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Startups are pushing the boundaries of reproductive genetics
- bookofjoe 1y agono paywall: https://www.wsj.com/tech/biotech/genetically-engineered-babies-tech-billionaires-6779efc8?st=wjrbYY&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/tech/biotech/genetically-engineered-babi...
- im3w1l 1y agoOne intermediate step between labrats and humans that seems sensible is pets. Maybe dogs in particular. Many popular breeds seem to be prone to genetic issues. I think once owning your own fuzzy little gmo is popular it would seem less dramatic to use it on people.
- Ziomislaw 1y agoDomestic rats are very fragile genetically, it would be nice to try to "fix" them. Also science knows a lot about rat genome so it would be even easier than dogs.
- estimator7292 1y agoPet rat owners will fall over themselves to throw money at anyone offering a longer-lived and healthier breed. I would pay more money than I care to admit for a rat that lived just a few years longer. There's actually a huge problem with pet rats in that they're all remarkably inbred. If you don't get your rats from a dedicated professional breeder who's been at it for decades, your pet is likely going to get really sick at the end of their life. Females tend to get catastrophic tumors, and all have extremely delicate respiratory systems. Out of the dozens of rats I've kept, only one died quietly in her sleep of old age. The rest were horrific and gruesome. Yeah, there'd be a good amount of money in it for whoever can fix rats' genetics.
- more_corn 1y agoGreat, super rats. There no way that could go badly at all ever.
- embedding-shape 1y agoPut them on a planet and leave them there, at least then it couldn't go badly for us. And no, I'm fairly sure there are no books about this already.
- toast0 1y agoWe need super rats (or at least one) to train the super turtles.
- neom 1y agoHow do you turn a $50 rat into a $600 rat? Get a rat. I don't even what to know how much I've spent on rats over the years, a lot. We do so much in rats for medical research you'd think we could produce some super rats! But as you mentioned, they're so in bread, and even from really good breeders, they're still gonna die shitty deaths from some cancer or respiratory infection. You're right, I'd pay up for a GMO rat that lived a super healthy life, even if it was shorter than other pets. Rats are so awesome!
- expedition32 1y agoAre you aware of Star Trek lore? Tech billionaires will make their Khan. Funny thing is that this kind of stuff is considered haram by the CCP who are fanatically dedicated to social order.
- solenoid0937 1y agoTech billionaires might ironically be our only hope here as they are the only ones willing to ignore the bureaucratic red tape. If a tech billionaire edits an embryo and figures out how to make a human immune to a certain disease or live a better life, that is a win for the rest of us. And before anyone says "they'd just keep it for themselves" - there has been no medical technology in human history that hasn't become generally available after a couple decades.
- userulluipeste 1y agoI'd love to share your expressed hope of billionaires' beneficial impact on society, but alas, the behavior that I see in nowadays' crop leaves much to be desired. To be a bit more clear, I don't necessarily see the incentives that drive the wealthy individuals to align with others' hope.
- Metacelsus 1y agoI know someone working on this! That's about all I can say for now though :)
- gweinberg 1y agoThey're prone to genetic issues because they're inbred.
- im3w1l 1y agoYes and I don't see how that changes anything I said?
- MagicMoonlight 1y agoSo are some groups of human. It would be beneficial to be able to reverse that.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- xvector 1y agoThey shouldn't be banned, but regulators would regulate their own shadow if they could. People are allowed to mutilate their babies, raise them in whatever destructive fashion they please, avoid vaccinating them in an environment where they will be exposed to deadly viruses. But god forbid someone try to make their baby immune to AIDS, some other genetic disease, or reduce the likelihood of psychosis given family history. There is no world in which regulators will let this happen. There is no way to test this in a manner that will satisfy them, because babies can't consent to a trial. If it was up to regulators, human evolution ends here. No group should have that power over our species. It is the same problem as modern medicine being so prohibitively expensive to test, that most ideas go to the bin. We need a deregulated zone to allow for progress to actually happen.
- portaouflop 1y agoPeople aren’t allowed to mutilate babies what the hell are you going on about? Genetic tampering can lead to all kinds of unknowable nightmares.
- maleldil 1y ago> People aren’t allowed to mutilate babies Circumcision?
- xvector 1y ago> People aren’t allowed to mutilate babies what the hell are you going on about? Circumcision is absolutely mutilation. > Genetic tampering can lead to all kinds of unknowable nightmares. You can "tamper with your kid's DNA" just by having kids with the wrong person and passing down a genetic disease. There are plenty of unknowable things about life. You could die in a car crash. You certainly will die eventually. Should we avoid taking risks entirely because they might result in bad outcomes? With this mindset, humanity would have never progressed. We would have never left our caves if we were paralyzed by our own fear. Humanity is still early stage. We are not so different from those that once ventured out of their caves. To them, we owe everything. It is a disservice to all future humans that will ever live if we stop taking trajectory-changing bets because things could go wrong.
- _trampeltier 1y agoIn sport, are such super-humans allowd to play with normal people. In society, i guess, if such super-humans are designed to have a 500 year life, they have automatic adusted there pension age to something like 450 years. In law, because such super smart super-humans allways know things better, the fines are 100 times higher. On the other side, of course, who would not choose the best for the best for the own child. Why should a person wear glasses the whole life, if it is possible to switch a few genoms. So many difficult questions ..
- doodlebugging 1y ago>In sport, are such super-humans allowd to play with normal people. There are already prohibitions on allowing transgender people to participate in some sports. It seems unlikely that the children of ordinary people will be allowed to participate in sports with children who are known to be genetically enhanced so that they are more powerful, etc. It is an interesting question though.
- energy123 1y agoThese rules are all made up anyways. The answer is if the people with influence over the decision want it to be the case.
- doodlebugging 1y agoI agree. I could see an opportunity for a future entertainment network or sporting competition where the only participants allowed to compete are those who can document their own genetics. One set of games for ordinary people and another for those people whose parents chose to try to engineer a result. All of this is so new that it may not happen in my lifetime but I'm not prepared to say that it can't.
- energy123 1y agoLike most things it'll be the self-interest of the majority disguised as the "right" decision. If a small fraction of the population are genetically engineered to be more physically capable, the "right" decision will be to exclude them. Once they're a significant fraction of the population, the moral consensus will suddenly shapeshift.
- arjie 1y agoMy wife and I have a whole-genome sequenced embryo that we selected based on Orchid’s results. In our case, we were trying to avoid a specific kind of hearing loss caused by a mutation in GJB2. People often try to bill these technologies as “trying to control everything” or “trying to make the perfect child” or all this business about “tech people think they deserve what they have due to their genetics” (paraphrasing Sasha Gusev) etc. but I don’t think that’s the driving impulse for most parents. The reality is so much more complex than the headlines people chase. One couple who I spoke to who were considering this were afraid of the opposite of the intelligence chase. The mother was concerned that she’d pass on her Asperger’s Syndrome. Another friend of mine doesn’t want to have kids because her brothers (and other male relatives) have schizophrenia. In my family’s case, we will not have boys (coincidence: all our female embryos are the ones unaffected) but that’s fine. Our baby girl is a beautiful happy child and even if she weren’t, she’d be mine and I’d love her as much. But being able to increase the chance she has the full sensory experience available to mankind brings me a bit of content. I hope all of these people I have met who fear genetic disease will be able to mitigate the risks as well as we have. Ours is monogenic, but as polygenic prediction improves their chances will improve too. People on the happy path don’t often realize what it’s like for those not on that path. In our family, a cousin had her child via her last embryo. That also happened to a friend. Imagine if the last one had a debilitating condition that could be edited out. Most parents would choose not to have that child and then they would simply be childless. In some future world, those people could have the condition edited and they could have the child. Finally, here are the notes I made throughout the process: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/IVF https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/IVF And a view into my genome https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/roshan-genvue/ https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/roshan-genvue/ And a link to my comment on an HN article on something similar: the potential for removing trisomy-21 (Down’s) from an embryo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44677834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44677834
- mrsvanwinkle 1y agoThis is extremely helpful to me, thanks so much for sharing.
- bonsai_spool 1y ago> The reality is so much more complex than the headlines people chase. One couple who I spoke to who were considering this were afraid of the opposite of the intelligence chase. The mother was concerned ... The problem here is a tragedy of the commons - the people you describe are avoiding a certain kind of pain (a child who will die early, or who will have a condition that the parent already has) and exchanging it for both 1) the uncertainty that the child will have unknown other issues, either due to the genetic sampling process or due to whatever genetic interventions are made, and 2) the chance that future humans will need to support the changes that the parents have introduced to the human germline I work in this area of biology, and, as far as the editing tools go, none of these tools are as foolproof as they are described. I recognize the human sorrow of not being able to have the particular kind of family one always wants, but I feel we forget the significant downside potential to the rest of humanity. --- lastly, regarding trisomy 21 - I have more sympathy around 'repairing' individual single-nucleotide variants and I suspect that it will be attainable at levels nearing perfection in our lifetimes (so error rates below 1E-11 if we want 1% chance of any off-target lesions). I do not see how this is ever going to happen for trisomy 21 repair - the only realistic possibility is screening to avoid it.
- bicepjai 1y agoSide note: You folks should watch the movie “the substance”
- acadapter 1y agoThis kind of blanket ban reasoning is kind of cruel to people with genetic diseases in their family line. "Hey, you've got a broken gene? Sucks to be you, my rigid ethics requires you to play the lottery with worse odds than the others!" In another thread about the same subject, I mentioned the issue of color blindness, and how some professions are open to ~92% of men and ~99.5% of women (because of how it's inherited). Society seems to be quite uninterested to start some wide campaign to replace color-coded information, even during the 2010s when the equality debate was active, it was never "upgraded" to include male issues like these. With DNA editing, this problem could be fixed on the other side (along with much more serious issues that can affect an unlucky individual). I don't know why there is so much fear to be out-competed by a hypothetical "superhuman", when the most easy implementation of DNA editing seems to be fixing genetic diseases (often "flipping one letter" to the correct one)?
- xvector 1y agoWe have become too risk averse as a species to make any real progress on this front. Our ancestors would make the most daring bets in pursuit of a better for their children. Hunter-gatherers setting off in an unknown direction in search for more abundant pastures, knowing that their survival was unlikely. Everything we have is thanks to them. Today we sit on our laurels, unwilling to take trajectory-changing bets because things might go wrong. In our risk paralysis, human evolution will come to a standstill, and that is a disservice to all future humans. No longer can an individual family or group of humans set out in that direction in search of a better future. They will be thrown in prison for daring to instead.
- dsign 1y agoI often think what would happen if somebody were to engineer some sort of quasi universal cure to cancer, and they were to do it out of desperation. Say the cure works, and then this person wanted for it to reach more people right now. Would they become fugitives? Would the long arm of the law chase them to the confines of the world? What would the drugs lobby do if the billions of investment they must throw into drug certification are jeopardized by some Rambo?
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- bloppe 1y agoI think it's pretty easy to get behind disease elimination in principle. >90% of people would be thrilled to use crispr to edit a congenital disease out of an embryo assuming it were as safe as any reasonable medical procedure can be. I think that ship is getting ready to set sail, probably not in the US at first, but the US will probably catch up eventually. I think the more controversial conversation around human improvement needs to happen at some point as well. There's a fundamental problem with the modern world. It has changed over the last ~1000 years so much faster than our evolution could possibly keep up with, and we are now woefully unfit for it. There are so many life-threatening diseases (obesity, tribalism, depression) that are due to our behavior. To speed up and guide human evolution to make ourselves more empathetic, more reasonable, better physically suited to lifestyles revolving around thought instead of physical work, would be a huge long-term win for our species. Of course there are inevitably a bunch of assholes trying to inject racialized agendas into this conversation, and that understandably poisons the very concept of genetic betterment for most people. But those racist tendencies are exactly the kind of outdated human nature I'm talking about eliminating.
- oulipo2 1y agoDefine "improvement"... Here lies the crux of the issue For some people in the past (eg 1939 Germany), or some people now in power in the US, "improvement" might not be defined as you'd like...
- sothatsit 1y agoThe difference to 1939 Germany is that individual people can choose the traits, instead of a top-down authority. I think this makes a rather big difference, even if it does not remove the ethical concerns.
- oulipo2 1y agoRich people with access to the tech can do it now... who tells you that once this matures, Government is not going to "mandate" some "improvements" over wide swath of the population... Also guess what, once we have discovered the "gene to increase IQ" (if that exists)... we will also be able to wilfully build "artificially low IQ" people who will never complain, and never be able to defend themselves because they won't have access to an education... guess who will be interested in being able to create such a big population and will force people to have that free labor workforce... If history told us one thing, is that we shouldn't play "magicians"
- brador 1y agoThe ban is ignored. I know a few couples who’ve chosen their baby features for cosmetic and aesthetic reasons. One specifically went for blonde hair blue eyes. Neither of the parents have these features but the father allegedly has a grandmother who was from Scotland.
- sharadov 1y agoQuite a coincidence - last week I was speaking to a parent at my kid's school, he's a scientist and works for a Chinese biotech firm. He told how he has clients in China, who want to change the color of their eye or eliminate deafness in their child. In the same breath - he told me how all his friends who are similarly PHDs in biotech are seeing their research grants cut and not finding opportunities because of the anti-science stance of the current administration.
- sgt101 1y agoIt's important to consider the potential long run impact of this work. It may be 30 years or more before the impact of genetic manipulation in humans becomes apparent. This could cause very signifcant suffering to those effected. The manipulation techniques are not entirely understood, in the past organisms that have been manipulated have not had the outcomes that were hoped for or expected. In addition during this work it is possible that suffering and death may be inflicted on human infants. These dangers surely must weigh heavily on anyone considering this sort of work be undertaken.
- Luker88 1y agoHumans applied eugenetics to dogs, animals and plants for thousands of years. We don't have a single, all-equal dog race. Diversity will remain and might even explode. At the same time, governments and cultures have tried to tightly control, or heavily "incentivize" who gets kids, and that has led to dark places. I think we are just entering a phase of "the same, but with tech". Changes are going to be faster, and thus we will notice them a lot more, but IMHO the result is not dependent on tech, but on culture.
- alexey-salmin 1y agoDogs are pretty f*ed up, I'm not sure it's a good example.
- pcrh 1y agoThe one consolation is that these efforts in vanity are unlikely to have broader impacts. Selecting embryos to avoid a known deleterious allele/gene is easily done, and without any harm. Similarly, one can choose blonde hair or blue eyes, etc. However, this is less reliable as too many different genes contribute to these traits, e.g. approximately 16 genes are involved in eye color alone. Consider an attempt to select 5 different genes each simply available in a "good" or "bad" form in both the parents, and which are randomly contributed to an embryo. Statistically, you would need to screen 97 embryos to get one single embryo that has the optimal combination. IVF typically transplants 2 or 3 embryos per cycle, so you need 200-300 embryos to get your chosen combination of only 5 genes. A typical woman will produce 3-400 eggs in her lifetime. So, optimal genetic selection of embryos will not be a major thing any time soon. Those paying for it are deluded. CRISPR editing of embryos is even more complex and less likely to succeed that the simple screening of embryos described above. If you want to optimize the genetics of offspring, it's far, far, easier to choose the parents than to engineer the embryos.
- polski-g 1y agoI had kids shortly before HeraSight became available, unfortunately. Though I did do LifeView PGT, which screened for disease risk and mental retardation only. It would have been really nice to get a potential ~9 more IQ points in my children via HeraSight. There's no downside so everyone should be doing some sort of PGT screening; it requires IVF to be used so it eliminates the ~30% chance of miscarriage due to trisomy. The PGT itself is very cheap, the expense is in the IVF.
- tptacek 1y agoI've said this before but I want to say it again: I think PGS projects that screen for intelligence/EA are genius products. They promise a margin-of-error level improvement on performance that can be fully evaluated only at the time the grown child applies for college, and the products are going to be purchased only by parents who were already going to fold space like a Guild Navigator to ensure their kids get into selective universities, so the vendors win "either way".
- akerl_ 1y agoAs an aside, I would be a lot less irritated with college admissions scandals like we saw a few years back if Lori Loughlin had to transform herself into a floating tank monster to pull it off.