Chinese genetically alter human embryo

[Broomstick]

And again I say so what? If two people can have a kid despite knowing their genetics means it will almost certainly be blind why shouldn't a rich woman be free to pay to insert the blindness gene into her prospective kid?

Because as a general rule it's illegal to deliberately cripple other people.

Non-engineered reproduction is a crapshoot, we've known that a long time, and I think society will move towards paying for interventions to correct naturally occurring defects before allowing optional modifications. Deliberately inserting a "blindness" gene into a fetus should be just as abusive and illegal as throwing bleach into an infant's eyes.

[Ralin]

Because as a general rule it's illegal to deliberately cripple other people.

They're not people. They're part of their mother's body.

Non-engineered reproduction is a crapshoot, we've known that a long time, and I think society will move towards paying for interventions to correct naturally occurring defects before allowing optional modifications. Deliberately inserting a "blindness" gene into a fetus should be just as abusive and illegal as throwing bleach into an infant's eyes.

Yeah, I call bullshit. There are defects at least as sure to be passed on to offspring as our hypothetical blindness gene. If causing a possible future person to suffer from a genetic defect is abusive and illegal then the exact same thing should be true of having a kid with the same chance naturally.

Maybe it should be, but that's eugenics and I know neither of you are in favor of that. And I'm not seeing a meaningful difference.

[ray245]

Because as a general rule it's illegal to deliberately cripple other people.

They're not people. They're part of their mother's body.

Except the woman in this scenario wants to carry her fetus to term and give birth to a baby. That child is going to be crippled.

[Ralin]

Because as a general rule it's illegal to deliberately cripple other people.

They're not people. They're part of their mother's body.

Except the woman in this scenario wants to carry her fetus to term and give birth to a baby. That child is going to be crippled.

Sucks to be him. Are you saying that it has the right to not be born crippled and that we should violate the woman's bodily integrity to ensure it?

[ray245]

Sucks to be him. Are you saying that it has the right to not be born crippled and that we should violate the woman's bodily integrity to ensure it?

Because this is entirely different from the whole issue of abortion. In the case of abortion, any damage done would be mostly limited to the woman who choice to put an end to her pregnancy before a child is born. Deliberately carrying a child to term with physical deformities is just inflicting pain onto another person, who by that point isn't merely a part of a woman body.

It's idiotic to compare this to abortion and the issue of choice. Even then, we have laws that discourage and prevent people from inflicting self-harm, regardless of whether this is the person's choice or not.

Please do not misunderstand the whole point of giving woman a choice to her bodily integrity in regards to abortion and misapplying these ideas to a different scenario.

Yeah, I call bullshit. There are defects at least as sure to be passed on to offspring as our hypothetical blindness gene. If causing a possible future person to suffer from a genetic defect is abusive and illegal then the exact same thing should be true of having a kid with the same chance naturally.

Maybe it should be, but that's eugenics and I know neither of you are in favor of that. And I'm not seeing a meaningful difference.

The point is in two people choosing to have a child with a high possibility genetic defects is done because they believed that there is a remote possibility of having their own healthy child, and one they would do their best to remove any defects the child suffer if possible.

It is entirely different and entirely cruel to subject a baby that could have lived a happy life to a life of suffering because the woman enjoys such an idea.

Your failure to even understand how cruel such an act can be is just disturbing to me.

[Gandalf]

Bear in mind that it's silly to speculate on the development of superhumans. The ability for wealthy people to produce children with corrections for inheritable diseases, and securing lower risk for developing other conditions, would by itself save a person a shitload of money (medical bills, insurance), time, and general happiness throughout their lives.

At which point we come to jobs. If you know you have been engineered so that you no longer are considered at risk of dying young or developing some disease, you can go to an employer and say, "Hey, guess what one of my skills is? Not getting sick and costing you money in the form of not being here to work."

Imagine what that would do to the world of health insurance?

"Naturally born? Pay the nature premium!"

[Ralin]

Because this is entirely different from the whole issue of abortion. In the case of abortion, any damage done would be mostly limited to the woman who choice to put an end to her pregnancy before a child is born. Deliberately carrying a child to term with physical deformities is just inflicting pain onto another person, who by that point isn't merely a part of a woman body.

And yet it is entirely legal right now to carry a severely deformed child to term. And anyone who suggested making it otherwise would be flamed to a crisp.

The point is in two people choosing to have a child with a high possibility genetic defects is done because they believed that there is a remote possibility of having their own healthy child, and one they would do their best to remove any defects the child suffer if possible.

Still not seeing how this matters? Regardless of how the probability of a horrible genetic defect comes about the results for the future child are identical, other than their rich designer baby-ordering parents presumably being better prepared and able to care for them. Assuming the chances of any given defect are roughly the same they should be treated the same way legally and morally.

It is entirely different and entirely cruel to subject a baby that could have lived a happy life to a life of suffering because the woman enjoys such an idea.

Your failure to even understand how cruel such an act can be is just disturbing to me.

It is amazingly cruel. Which doesn't mean that our hypothetical rich gene altering asshole shouldn't have the right to do it, anymore than it's illegal now to deliberately conceive a child with a partner who shares some horrible inheritable condition because they want to pass it on for some fucked up reason.

[Broomstick]

Because as a general rule it's illegal to deliberately cripple other people.

They're not people. They're part of their mother's body.

If the intention is to carry the fetus to term they are going to be people.

Sucks to be him. Are you saying that it has the right to not be born crippled and that we should violate the woman's bodily integrity to ensure it?

Genetic manipulation of the sort we're discussing does not take place inside the woman's body, it's takes place in a laboratory. No violation of bodily integrity required, so that argument is moot.

Because this is entirely different from the whole issue of abortion. In the case of abortion, any damage done would be mostly limited to the woman who choice to put an end to her pregnancy before a child is born. Deliberately carrying a child to term with physical deformities is just inflicting pain onto another person, who by that point isn't merely a part of a woman body.

And yet it is entirely legal right now to carry a severely deformed child to term. And anyone who suggested making it otherwise would be flamed to a crisp.

As it stands now, such severe deformities are typically discovered after a commitment to a pregnancy. At that point our society has deemed it the woman's choice as to whether or not to continue.

In this case we're talking about “discovering” a deformity before implantation in someone's uterus.

If a fetus is genetically manipulated with all good intentions and later, while the pregnancy is underway, it is discovered something went wrong and the child is now defective in some manner then, again, it would be the woman's choice whether or not to continue the pregnancy. That is different than deliberately causing a problem.

[Simon_Jester]

It is amazingly cruel. Which doesn't mean that our hypothetical rich gene altering asshole shouldn't have the right to do it, anymore than it's illegal now to deliberately conceive a child with a partner who shares some horrible inheritable condition because they want to pass it on for some fucked up reason.

I would argue that "it's amazingly cruel" is by itself good and sufficient reason to say "X shouldn't have the right to do it."

Also, at the moment, any 'decision' to pass on a genetic condition is made by a couple who would otherwise not have children at all- who would have to sacrifice that.

There is a difference between that and deliberately creating a person specifically with the intent that they have a major disability, when the alternatives are "have genetically normal children" or "just don't create children in a laboratory at all, you sadistic fuck."

[jwl]

I think worries about designer babies for the wealthy are overblown. Those improvements will be incremental, and they will still take two decades to grow up. By then it will be a moot point since there will be the 1% property owners, their AI workforce, and the permanently unemployed and immobile 99%. In other words I think AI and automation will improve so much faster than human genetic engineering that we meat bags will be irrelevant and obsolete long before biotech can cause any pressing social issues.

It's still worthwhile to pursue it. We might get blasted by another Carrington-event or some other disaster, in that case it would be nice if the mean IQ of the global population was centered around 200 thanks to genetic intervention.

That's impossible, the IQ of the population always centres on 100 by definition.

[Enigma]

I think worries about designer babies for the wealthy are overblown. Those improvements will be incremental, and they will still take two decades to grow up. By then it will be a moot point since there will be the 1% property owners, their AI workforce, and the permanently unemployed and immobile 99%. In other words I think AI and automation will improve so much faster than human genetic engineering that we meat bags will be irrelevant and obsolete long before biotech can cause any pressing social issues.

It's still worthwhile to pursue it. We might get blasted by another Carrington-event or some other disaster, in that case it would be nice if the mean IQ of the global population was centered around 200 thanks to genetic intervention.

That's impossible, the IQ of the population always centres on 100 by definition.

So if by chance the mean IQ was 200 it becomes the "new" 100 IQ?

[Eleas]

So if by chance the mean IQ was 200 it becomes the "new" 100 IQ?

De facto, what it would mean is that what was once considered normal would now be considered severe mental impairment.

An IQ of 200 is absurdly high. Such a high IQ doesn't just have a positive effect. For instance, the higher your IQ, the greater your ability to rationalize flawed data. You're a better pattern-matching machine than most, and this is not always a good thing because you'll see patterns where none exist. High IQ also correlates with a higher degree of mental disorders, depression, substance abuse and so on.

So in addition to be hard, raising the mean IQ by 100 might also be counterproductive. If we managed to raise mean IQ by "merely" 30 points without radically increasing the incidence of mental disorders, that in itself would transform the world.

[Simon_Jester]

I submit that once we get 30 IQ points smarter, we might be better qualified to figure out how to make people another 30 IQ points smarter without hurting them. Due to, y'know, being smarter.

[Broomstick]

Or we might decide that either we don't need to be smarter than that, or that the trade-offs aren't worth it.

[mr friendly guy]

So if by chance the mean IQ was 200 it becomes the "new" 100 IQ?

Pretty much, which is what certain Racists, er I mean Race Realists don't understand. IQ is standardised every few years. What we find is, that if someone with an IQ now would have a higher IQ if they took the test in say, the 1960s.


As a rule this observation has happen in most parts of the world, but the rise is most markable in groups who would have scored lower in IQ historically. This suggests an environmental rather than biological cause (since evolution doesn't occur that fast) and puts a nail in the coffin of those Racists Race Realists who keep on saying Africans are genetically prone to low IQs. The rise in IQ is due environmental things like education, less poverty etc.

This is phenomena of rising IQ is known as the Flynn Effect.

The Flynn effect is the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world from roughly 1930 to the present day. When intelligence quotient (IQ) tests are initially standardized using a sample of test-takers, by convention the average of the test results is set to 100 and their standard deviation is set to 15 or 16 IQ points. When IQ tests are revised, they are again standardized using a new sample of test-takers, usually born more recently than the first. Again, the average result is set to 100. However, when the new test subjects take the older tests, in almost every case their average scores are significantly above 100.

Test score increases have been continuous and approximately linear from the earliest years of testing to the present. For the Raven's Progressive Matrices test, subjects born over a 100-year period were compared in Des Moines, Iowa, and separately in Dumfries, Scotland. Improvements were remarkably consistent across the whole period, in both countries.[1] This effect of an apparent increase in IQ has also been observed in various other parts of the world, though the rates of increase vary.[2]

There are numerous proposed explanations of the Flynn effect, as well as some skepticism about its implications. Similar improvements have been reported for other cognitions such as semantic and episodic memory.[3] Recent research suggests that the Flynn effect may have ended in at least a few developed nations, possibly allowing national differences in IQ scores[4] to diminish if the Flynn effect continues in nations with lower average national IQs.

[LaCroix]

I'd presume that there is a hard limit to IQ development per genetics (and we're pretty close to it, already, seeing how IQ development seems to slow down). Unlike a computer, no matter how much you try to tweak it, a brain cannot work faster. You can't miniaturize brain cells to get more of them, so unless you increase head size, you have finite ressources. REmember, he "10%" myth is only a myth, there are no (or not a lot) ressources to spare in our brain. At one point or the other, you will hit a brick wall...

You may say that you could cheat and get a bit more out of what we have by improving memory retention (which is not connected to intelligence levels), for example.
But as is, people with "eidetic memory" (read up on it, if you want, it's not what people think it is) usually do have some mental problems because of it. Seems if the brain is optimized for one task, everything else is neglected. You would have better results by teaching mnemonics to school children.

[His Divine Shadow]

I hope someday soon we can reliable alter germ line cells so for instance, my sons won't be at risk passing on the condition that resulted in their heart and hand issues.

[His Divine Shadow]

or at the extreme end of the spectrum, the dystopian prospect of wealthy parents ordering up genetically perfect “designer babies.”

I always hear this thrown around and I still don't get it. Why is that supposed to be a bad thing?

Distributive justice. Imagine for a moment if, in addition to all the advantages wealth brings on its own, the wealthy can engineer children who are born with genetic advantages in intellect. Upward mobility dies.

This is a genie that cannot be kept in a box however. It's going to happen. Supressing it might only mean the really rich and wealthy might have access to it, disseminating to everyone via universal health care programs won't be a perfect solution, but perhaps better since it means more people without means will also have this choice. It really sucks for those children whose parents chose the natural way though, leaving them at a disadvantage from birth.

Basically for true equality to return technology would have to approach the level where it can affect changes in already born humans or adults.

[Lagmonster]

Imagine what that would do to the world of health insurance?

"Naturally born? Pay the nature premium!"

Among other things. Consider that people have no problem forming crippling socioeconomic barriers between groups based on imagination and fear. It won't be very hard for people to start looking down on people who didn't, couldn't, or won't get their baby-to-be the "No Downs' Syndrome ever" treatment that everyone in the middle class and up have. Those people will be looked down on as intentionally allowing horrible things to maybe happen to their kids and to many future generations. As people who are causing a drain on the system with their dependant kids. In an extreme, arguably unlikely stretch, you could end up with matchmaking being made based on whether you are engineered or not, creating two breeding pools, one of which coincidentally has all of the money and whose overall financial cost to exist is lower.

I'll say again that the most useful conversation is in terms of the gradual separation caused by weeding out problems inherent in all humans, not making superhumans. You don't need to make anyone smarter than average or stronger to give them such an incredible advantage in life that it buys them tremendous privilege.

[Guardsman Bass]

One thing I might add to this is that it's not necessarily impossible to use CRISPR to hit at genetic issues among fully developed human beings. It's just a lot harder than doing so for embryos.

[Broomstick]

If I recall, there are some genetic syndromes resulting in a lack of an enzyme or something similar where you don't need to fix every cell, just enough to produce enough of what's lacking to mitigate the syndrome. Damn if I can recall the name of any of them, but I'm pretty sure they're out there. CRISPR might work well enough for those.

[His Divine Shadow]

Regarding the alteration of human DNA, and this just me shooting of a stream of thought here...

I wonder if we'll be able to take this field to it's fullest, safest potential without the development of much smarter AI? There's just so much data to consider and take in, so much cross-referencing to keep in mind and sort through. Seems to me that only an AI system, perhaps not a sentient one, but something a lot smarter than what we got today, could possibly keep track of it all and the recursive changes just one alteration might imply, and to remember the results of all earlier experiments. One would have to know multiple disciples of medicine to properly evaluate and forsee potential problems I think. I am starting to think we're reaching a level of complexity in medical science that we're gonna need more and more help to think.

[Lagmonster]

I'd suspect, as an aside, that engineering better humans is probably harder to do and less rewarding in terms of the results than using artificial enhancements.

[Guardsman Bass]

That's what I'm thinking, too. There's always going to be a market for using it to get rid of genetically-linked diseases and birth defects, but the rest of it? By the time we tease out what genes contribute to intelligence, what the exact genetic contribution to intelligence is, and then come up with ways to safely enhance it, odds are we'll have "smart" enough machines in extremely easy-to-use assistant roles so as to make it not matter.

[Purple]

What about genes for other stuff? Like how long before we will be technologically capable of picking the hair, eye or even skin color of our offspring? Imagine if genetics was to allow one to at least superficially change the race of ones children. That would be a can of worms I'd love to see opened.