Modnote: Please don’t just take swipes at other posters. This is not the Pit and this is a very borderline post at best.
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Has there ever been a technology developed that no one ever decided to use?
As pointed out above, we’re already doing things like this with animals. Given that this application will continue to progress, it’s a near-certainty that at some point, we’ll have the skills needed to do this with humans. And at that point, someone, somewhere will do it. Even if we start a massive campaign to ban this world-wide, with all the various governments, corporations, cults, and what not out there, someone will have a lab that lets them engineer kids.
So we really do need to start thinking about how best to use this technology, otherwise we’ll be leaving it up to those few people who don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks.
For sure, I think with all such things we have blind faith in technology at one mistaken extreme, and Luddism at the other.
By definition, unforeseen consequences cannot be anticipated. But when there is a huge benefit to proceeding, at some point you have to say: what is the probability that potential harm from unforeseen consequences is greater than the certain benefit from proceeding.
I’ve debated biotech approaches to reducing or perhaps eliminating malaria with people who are just intransigently resistant to doing anything to mosquitoes because of unforeseen consequences for the ecosystem. It doesn’t matter how much careful research has been done on the potential negative consequences, it’s never enough. But when half a million people a year are dying, at some point you have to say - we’ve done enough research, the benefit is so great that it’s time to act. And in my experience people are generally much more concerned about unforeseen consequences when they are living in a crunchy suburb of Portland than when they are living in a place where malaria causes misery and death for their family and friends.
A similar metric can be applied to the kind of biotech OP envisions. There is plenty of objectively harmful “low-hanging fruit”. To the extent that we have identified alleles that we know cause substantial harm, with a definition of “harm” that absolutely nobody would dispute - Huntingtons, say, as opposed to the presence of freckles - then opponents need to do better than vague warnings about unforeseen consequences. Where the benefit is much less certain or controversial, far greater caution is warranted.
Everything makes sense in your post until (2), which seems to contradict everything else you have said. Aren’t the foolish and unethical desires of parents going to be the source of most of the problems with this technology?
Absolutely. This can all go horribly wrong. But it’s not as though we can say: there’s nothing we can do about human nature, so an alternative solution is to ban the technology. That alternative doesn’t exist. The technology will happen, so we need to start thinking hard about ethics, education, careful and consistent regulation.
Balancing the interests of the parents vs. the interests of the kids vs. the interests of society will be a difficult task, but then, it always is. We have family courts for a reason.
Someone, somewhere did it in 2018 (somewhere was China, someone is He Jiankui)
Sure, and I think right now we have the wrong balance of power between the parents and the courts, we adhere largely to the “mommy knows best” philosophy. It’s ironic that those who are most adamant about the rights of the unborn child seem just fine with giving the parents free rein after the child is born. If parents are allowed to abuse their children with incompetent and harmful home schooling or by refusing to vaccinate, then we’ve got the balance wrong. This will become a much greater problem when the tech OP envisions becomes real.
Not to mention that we can store samples of the Huntington’s gene (or even digitized copies, my understanding is that we have a limited capability to digitize DNA and then recreate those patterns from scratch, and this capacity is improving) forever, without keeping it around in any newly born live (and suffering) humans. I think it would be incredibly cruel to keep creating new humans with Huntington’s genes once we can avoid doing so without preventing anyone from their right to reproduce (and arguably, we are at that point NOW).
Do you want to be the one explaining to a 30 year old whose Huntington’s symptoms have just started presenting that they must pass this fate on to their children (and their children’s children, and so on) just in case a plague 500 years from now can be stopped by the gene?
I think this will be easier to control than home schooling and the like. You can literally do homeschooling all by yourself if you’re fanatical enough, but genetic engineering is a bit more complicated. The vast majority of parents will need a third party to do the actual work for them, and those third parties can be regulated, by the third parties themselves, or by regulations.
If some cult decided they wanted to do this all by themselves, they’d literally have to set up their own whole system, including at least getting a sufficient number of their community educated to the level needed to run such a facility. That would make this much harder to do, and much easier to detect, than child abuse or neglect.
I would not count on that remaining the case in the long term, honestly. Even a handful of decades seems a stretch. People can and do already use CRISPR at home:
IVF is the smart way to do this sort of thing, and I do think that in the future we will see that technology become fairly universal. But there are ways to use CRISPR to target gametes which would let fertilization occur the old fashioned way. That’s something a determined couple could concievably do at home today.
This makes sense when we’re talking about stopping the parents doing stupid things. It doesn’t help when the parents refuse to do something that’s in the best interests of their progeny. We will reach a point where correcting uncontroversially harmful genetic defects in an embryo is as routine as giving children adequate nutrition.
The problem here is that most people (for good reason) don’t trust the government in such matters, and despite the theoretical separation of powers, the courts are generally seen in the same light. I trust Google to make wise decisions for my well being more than I trust our public institutions. But parents have demonstrated that they are often worse, so this needs to change - we do need good, independent and trustworthy institutions of some kind to safeguard the genetic interests of embryos and children.
I figure that’s far enough in the future, we can let them sort it out. They’ll do that anyways. “Can you imagine these guys were actually debating this back in 2023? What a bunch of cavemen!!”
We could offer every couple planning to have a baby free genetic counseling today. In the event that they are found to have a high enough risk, we could offer them free IVF treatment where we screen the fertilized eggs before implantation. This is all stuff that we do on a routine basis for couples who ask for it. If we were serious about universal genetic health, we could offer it to everyone tomorrow. This would eliminate an enormous number of genetic diseases from the poopulation in a single generation.
As noted above, there is even more we could do. While we certainly don’t understand genetics well enough to start grabbing animal genes willy-nilly in an attempt to make ourselves post-human, we DO know enough to identify specific genetic disorders (the aforementioned Huntington’s) and it is entirely within our current capabilities to swap out those genes from the equivalent set taken from a healthy genome. In the rare event that a couple cannot produce any fertilized eggs without the gene that causes such a disorder, we could go in and snip it out.
So a significant portion of what the OP proposes is ALREADY possible. This isn’t a question of means. It is striclty a question of morality, and a cost-benefit comparison.
To some extent, but different groups define “too close” differently. Some groups do not permit marriage if any relation can be found between two people. Some do not permit first cousins or closer. Some do allow first cousins to marry. Some do not allow incest EXCEPT among the ruling classes.
So… there’s something else to define: what is “too close”?
Well… actually not, because mutations will continue to occur so you would still get cases of Huntington’s. Just a lot less frequently.
I should also point out that Huntington’s is not a discreet gene, it’s an excessive number of repeats of DNA. If you have fewer than 36 repeats you don’t have Huntington’s. If you have more you do. The more you have the younger it tends to start. About 10% of cases are believed to be new mutations. So they hypothetical technology should eliminate 90% of cases but we will still be dealing with new ones.
Still, eliminating 90% of a problem sounds very good to me.
The problem is coercion - bad things seems to happen when you starting forcing things on people when it comes to reproduction (or not reproducing, which is also a valid choice).
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It is caused by repeat polymorphism, but the repeats are indeed part of a gene.
The function of huntingtin (Htt) is not well understood but it is involved in axonal transport.[10] Huntingtin is essential for development, and its absence is lethal in mice.[8] The protein has no sequence homology with other proteins and is highly expressed in neurons and testes in humans and rodents.
Not necessarily. One might envision a scenario, for instance, where the plague starts in some small area, and wipes out almost everyone in that small area. The only people who survived in that small area were the ones who are allergic to pickle juice. But now that we know that, we can act quickly to graft pickle-juice-allergy genes into the rest of the population, or create other biotech treatments or cures based on how those genes work, and thereby still save almost all humans.
By contrast, if we had already eliminated the pickle-juice-allergy gene, then we might not realize what could stop the plague until it’s too late.
This is not to say that we should never do it. There are some conditions that are 100% fatal in childhood to anyone who gets two copies of the gene, for instance. It’s difficult to envision any scenario where that’s beneficial. And even if heterozygotes get some benefit, like with sickle cell, we could just limit our editing for that gene to children where the parents are both carriers.
Even a new case due to mutation would be detectable (with IVF plus genetic screening) and fixable in an individual egg (with CRISPR style tech), no?
But the cure here is an example of exactly the kind of biotechnology that OP describes.
The only difference is that you’re arguing that the way we should proceed is to deliberately use a cohort of humans as living carriers of genes that are known to be harmful, on the off chance that those genes might be useful later. This is a lot more sinister than eugenics.
If we are good enough at biotech to implement a cure in the way that you describe, then we can find much more efficient (and more ethical) ways to store gene variants that might be useful later. We already can, in fact - we can screen different genotypes by testing resistance in cell culture. And we can synthetically generate far more variant alleles to screen for resistance than would arise through natural mutation.
And again - bear in mind that when a species has been severely challenged and nature has been asked to find the right random mutation, it has often failed. To say that we are here now because nature is so good at solving problems is survivorship bias. Most species are extinct.
Genetic diversity in a species is good, other things being equal. But we can generate orders of magnitude more diversity in the lab than the diversity available in nature if that’s what we need to do to save us from a plague.