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Ramez Naam had a good response to all the fear surrounding CRISPR: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/05/dont-fear-the-crispr.html http://mar

by toby 11y ago

Ramez Naam had a good response to all the fear surrounding CRISPR: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/05/dont-fear-the-crispr.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/05/don...

SapphireSun 11y ago
I don't fear the CRISPR, but most of the points in the article are consequentialist in nature based on how hard it is to apply CRISPR in practice right now. Genetic technology moves very fast, c.f. CRISPR :P What seemed impossible a few years ago is now almost practical. The real point one should take away I feel is the idea that parents will act to benefit their children more than they want to create "superhumans" or other mutants. It's pretty clear to me that the way forward is to allow disease oriented research, but debate other uses well in advance of feasibility.
- pmalynin 11y ago
  What's wrong with creating superhumans? That is if we all become superhuman.
  - nmrm2 11y ago
    There are a lot of risk reduction reasons and also a lot of ethical and moral reasons. These are all legitimate and worth considering, and hopefully another commenter or two can elaborate and point you to resources. But I want to take a moment to highlight the legitimacy of sentimental reasons in this case. Humanity is an important and closely guarded trait, for reasons that some have characterized as "self-evident". One could characterize "civilization" largely as a mechanism for preserving humanness and helping it flourish. When it comes to deciding the genetic fate of the species, these rather sentimental ideals about what makes life worth living are perhaps one of the most important decision criterion.
    - meatysnapper 11y ago
      What exactly is humanity? Wiping out as many other species as we can? The Kardashians? Soylent? Hopefully we can leave that behind.
      - derefr 11y ago
        Boredom, laughter, appreciation of art, curiosity, etc. Genetic modifications could theoretically remove all of those things, and give us other things besides, drives we wouldn't recognize in the slightest.
        wowowow 11y ago
        It's natural that an intelligent agent would defend against modification to its current primary drives, but the thing about changing your mind about what you want is that once you've done it you no longer care about your previous drive. I find it hard to think of reasons why we'd rationally object to changing our fundamental motivations, since we wouldn't care after we did it. There's no real reason to object other than a craven appeal to self-preservation taken axiomatically.
        derefr 11y ago
        The same can be said of suicide.
        vdaniuk 11y ago
        Humanity is also suffering, pain, despair, hate, agony, torture. Human condition is indivisible from suffering. Such is life they say. For millenias humanity has not made a significant number of its individual members happy or fulffilled. Humanity as something immutable is in its waning years. And I won't mourn for it. The posthumans are coming. Let them come faster.
        Brakenshire 11y ago
        Frankly, it is precisely because of the human condition that technologies like this are dangerous. What happens when a misogynist wants their daughter to have a reduced sex drive, or a fundamentalist government wants its people to be more religious. If we have this capability, it will not go well.
- onewaystreet 11y ago
  In the end the debate will be pointless. If CRISPR and other techniques advance to the point where a Gattaca-like level of genetic manipulation is possible, they will be used. Banning them means that they will be used by only the elite.
toufka 11y ago
That's not really a response to crisper, rather a response to why humans won't be engineered using crisper any time soon. Crisper itself is very powerful. And like any dual-use technology, that power can be put to ill purposes. Crisper however, is unique in that it is 1) easy and 2) only understood by a very small fraction of people. Nukes are 1) hard and 2) not well understood. Guns are 1) easy and well understood. Synthetic biology will become well understood, but not for a generation or so of people seeing how their tools have actual practical, ethical, aesthetic and damaging functions. Crisper is scary because it's very potent, and very easy to use.
makeitsuckless 11y ago
Sounds reasonable, except for the one sentence that exposes it as ideological wishful thinking: "Parents are likely to use genetic technologies in the best interests of their children." Never mind the fact that "best interests" is highly subjective in the first place. It's exactly because culture, ethics and morality are subjective that people fear all forms of genetic manipulation. And the rather naive "we're good and smart people here" spliced with subjective ideological views is not making a strong case. There is a lot of reason for fear. The question is how we deal with that fear. Pretending the fear unfounded when all we know from the entire history of how the human race leverages science and technology says otherwise isn't helping.
eggie 11y ago
This is possibly the most reasonable piece I've seen linked on the topic. CRISPR/Cas9 techniques do not give us anything we couldn't do before--- after all there have been TALENs and zinc finger nucleases for quite a while. It just made the process of designing a new nuclease system much, much cheaper. However, no endonuclease driven system is going to be efficient at introducing mutations consistently. The basic problem is that these systems require the cooperation of the genomic repair systems of the cell. There are several ways which these repairs are mediated, and only one (homology directed repair) yields the desired outcome. That this happens at a low rate, and requires the introduction of DNA templates only diminishes the overall efficacy and multiplexity of the process. Even when flooding cells with preassembled Cas9/gRNA complexes that are immediately active, the overall rate of homozygous introduction of the target mutation is in a few %. Knowing this, I find it hard to believe that CRISPR will be how we ultimately engage in high efficiency genome modification. It depends too much on the biology of the target system. That said, the hype around it has initiated a great and timely public discussion about the use of these tools in medicine.

by toby 11y ago

SapphireSun 11y ago

I don't fear the CRISPR, but most of the points in the article are consequentialist in nature based on how hard it is to apply CRISPR in practice right now. Genetic technology moves very fast, c.f. CRISPR :P What seemed impossible a few years ago is now almost practical. The real point one should take away I feel is the idea that parents will act to benefit their children more than they want to create "superhumans" or other mutants. It's pretty clear to me that the way forward is to allow disease oriented research, but debate other uses well in advance of feasibility.

pmalynin 11y ago
What's wrong with creating superhumans? That is if we all become superhuman.
- nmrm2 11y ago
  There are a lot of risk reduction reasons and also a lot of ethical and moral reasons. These are all legitimate and worth considering, and hopefully another commenter or two can elaborate and point you to resources. But I want to take a moment to highlight the legitimacy of sentimental reasons in this case. Humanity is an important and closely guarded trait, for reasons that some have characterized as "self-evident". One could characterize "civilization" largely as a mechanism for preserving humanness and helping it flourish. When it comes to deciding the genetic fate of the species, these rather sentimental ideals about what makes life worth living are perhaps one of the most important decision criterion.
  - meatysnapper 11y ago
    What exactly is humanity? Wiping out as many other species as we can? The Kardashians? Soylent? Hopefully we can leave that behind.
    - derefr 11y ago
      Boredom, laughter, appreciation of art, curiosity, etc. Genetic modifications could theoretically remove all of those things, and give us other things besides, drives we wouldn't recognize in the slightest.
      - wowowow 11y ago
        It's natural that an intelligent agent would defend against modification to its current primary drives, but the thing about changing your mind about what you want is that once you've done it you no longer care about your previous drive. I find it hard to think of reasons why we'd rationally object to changing our fundamental motivations, since we wouldn't care after we did it. There's no real reason to object other than a craven appeal to self-preservation taken axiomatically.
        derefr 11y ago
        The same can be said of suicide.
      - vdaniuk 11y ago
        Humanity is also suffering, pain, despair, hate, agony, torture. Human condition is indivisible from suffering. Such is life they say. For millenias humanity has not made a significant number of its individual members happy or fulffilled. Humanity as something immutable is in its waning years. And I won't mourn for it. The posthumans are coming. Let them come faster.
        Brakenshire 11y ago
        Frankly, it is precisely because of the human condition that technologies like this are dangerous. What happens when a misogynist wants their daughter to have a reduced sex drive, or a fundamentalist government wants its people to be more religious. If we have this capability, it will not go well.
onewaystreet 11y ago
In the end the debate will be pointless. If CRISPR and other techniques advance to the point where a Gattaca-like level of genetic manipulation is possible, they will be used. Banning them means that they will be used by only the elite.

toufka 11y ago

That's not really a response to crisper, rather a response to why humans won't be engineered using crisper any time soon. Crisper itself is very powerful. And like any dual-use technology, that power can be put to ill purposes. Crisper however, is unique in that it is 1) easy and 2) only understood by a very small fraction of people. Nukes are 1) hard and 2) not well understood. Guns are 1) easy and well understood. Synthetic biology will become well understood, but not for a generation or so of people seeing how their tools have actual practical, ethical, aesthetic and damaging functions. Crisper is scary because it's very potent, and very easy to use.

makeitsuckless 11y ago

Sounds reasonable, except for the one sentence that exposes it as ideological wishful thinking: "Parents are likely to use genetic technologies in the best interests of their children." Never mind the fact that "best interests" is highly subjective in the first place. It's exactly because culture, ethics and morality are subjective that people fear all forms of genetic manipulation. And the rather naive "we're good and smart people here" spliced with subjective ideological views is not making a strong case. There is a lot of reason for fear. The question is how we deal with that fear. Pretending the fear unfounded when all we know from the entire history of how the human race leverages science and technology says otherwise isn't helping.

eggie 11y ago

This is possibly the most reasonable piece I've seen linked on the topic. CRISPR/Cas9 techniques do not give us anything we couldn't do before--- after all there have been TALENs and zinc finger nucleases for quite a while. It just made the process of designing a new nuclease system much, much cheaper. However, no endonuclease driven system is going to be efficient at introducing mutations consistently. The basic problem is that these systems require the cooperation of the genomic repair systems of the cell. There are several ways which these repairs are mediated, and only one (homology directed repair) yields the desired outcome. That this happens at a low rate, and requires the introduction of DNA templates only diminishes the overall efficacy and multiplexity of the process. Even when flooding cells with preassembled Cas9/gRNA complexes that are immediately active, the overall rate of homozygous introduction of the target mutation is in a few %. Knowing this, I find it hard to believe that CRISPR will be how we ultimately engage in high efficiency genome modification. It depends too much on the biology of the target system. That said, the hype around it has initiated a great and timely public discussion about the use of these tools in medicine.