taken from bats or whales will confer high resistance to cancer, but at the cost of XXX or YYY. This is the sort of decision that will be really hard.

mrweasel 1y ago

> Or adopt? Adopt who? There is almost no children available for adoption, only highly handicapped children who needs an auxiliary family. Might be easier with a donor egg, but where are you going to get that? Egg donation is highly regulated and many would find it hard to get a donor. Of course this solution also requires a donor egg, so you'd already need to have that available.

stephendause 1y ago
> There is almost no children available for adoption This is not true, at least in the United States. For one thing, there are many children in foster care who want to be adopted. It is also possible, though difficult and expensive, to adopt infants from mothers giving up their children for adoption as well. I am not saying it's an easy option or that everyone should do it, but it is an option.
mousethatroared 1y ago
Sick kids need parents too. And there's plenty of foster kids, like Dave Thomas who was adopted as a foster kid. So was my friend D. D's adopted parents asked the state of NJ for the kid that needed parents the most. And boy did the state of NJ deliver. D had a foster home raided by the FBI. Another foster house beat him. He didn't know how to read until grade 5. Now he has masters in microbiology from a top 20 program, a job as a data scientist and he's making the better part of $200k to take care of his wife and three kids. As annoying as he is (he is from Jersey), I know he's a guy I can call who will show up to help. All because a couple of God fearing parents asked NJ for the most messed up kid in the system. For me, D's parents are saints. It's sick that our society thinks people deserve children instead of the other way around.
- 999900000999 1y ago
  One of my uncles adopted a kid. He's now a well paid classical musician. He's just like any other cousin. If anything he's MORE successful than the rest of us! Once I spoke with a woman who was annoyed she wasn't able to adopt a child from a specific country that matches her ethic/cultural background. Like she's shopping or something. She's too good to adopt from the community she actually lives in. >It's sick that our society thinks people deserve children instead of the other way around. My feelings exactly. Their are absolutely no shortage of kids who very much need good homes. They aren't perfect, a lot of them are going to need a bit of help like your friend.

daedrdev 1y ago

Humanity has discarded natural selection thanks to modern medicine. Gene mutations that would have meant someone didn't survive now can be treated. The cold truth is that it is thus inevitable that in the future humanity will need gene modification to avoid the spreading of harmful mutations. This is what they are doing here, especially since mitochondrial DNA is inherited directly from the mother means that any problems will be propagated to all future generation unlike normal genes.

wizzwizz4 1y ago
It's not really a "cold" truth: eugenics isn't inherently bad, it's just us humans have an annoying cultural problem where we do horrible horrible things (including, but not limited to, genocide) whenever anyone tries to attempt eugenics. (It might be "human nature" preventing us from ever doing eugenics ethically, but all the evil eugenicists have a shared cultural background, so it's hard to tell.) From this perspective, techniques that are technically eugenics, but can't feasibly be used in evil ways, are unambiguous progress. I'm wary of gene editing, but the technique described in the article doesn't seem like a slippery slope to me.
- daedrdev 1y ago
  I just think people are going to heavily disagree what is moral and immoral eugenics. Like there was an article here recently about how there was drama with gene editing to remove blindness in one's children in the blind community
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    When I've investigated why there's drama (though there isn't actually much for blindness, afaik: HN comments by sighted people are not primary sources), I've found that it's mainly concerns about the eradication of culture – which are understandable: the way the world's currently organised, all non-normative cultural expression is penalised.
  - squigz 1y ago
    Can you link to that? This is particularly interesting to me because, as I've commented in the past, I've never encountered this feeling in the blind community, while it's relatively common in the deaf community,

mpalmer 1y ago

This feels like something that's going to start well intentioned, but snowball into very strange outcomes. So it's like most technology, then.