A few years ago we discovered a gene in our family that predisposes to heart arrhythmias and sudden, early death but apparently it’s rare enough no one regularly screens for it. Armed with that knowledge we can screen for it going forward, but it requires screening for a gene/defect most doctors have never even heard of. There are no doubt other people with it, but most are completely unaware of it because, again, it’s not normally looked for. We can only find what we’re looking for (until symptoms show up). That’s why such technology will never result in all humans having perfect healthy - mutations will continue to occur and may even persist for generations if they don’t cause too much damage, or obvious damage.
Sure, but once we have the infrastructure in place to do IVF and genetic screening on this scale, looking at another genetic marker (or another thousand genetic markers) is just a question of slightly more processing power dedicated for the task. Adding new potential problems to the list, no matter how rarely encountered, will easily become a routine matter.
No, not perfectly healthy. I mean, unless we also invent significantly more reliable forms of birth control, there will still be unplanned pregnancies, no matter how easily accessible IVF is.
Storing the genes for later is trivially easy. Knowing how the genes actually react in vivo to various changing aspects of the environment is really, really hard. If we know that the pickle-allergy gene is key, then it’s easy to beat the plague, but how do we find out that it’s key?
As I said, in vitro screening in cell culture is one way. We do that now. Of course, it’s not a perfect model for what will happen in a human body. But you can screen a large number of candidates quickly, orders of magnitude more than natural genetic diversity in the population.
Remember, nobody is advocating reducing human genetic diversity per se. The bone of contention here is only whether we should leave known deleterious alleles in the living population, just in case they later turn out to be useful.
You’re arguing that we should let a cohort of people continue to suffer, just on the very low chance that a species-saving cure happens to come from one of the deleterious alleles, and that the cure is only apparent when it’s in a living human; rather than the cure coming from all the other research possibilities that biotech allows - or, indeed, from one of the many non-deleterious alleles that are still present in the population.
“Suffer” is a loaded term, with a very broad range of meaning. I think we agree that, say, Tay-Sachs Disease is a level of suffering that we should do away with, if we can. I think we also agree that we shouldn’t be “saving” people from the “suffering” of being born with too much melanin. Somewhere in between is where we draw the line, and where we might be disagreeing is just precisely where.
Thank you, but I’m an evolutionary biologist (although I haven’t played one in a movie), and this is the kind of language we commonly use. To say “nature finds a solution” here is shorthand for “a genotype arises through random mutation (or exists in the standing genetic variation already present in the population) that allows the species to survive the novel environmental challenge”. But saying it that way takes longer.
Biotech AI: “We have screened your embryo, and detected the mutation that causes pickle juice allergy. We could edit it out with no risk to your child. However, we would prefer not to do so because there is a chance that at some point in the future humanity might be exposed to some as-yet unknown environmental challenge, and this allele might prove useful.”
Parent: “Um, I guess a pickle juice allergy isn’t a death sentence, but I’m still worried about it. And I don’t really understand the rest of what you said. What’s the benefit to my child from not getting this gene fixed?”
Biotech AI: “We don’t know exactly. And if anyone benefits directly from carrying this allele, it’s more likely that it would be one of your child’s descendants.”
Parent: “But you think there might be a benefit? Under what circumstances?”
Biotech AI: “Some unknown future environmental challenge, such as a novel plague.”
Parent: “But how do you know this particular mutation would help in a hypothetical plague? Would it mean that my child or grandchildren are more likely to survive a plague?”
Biotech AI: “We have no evidence that this particular mutation would help, and it’s equally likely that it could be worse for your child in a hypothetical plague. But we figure the more alleles we keep around, the better the chances overall that someone might survive. It could save humanity from extinction!”
Parent: “So you want my child to forego a risk-free treatment and live with pickle juice allergy, because of a potential plague that doesn’t exist yet, even though you have no evidence that this allele would even help my child (or my grandchildren) survive this hypothetical plague, and it’s equally likely that it would be worse for them in this hypothetical scenario?”
Biotech AI: “Yes, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Parent: “What are you smoking? Give my child the treatment.”
An issue, which is similar to what the first respondent said, but which I want to expand on, is that, in practice, there won’t be a sharp dividing line between “curing disease” and “designing super humans”.
Because there will be countless genes that have a net negative effect but not so negative that present day medical science has identified them.
In a hypothetical future where we are so confident in our generic engineering understanding and ability that we’re rolling it out on a mass scale, we may well know of all these negative genes.
And if you just fix them all, you may not have what we would see as a “normal” human any more.
All that being said, I think it’s right that we screen for genes like cystic fibrosis or Huntingdons.
I didn’t say that it is good or bad, the point is, many people like to draw a distinction between curing genetic illness and designer babies, and the OP alludes to such a distinction. I’m just saying that that distinction is largely illusory.
But yes, in terms of my opinion, I think large-scale human genetic engineering makes sense and is inevitable at some future time where we understand very well all of the effects of changing a gene and know that we can do so safely.
It might be a long way off from our point of view – centuries, maybe millenia, but I just don’t see how this wouldn’t happen.
And the time scale is what will make this less of a problem. Of course over time our ideas of what is a “normal human” will shift, and gradually, greater and greater control over the details of a child’s genetics will evolve. But give it a few hundred years of social evolution, and the potential negative effects will most likely be seriously attenuated.
Arguing that you’re “genetically superior” the way our current crop of white supremacists like to do will be ridiculous on the face of it, when essentially everyone is “genetically superior” to those poor losers from three generations ago.
“Eww, you still use genes? Disgusting meatbag, you should have uploaded your conciousness to the cloud like the rest of us transcendent beings.” -ChatGPT3000, probably
While there are some conditions that can be traced to a single gene or a single base within a gene compromising the effect of a critical protein. Those are the simple cases and may be suitable to gene therapy treatment that fixes the fault. Or simply identifies the condition clearly so the symptoms can be managed.
Also there is a huge benefit to drug development. Individuals can react very differently to drug treatments and genetics plays a role. There are huge number of deaths caused by drug reactions and a genetic test could prevent the treatment from killing the patient. Genetically tailored drug treatments will be a big step forward.
However, there are many conditions that related to complex interactions between genes that are not understood. This is a much bigger problem to solve. It is somewhat similar to bacterial and viral disease. Some are very simple, like smallpox, and an affective treatment deployed to eradicate the disease. Others, like influenzas, are complex moving targets.
It requires an effective regulatory environment to ensure this done ethically and responsibly and avoid politicisation.
Accurate diagnosis and avoiding killing the patient when they may be sensitive to a drug reaction. These are clearly important health benefits. Making the leap from that to the fictional dystopias of ‘Brave New World’ or ‘Gattica’ ignores the technical difficulty and assume that the mechanisms of genetic expression will be completely understood at some point in the future. Well we may also have practical nuclear fusion power generation, teleportation and interplanetary travel and an artificially intelligent robotic best friend at some point. Good stories for Hollywood movies.
We may have better success in dealing with the genetics of other species such as the domesticated plants and animals we use for food. Genetic manipulation has been around as long as selective breeding. But it is slow. Advances in genetic manipulation of food plants could save millions from hunger and famine and may become a critical factor if climate change compromises the output of the food growing regions. The same techniques can preserve endangered species.
There are simply too many potential benefits to ignore because of hypothetical dangers that can be mitigated by adequate safeguards.
The more serious worry is that genetic science will be misrepresented again to lend a veneer of rationality to political movements that want some simple way to test for friend or enemy.
Not that it takes much to polarise human beings into opposing camps. That seems to part of the human condition.
There is an awfully big distance between what goes on when cells reproduce on the microscopic scale and how human beings relate to each other in society. That nature versus nurture debate.
I agree.
Let me be clear: the situation today in 2023 is that we can, and should, screen for single, clearly-pathological, alleles like cystic fibrosis.
And, going beyond that to genetic engineering, is fraught, not just because of the whole issue of eugenics / racism etc (or the rich becoming a super-class) but also because, from a scientific / engineering perspective, we’re not sure of how safely we can change individual genes and what all the knock-on effects are of doing that.
I am just saying that there is no reason that all these issues – social and technical – could not be resolved at some future time. At which point, I don’t see what would stop humans from deciding we want to be healthier, longer-lived, less eco-footprint etc.
Presupposing 100% of the human populace always gets 100% of the latest treatments I almost agree with this.
In the far more realistic future world where some people get more of the good stuff than others, and where those advantages compound over multiple generations of scientific progress, the most-engineered of those future people will be far more inclined to claim “genetic superiority” than are the ignorant racists of today. And they will have a much better factual claim to it too. Which they will use to further cement their own, their families, and their cohorts’ advantages in society.
Unless the first thing we engineer out of everyone is all forms of selfishness. Which seems … unlikely.
