> They also want the public to understand the ethical issues surrounding the technique, which could be used to cure genetic diseases, but also to enhance qualities like beauty or intelligence. The latter is a path that many ethicists believe should never be taken.
In many ways we are already selecting for those traits and have been for countless generations, so assuming we had a well-understood and safe method for artificially selecting for them then there should be no ethical quandaries beyond "but, that's cheating!" There are no scorekeepers of the universe, nobody's going to give us karmic demerits for finding a shortcut. The only risks are scientific, like the obvious potential loss of diversity of the gene pool as we converge on certain universal traits.
From another perspective, what if we could identify genes which bring the value of a trait below the baseline? For example, imagine we could identify the gene which would cause someone's teeth to be so bad as to require braces to correct later in life, but it would still be a largely superficial genetic change largely related to "beauty". Should some people be made to suffer or "earn" straight teeth while others are born with it? Why should this be true of any traits?
> In many ways we are already selecting for those traits and have been for countless generations, so assuming we had a well-understood and safe method for artificially selecting for them then there should be no ethical quandaries beyond "but, that's cheating!"
Or creating a permanent underclass from those who were unfortunate to have parents who couldn't or wouldn't give them the enhancements - and for that to carry forwards as jobs, and the wealth to advance your children, increasingly go to those who have been modified.
In effect, if you found something and it really worked, you might well lock a large portion of the population out of any realistic chance of meaningfully participating in the future.
(Though I suppose one might argue that this is the case now, with education and good environments going primarily to the wealthy. The difference would be in the degree to which the path was locked in.)
Sounds a lot like the plot of Gattaca, and I agree that would be an awful potential effect. I do not think it's insurmountable, however, and I agree that it's unfortunately fairly close to today's current class divide.
However, I don't think such a thing could happen "overnight" as you suggest. In order for those genetic enhancements to become commonplace they will need at least several generations of trials, especially to explore how various genes interact. This long process could well lower the barrier for the less privileged to participate.
The cost of a germ-line genetic enhancement is front-loaded on the first generation to get it. After that, the cost of sperm is incredibly cheap.
Newly-developed gene modifications will first appear in children of the wealthy. The sons of the rich will have plenty of one night stands. Many of them will be with women who have timed their ovulation and will collect the used prophylactics on their way to the bathroom. If you're poor, you just need to teach your daughters how to pick the right marks, and your grandchildren can inherit many of the traits that the rich are willing to pay for.
But this problem will only last a few generations due to purely technical limitations. The politics now will only determine whether gene modifications will be available on the open market or grey market in the future, because they will definitely be available on the black market and in the "secondary" market.
Who's creating any underclass? There's no reason to expect you won't just take a pill to change our eye color etc. It could be cheap and available. Not yet time to pull the emergency stop cord, because of imagined inequalities in a system that's not even been engineered yet.
Have you observed how the real world works? There are many diseases whose cures/preventions are "cheap and available" yet still continue to kill millions in the "underclasses."
GP made a fair point, and was not overly sarcastic.
EDIT: I appreciate the urge to have a kinder and gentler HN, but let's not start cluttering up threads more than we have to with references to the guidelines. It's meta, and meta kills.
Have you seen the unregulated medical systems in 3rd world countries? Easier access to antibiotics etc than in Malibu. Failure to cure diseases may be more about culture than price. Not warranted to jump straight to Gattica horror stories.
There are indeed many examples of this, especially in third-world countries ruled by dictators or superstitions, or a combination of the two. But that doesn't stop us from creating those cures/preventions for ourselves, because it's still the right thing to do.
We may eventually get through to them, at any rate. See Bill Gates and Polio vaccines, for example.
Hardly permanent, I'd say; eventually they would be outcompeted to extinction by H. s. mutabamus, in the same way H. s. sapiens (is thought to have) outcompeted neanderthalensis.
I agree. "Survival of the fittest" does not bode well for that underclass. At best they will naturally go extinct. At worst they will be exterminated or enslaved.
That is a purely scientific scenario and therefore can be understood and accounted for. The ethical question is how we identify and resolve them safely.
It is also mostly moot, as genetic interactions are already a part of everyday conceptions. Many of today's genetic afflictions are due to parents' genes interacting unexpectedly. See Lorenzo's Oil[1], for example.
> In many ways we are already selecting for those traits and have been for countless generations,
What are you talking about?
The concept of beauty changes every generation (so what would we select for?), and IQ/fertility has, at best no definitive correlation (and many would argue it has a negative correlation)[0].
I'm talking about self-driven evolution. In the past it was selecting for traits which suited the environment of the time, and perhaps that did not include intelligence per se, but the concept remains valid.
I also never claimed that in all of human history we always chose the same traits for beauty, but we have always selected for what we felt like "beauty" was at the time, even if that meant selecting against an "uglier" option. It was never a straight line, and it probably never will be.
Beauty changing every generation may actually be a boon to the process, as well. If the majority of one generation selected for a particular beauty trait then it would lose its appeal, driving diversity as less people selected for it or more people selected alternatives.
We humans are a fickle lot, at least until we find the fickle gene.
You seem to forget that being attractive and having more kids are in no way correlated. Ugly people have kids too.
If you're not saying we're selecting for intelligence or beauty, then what are you saying? You claim "the concept holds true", but I'm not sure what the greater concept you're trying to explain is. That humans are still evolving?
> You seem to forget that being attractive and having more kids are in no way correlated.
Attractiveness plays absolutely no role in reproduction? I honestly don't know how to respond to that, I hope you've just phrased it poorly.
I'm not saying we're not selecting for intelligence or beauty, I'm saying we're not selecting for the same intelligence and beauty every generation. A few thousand years ago intelligence was being able to tie a pointy rock to the end of a stick, and that sure played a role in natural selection. "Intelligence" as I intended to convey is broadly defined, it's not just the modern definition of IQ but the skills to survive and thrive in the environment of the time.
> Attractiveness plays absolutely no role in reproduction? I honestly don't know how to respond to that, I hope you've just phrased it poorly.
I have not worded it incorrectly. Attractive people may have kids, but so do ugly people, and ugly people have kids with attractive people, too. There is currently no known link between attractiveness and offspring. Your "common knowledge" is failing you here.
But wait, so you're trying to tell me that this sentence:
> In many ways we are already selecting for those traits and have been for countless generations
Is supposed to have meant this:
> I'm saying we're not selecting for the same intelligence and beauty every generation.
And yes, my two sentences are one and the same. A trait is a category, such as hair color. We can select for that trait without always selecting specifically red hair, for example. In fact, at one point we selected against red hair in some cultures [1]. Similarly, as I described earlier, intelligence today is often defined as IQ or literacy while intelligence in the past might have been toolmaking, memory (for verbal history/storytelling), or navigational skills.
That's why I don't see any ethical quandaries about genetic modifications for beauty, because it's highly unlikely to lead to homogeneity and even if it did, if everyone is beautiful then nobody is, which means people would immediately find new definitions for beauty and pursue those instead.
In many ways we are already selecting for those traits and have been for countless generations, so assuming we had a well-understood and safe method for artificially selecting for them then there should be no ethical quandaries beyond "but, that's cheating!" There are no scorekeepers of the universe, nobody's going to give us karmic demerits for finding a shortcut.
I like the "there are no scorekeepers of the universe" line.
The ability for humans to use the intelligence that evolution has provided them for whatever they see fit, including the ability to better themselves and better the species as a whole (or, sadly and unfortunately, to hurt each other), should be considered part of the evolutionary process. Just because humans have intelligence doesn't mean they exist outside of evolution. In fact, not using our evolved intelligence to influence our genetic makeup is avoiding thinking about how and why we have this intelligence to begin with.
The ability for an organism to influence the genetic makeup of itself and its descending, through either gross methods like breeding/natural selection or discrete methods like genetic engineering/modification is really just one step out of many on the evolutionary ladder.
Here's an interesting heuristic: if an action is morally bad, then its inverse is morally good. Does that seem plausible? If blinding a child is bad, then curing their blindness is good, etc.
Applied to this situation: if it's morally bad to enhance the intelligence of a child beyond that of their peers, then it should be morally good to diminish the intelligence of a genius child to be more average. If it's bad to enhance the intelligence of an entire generation, it should be morally good to switch back to leaded paint and gasoline.
Or my favorite, from slatestarcodex I think (I can't find the link): if it would be morally bad to cure heroin addiction with a pill rather than the "hard way" with will power, then it should be morally good to addict schoolchildren to heroin. (In other words, if the chance to build character has more value than not being addicted to heroin, then we should be addicting _more_ people to heroin).
No, I don't think that heuristic passes the sniff test. There are lots of situations where the doing the functional opposite of a morally wrong action is also morally wrong. It's wrong for me to take $50 from you and give it to Bob, and still wrong for me to take $50 from Bob and give it to you. It's wrong to kill babies and wrong to force women to create babies. In these cases the moral inverse isn't to do something that creates the opposite effect, but to just not do the bad thing. Changing a kid's genes so he's smarter may or may not be immoral but it's not related to whether changing a smart kid's genes so he's normal intelligence, at least not in such a formal logic kind of way.
By inverse, I mean reversing states of the world. If Alice and Bob have exactly equal wealth, then transferring $50 from Alice and giving it to Bob decreases total utility, because of the decreasing marginal utility of money. If Bob now has $100 more wealth than Alice, then transferring $50 from Bob to Alice increases total utility by the same amount. If by "take" you meant steal, then returning the stolen money is obviously also a good thing.
If it's wrong to kill babies, then it's good to resuscitate ones that have died (assuming they're in the same state they would have been: no brain damage, etc.)
If making one average child a genius is bad for the world, then making one genius child average must be good for the world.
If you're a utilitarian, then the heuristic is basically a tautology: If moving from state A to state B decreases utility by X, then moving from state B to state A increases utility by the same amount.
With apologies for the somewhat flip turn of phrase, if we outlaw human genome editing, then only outlaws will edit the human genome.
States in general do not have a good track record at preventing things that can take place in a small room, with inexpensive equipment and few personnel.
Consider the kinds of equipment, and its associated cost, needed for genome editing -- and compare to that required for development of nuclear weapons. The collected might of the western world has occasional challenges in preventing development of nuclear weapons; it's not clear to me how anyone expects to be able to enforce a "ban" on editing the human genome. And for a glimpse of what an unenforceable ban looks like, look at the drug war.
The whole thing is empty posturing. Genome editing is coming, like it or not. Bans won't prevent it; they'll just prevent open discussion on how and where it's being used.
Agreed. This is the crux of the problem: if we're worrying about this leading to an "underclass"... does anyone think its illegality will prevent the ultra-wealthy from funding this technology?
And who will be overseeing the research? If it must be conducted in the dark and on a budget, does anyone doubt that human experimentation will take place?
No thanks.
Ethical or not, the cat is out of the bag and the only way is forward.
An ethical moratorium doesn't outlaw the tech outright, but it does influence sources of funding, availability of laboratory facilities and capital, and the diversity of personnel willing to advance the state of the art.
It would be similar to the impact that an executive order by G.W.Bush had on stem cell research in the U.S. It was delayed by a few years, and some research moved overseas, but then the issue largely became moot when the tech progressed past the need for embryo harvesting.
At most, this would slow down gene mod tech for a few years, as the pressure in the djinn bottle builds. As long as we don't annihilate our civilization, it is practically inevitable that every human will one day have ready access to cheap gene mod tech, in the same way that they now have ready access to networked computer resources.
The only way to reasonably keep this tech out of the hands of the irresponsible public is to convince scientists to not develop it in the first place. And that's what this is. I question the motive behind the suggestion, but that's my foil hat talking.
A tool so dangerous and powerful that scientists consider it worthy of banning is a tool that governments will continue to work on regardless of the general scientific community's feelings. So the only question remains is if we want this tool to be understood and used by all or only those in power.
Regardless of the morality of it, the U.S. government will probably work on creating super-intelligent humans for national security and defense reasons.
I'd actually be surprised if they haven't started doing this many years ago, and it's top-secret.
What you're suggesting is a sort of Manhattan Project for genetics. I don't think it's entirely impossible, but I do think that the scope of the project would be so great that it would be especially difficult to accomplish in a vacuum.
I really think this is simply a tactic to consolidate market position, by creating a monopoly and artificial scarcity, by raising the barriers to entry on what is otherwise apparently not very defensible tech. "Don't use it until it's safe", is a fairly effective way to stave off competition in medical research and biology in many places. Added to this, is the idea of anticipating and smoothing any regulatory humps by gaining consensus before launch, allowing growth to be faster when it actually does launch.
These are both smooth moves if that's the intent, though I don't think it's sufficient if the tech is really so indefensible.
I think another important consideration is long-term branding. Because the tech is not defensible, there's going to be a whole bunch of competitors, so how can we differentiate ourselves? "We're the ones who did this safest, and we've been about safety from day one."
That's going to be a pretty compelling narrative for human gene therapy suppliers.
It's encouraging to see strategic smarts in science at an early stage in a bio venture that could end up having a very large impact on medicine. So that's really cool, my hat's off to them for these plays. I think the new biotech therapies will need huge monopolies with the resources and motivation to push with the highest standards. After all, for developing biotech, do you really want to be buying your medical future, from a garage startup? Or from a massive name?
So I think it's smart they're clothing themselves in the apparel of major names from day one: caution and safety. It's also exciting to think that right now could be the start of some huge biotech firms of the future, companies that will literally be 10x bigger than the energy companies of today.
I worked in a next-gen DNA sequencing lab (as a sysadmin), and learned a lot while I was there. One of the primary things I took away from it was that the human genome is it's various interactions with other organisms (microbiome) is incredibly complex and difficult to understand in an interrelated way. I would say don't ban it, but rather put regulations that require extremely extensive oversight and testing.
It's the same reason I criticize GMO products (worked with big agriculture geneticists before going into bioinformatics), namely that the testing periods are so short and lack oversight is so nonexistent that it is the unforeseen consequences that make me very wary of GMO foods.
We need to just be able to admit when a technology is very dangerous, and instead of hiding it away, open it up to as many eyes as possible, and fund the testing as much as possible. The key point for me though is the time factor. Testing over extended periods of time (1,5,10,20 years) is a must for such dangerous scientific advancements.
Luckily sequencing and modification are becoming cheaper and more reliable by the year, to the point that I am pretty sure that your local doctors office is going to have a sequencer before 2020.
I can't wait till my non-compete is up in a few months and I can get more involved.
I did indeed, because I got into a tiff with someone and I like to burn accounts fairly often. It sorta sucks to see accounts go away, but I don't like the string of correlation being too easy. Also, are you stalking me?
The headline is misleading (NYTimes fault not OP's) the scientists are asking their fellow scientists not to use certain techniques on humans until the implications are more fully understood. Unfortunately that isn't quite as sensational of a headline.
There was a call around here to ban AI research too. Maybe the reason we don't do new things is that we are too afraid. I blame lazy and unimaginative sci-fi plots among other things.
Genetics could improve the inequality situation too, but that would require challenging elements of our economic system which is off the table.
You should question your assumption. While there is without question a social element, there is growing evidence that IQ is at least 50/50 heritable.
Not to mention birth defects and other genetic disorders which can only be kept under control now by people with enough money to get their kids therapy, rehab, etc. So in fact putting people on an equivalent genetic playing field is a great way to give an investment to the children of the current underprivileged .
(edit: think about it this way -- health care costs are currently a kind of regressive tax, as it takes a larger portion of the poor's income than the wealthy. so anything to lower overall treatment costs will help reduce inequality.)
Your final point is brilliant. If the traits that give rise to higher income are heritible and are also largely the inverse of poor health traits, health care is indeed a regressive tax.
If that's the case, augmentation and genetics are literally the only technologies that could have a lasting impact on inequality.
Your first sentence is a non-sequitur. When did Nature decide that the more well-educated are the fittest?
Your second sentence is wrong. People's intelligence vary widely which is why some people can't even answer a hypothetical question and engage in thought experiments.
Black people suffer in the US because the US has a ton of laws that harm them, like minimum wage laws (first enacted to stifle competition), drug laws (first enacted on racist grounds to jail minorities), welfare laws (first enacted to segregate minorities in ghettos). But god forbid we blame the State, it must be a "social" problem...
> Your first sentence is a non-sequitur. When did Nature decide that the more well-educated are the fittest?
IQ isn't nature, IQ is a testing system. IQ is essentially a test of whether you have been given a high-quality Western education.
> Your second sentence is wrong. People's intelligence vary widely which is why some people can't even answer a hypothetical question and engage in thought experiments.
People's intelligence does vary, but not as much as you think it does. A lot of it, again, is down to education.
> Black people suffer in the US because the US has a ton of laws that harm them,
The legal system does not exist in isolation. It is influenced by US society (which is oppressive towards black people).
I am more convinced of Dr James Flynn's arguments than yours regarding IQ because I have gone over some of his work, which contradicts what you are saying. If you point me to some of yours or your sources I'd take a look.
I didn't state that clearly. What I meant is the other way around-- that if people had more universal access to this technology it would be less likely to lead to greater inequality. This in turn would involve challenging our economic system.
I do think in that case it would be more likely to have a leveling effect, since it would be technically easier to fix problems or boost capabilities to high but normal human levels than it would be to try to go beyond normal human ability. At the very least there would be less risk of a runaway divergence if anyone could access this technology as part of normal family planning.
I agree that in our present economic system this would join elite schools and trust funds as another way generational inequality is perpetuated. IMHO we jump to banning because any economic change is categorically off the table. If these scientists instead called for universal access to any human enhancement technology, that would be crimethink.
I mean, really? Poverty correlates far more strongly with negative health outcomes, lower educational attainment, increased risk of incarceration, unhappiness, decreased life expectancy--you name it--than any known genetic risk factor.
So if everyone were clones that would not be enough equality for you?
How would you go about your further goals in this clone society? Constant monitoring of citizens, tracking their lives, measuring disparities in the short and long term and either awarding or punishing certain activities at certain times by certain people to make sure everything is equal to everyone?
Seriously, what do you mean by equality that the ability to choose one's genes wouldn't fix?
Haha. I sensed this thread starting to take a turn towards nutcase-ville... aaaand here we are. If you really believe that there is absolutely no daylight between a) lessening pervasive, endemic inequality that exists the status quo and b) "1984 with clones", well, that says a lot about you and your world view. #ocra
Before you think about the possibilities for improvement, just think for once that there be more depth to the topic of genes than we have fully realized.
We've been at GATTACA since long ago. GATTACA is about a guy trying to sneak into the space program even though he has genes that say he's got a weak heart. How is that not already part of the space program?
* Distant visual acuity: 20/100 or better uncorrected
* Height between 62 and 75 inches.
Both of those are based on your genes. Have bad genes, you don't get to be an astronaut.
There's also
* Blood pressure: 140/90 measured in a sitting position
And while I suspect most people can adjust their blood pressure through diet and exercise I'm sure some people could never get in that range. In other words they'd have the exact same problem as they guy in GATTACA, a bad heart.
Well, visual acuity could potentially be surgically corrected. I'm not sure how relevant height is, exactly, but I'd be willing to bet a larger range than that could be accommodated in the right circumstances.
Then again, if you're genetically blind or have dwarfism, that may not be the case.
I think GATTACA is less about genetics setting a bar, but that the bar is constantly getting raised until it will eventually be unreachable without artificial enhancement.
Thats a very literal & narrow interpretation of the movie. Ethan Hawk's parents weren't upset when he was born because wasn't going to be in the space program, they were upset because he had inferior genes.
Absolutely. The sooner the general public accepts that genome editing is going to happen anyway and the sooner governments create institutions which allow the benefits of genome manipulation to be available to everyone the better for social cohesion.
One way it is scary is it creates a new form of genocide. Rather than murdering oppressed groups, we will simply disable the genes that make them part of that group, erasing diversity.
A world with only white, straight, cisgender, neurotypical, conventionally attractive etc. people is not one I want to live in.
Take a trip on tumblr sometime and you'll see that the psychological drive to be a unique and special snowflake is strong enough that you have nothing to worry about.
So you'd say with a straight face that if everyone in the world suddenly became white, straight and good-looking, that this would be so unbearable to you that you would kill yourself?
If you're not literally saying that, then what is the value of your hyperbole? Your post reads like pure fear-mongering to me.
> So you'd say with a straight face that if everyone in the world suddenly became white, straight and good-looking, that this would be so unbearable to you that you would kill yourself?
No?
I'm saying I'd rather not live in a world where diversity has been eliminated.
Why is arbitrarily changing human genome something that biologist worry about, but changing the genome of other creatures and foods that are later consumed is not something that biologists worry about?
I'm not sure what the problem is. Can't they just be kept 50 metres apart to avoid cross pollination, the same as Monsanto's regulations to prevent cross pollination of their GM crops? :P
It seems this is a perfect example of a problem you don't want to spend too much time / energy trying to make sure other people don't do it. In my estimation you'd want to throw tons of money / resources at getting ahead of the issue to understand more about what's about to happen whether we like it or not.
In many ways we are already selecting for those traits and have been for countless generations, so assuming we had a well-understood and safe method for artificially selecting for them then there should be no ethical quandaries beyond "but, that's cheating!" There are no scorekeepers of the universe, nobody's going to give us karmic demerits for finding a shortcut. The only risks are scientific, like the obvious potential loss of diversity of the gene pool as we converge on certain universal traits.
From another perspective, what if we could identify genes which bring the value of a trait below the baseline? For example, imagine we could identify the gene which would cause someone's teeth to be so bad as to require braces to correct later in life, but it would still be a largely superficial genetic change largely related to "beauty". Should some people be made to suffer or "earn" straight teeth while others are born with it? Why should this be true of any traits?