There's actually a huge problem with pet rats in that they're all remarkably inbred. If you don't get your rats from a dedicated professional breeder who's been at it for decades, your pet is likely going to get really sick at the end of their life. Females tend to get catastrophic tumors, and all have extremely delicate respiratory systems. Out of the dozens of rats I've kept, only one died quietly in her sleep of old age. The rest were horrific and gruesome.
Yeah, there'd be a good amount of money in it for whoever can fix rats' genetics.
Funny thing is that this kind of stuff is considered haram by the CCP who are fanatically dedicated to social order.
If a tech billionaire edits an embryo and figures out how to make a human immune to a certain disease or live a better life, that is a win for the rest of us.
And before anyone says "they'd just keep it for themselves" - there has been no medical technology in human history that hasn't become generally available after a couple decades.
People are allowed to mutilate their babies, raise them in whatever destructive fashion they please, avoid vaccinating them in an environment where they will be exposed to deadly viruses.
But god forbid someone try to make their baby immune to AIDS, some other genetic disease, or reduce the likelihood of psychosis given family history.
There is no world in which regulators will let this happen. There is no way to test this in a manner that will satisfy them, because babies can't consent to a trial. If it was up to regulators, human evolution ends here. No group should have that power over our species.
It is the same problem as modern medicine being so prohibitively expensive to test, that most ideas go to the bin. We need a deregulated zone to allow for progress to actually happen.
Genetic tampering can lead to all kinds of unknowable nightmares.
Circumcision?
Circumcision is absolutely mutilation.
> Genetic tampering can lead to all kinds of unknowable nightmares.
You can "tamper with your kid's DNA" just by having kids with the wrong person and passing down a genetic disease.
There are plenty of unknowable things about life. You could die in a car crash. You certainly will die eventually.
Should we avoid taking risks entirely because they might result in bad outcomes? With this mindset, humanity would have never progressed. We would have never left our caves if we were paralyzed by our own fear.
Humanity is still early stage. We are not so different from those that once ventured out of their caves. To them, we owe everything. It is a disservice to all future humans that will ever live if we stop taking trajectory-changing bets because things could go wrong.
And just as a small aside, not really related to OPs points, I'd just like to point out that nature pretty consistently tampers with everyones kids DNA, which quite regularly leads to absolute nightmare fuel. Whatever those unknowable nightmares may be, they have to be pretty gruesome in order to compete.
You're also just wrong - the first scientist to genetically edit human embryos edited in immunity to AIDS.
In society, i guess, if such super-humans are designed to have a 500 year life, they have automatic adusted there pension age to something like 450 years.
In law, because such super smart super-humans allways know things better, the fines are 100 times higher.
On the other side, of course, who would not choose the best for the best for the own child. Why should a person wear glasses the whole life, if it is possible to switch a few genoms.
So many difficult questions ..
There are already prohibitions on allowing transgender people to participate in some sports. It seems unlikely that the children of ordinary people will be allowed to participate in sports with children who are known to be genetically enhanced so that they are more powerful, etc. It is an interesting question though.
How would you test it anyway.
People often try to bill these technologies as “trying to control everything” or “trying to make the perfect child” or all this business about “tech people think they deserve what they have due to their genetics” (paraphrasing Sasha Gusev) etc. but I don’t think that’s the driving impulse for most parents.
The reality is so much more complex than the headlines people chase. One couple who I spoke to who were considering this were afraid of the opposite of the intelligence chase. The mother was concerned that she’d pass on her Asperger’s Syndrome. Another friend of mine doesn’t want to have kids because her brothers (and other male relatives) have schizophrenia.
In my family’s case, we will not have boys (coincidence: all our female embryos are the ones unaffected) but that’s fine. Our baby girl is a beautiful happy child and even if she weren’t, she’d be mine and I’d love her as much. But being able to increase the chance she has the full sensory experience available to mankind brings me a bit of content.
I hope all of these people I have met who fear genetic disease will be able to mitigate the risks as well as we have. Ours is monogenic, but as polygenic prediction improves their chances will improve too.
People on the happy path don’t often realize what it’s like for those not on that path. In our family, a cousin had her child via her last embryo. That also happened to a friend. Imagine if the last one had a debilitating condition that could be edited out. Most parents would choose not to have that child and then they would simply be childless.
In some future world, those people could have the condition edited and they could have the child.
Finally, here are the notes I made throughout the process:
https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/IVF
And a view into my genome
https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/roshan-genvue/
And a link to my comment on an HN article on something similar: the potential for removing trisomy-21 (Down’s) from an embryo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44677834
"Hey, you've got a broken gene? Sucks to be you, my rigid ethics requires you to play the lottery with worse odds than the others!"
In another thread about the same subject, I mentioned the issue of color blindness, and how some professions are open to ~92% of men and ~99.5% of women (because of how it's inherited). Society seems to be quite uninterested to start some wide campaign to replace color-coded information, even during the 2010s when the equality debate was active, it was never "upgraded" to include male issues like these.
With DNA editing, this problem could be fixed on the other side (along with much more serious issues that can affect an unlucky individual).
I don't know why there is so much fear to be out-competed by a hypothetical "superhuman", when the most easy implementation of DNA editing seems to be fixing genetic diseases (often "flipping one letter" to the correct one)?
Our ancestors would make the most daring bets in pursuit of a better for their children. Hunter-gatherers setting off in an unknown direction in search for more abundant pastures, knowing that their survival was unlikely.
Everything we have is thanks to them.
Today we sit on our laurels, unwilling to take trajectory-changing bets because things might go wrong. In our risk paralysis, human evolution will come to a standstill, and that is a disservice to all future humans.
No longer can an individual family or group of humans set out in that direction in search of a better future. They will be thrown in prison for daring to instead.
On the subject of colour blindness, i know many people who are colour blind and it's little more then a minor inconvenience for them. A large portion of the population probably don't even know they are colour blind. It's pretty widespread.
This is where you have it wrong. The risk is not to society, it is to the individual. One family can take on immense risk to discover something that benefits all of humanity - whether it makes us live better, cure a disease, etc.
Yes, there are society-wide upheavals that a new technology like this might create, which you might be referring to as a "risk" - but upheavals are a fact of life all major technologies throughout human history. We will adapt.
I think the more controversial conversation around human improvement needs to happen at some point as well. There's a fundamental problem with the modern world. It has changed over the last ~1000 years so much faster than our evolution could possibly keep up with, and we are now woefully unfit for it. There are so many life-threatening diseases (obesity, tribalism, depression) that are due to our behavior. To speed up and guide human evolution to make ourselves more empathetic, more reasonable, better physically suited to lifestyles revolving around thought instead of physical work, would be a huge long-term win for our species.
Of course there are inevitably a bunch of assholes trying to inject racialized agendas into this conversation, and that understandably poisons the very concept of genetic betterment for most people. But those racist tendencies are exactly the kind of outdated human nature I'm talking about eliminating.
bookofjoe•4h ago