The plot of Change Agent by Daniel Suarez centers around “gene edited embryos for vanity purposes”.
Modifying the genome of human embryos is illegal in most countries.
But you can do this in shitholes. Sam Altman already has a company doing this called Preventive.
Living in a world I recognize less and less every year 🫠
“No way to stop this from happening” coming from someone helping make it happen is such rapey energy…
“There’s no way to stop this.”
– the only people doing it
The Guardian? Or?
There are many ways to stop this.
There is no way this wouldn’t devolve into gattaca. This is just eugenics fornrich people.
As the world is right now, we live is “gattaca-lite”. Your success in life depends on genetical characteristics that you got at conception by pure luck. You can’t (or less likely to with the same amount of effort) become a pilot with poor vision, a musician with serious disorder of hearing, a scientist or engineer with learning difficulties, an actor with some forms of autism. Parental wealth and health also have impact on your congenital stats.
If anything, genetic intervention will make the society more equal. Yes, it would be nice if every parent would have access to this for free, and current influence of bad genetics would be eliminated, but even if in first years of this tech being developed only kids of rich will be enhanced, this advantage will not be more or less deserved than random chance we currently have.
Except there’s not. What are you gonna do about a third country allowing it and letting people abroad do it there?
It is eugenics for rich people. But with research it could be eugenics for everyone.
Personally, I’m not sure where i stand yet.
With time it will be eugenics for everyone (left)
Personally speaking as an agnostic person it disturbs me we are so quick to decide we will play God without having a long serious adult conversation about if we should play God.
Pragmatically I agree it’s going to happen because I know humanity too well but that said it’s not something I would ever personally partake in at least at this current point in time.
there is no way to stop this
The words of a narcissist with psychopathic tendencies
Words of a rapist, as others have pointed out here.
The full genetic makeup of an individual is very complex, possibly infinitely so and to jiggle a small part is to potentially create more long-term defects than it fixes and possibly even bring the whole house of cards down. Not to mention on a species level if that individual survives to breeding age those crude modifications can enter the common gene pool.
While I 100 % agree with the general sentiment that this is a terrible idea, I think your line of thought is a bit off. We have been made by evolution, a process built on the simple fact that any change that is too crappy will prevent itself from spreading, since the carriers of that change will be less likely to reproduce. Evolution is extremely efficient at preventing really crappy modifications from spreading. Thus, I don’t think our primary concern should be about these modifications “entering the common gene pool”. If they really are shitty modifications, their carriers will be less likely to survive/reproduce, and they’ll be watered down/wiped out by evolution.
I think what we should be worried about is twofold: First, it’s directly dystopic to imagine children born with defects that have been wilfully introduced, and which may not become apparent until in many years. Experimenting on unborn children this way is absolutely abhorrent. The second is the possibility that this actually works out in some ways, and is reserved for the super-rich, in which we can literally end up creating a human super-race that will inevitably suppress and exploit the rest of humanity.
Basically whether this works out or not, all outcomes look pretty bad. The only ethical way I could see this being done is using it to remove known defects such as hereditary diseases, and doing that through public programs aimed at eliminating those diseases at a population level. Doing something like that hinges on the program not being run by people like the one in the article.
Many genetic disorders persist in the human population because they can confer a genetic advantage.
Sickle cell anemia carriers are resistant to malaria.
Tay Sachs carriers are resistant to tuberculosis.
Huntington disease carriers have less cancer risk.
This is illegal to do in most countries because we don’t want to fuck around and find out with the human genome, which is full of remnants of ancient viruses.
As a starter, I’m extremely sceptical of modifying the genome of embryos (as I hope was clear from my comment). Like you said, there’s plenty of defects that can have advantageous sides in addition to the negative sides. My point is that the only way this could even conceivably be ethical to do, is if it was used to remove diseases.
I believe there’s already a procedure they do to remove a disease carried in the mother’s mitochondria. I heard about a rare disease from my dentist the other day that causes people to never grow any teeth. I’m saying that if this is done, then the only ethical thing to do is use it for population-wide removal of severe diseases with no known positive sides, and even that can be dubious (as you point out).
The precision of gene editing has been vastly oversold.
We already genetically other species successfully. I don’t expect humanity to be that much different.
It also depends on what the generic modification is. I expect that the current state of the art has less to do with adding novel genes and more to do with removing and replacing known genes which cause disabilities.
The technology to do this without unintended off targets does not exist.
Yeah, but I’d suspect that a couple who want a child and has a high risk of having a child with a generic disorder might choose to go with generic manipulation over a natural birth.
The solution is pre implantation genetic diagnosis. Eggs are fertilized in vitro, screened, and only the healthy embryos are implanted back in mothers.
This has been a procedure for about 25 years. It ends the inheritance of the disease in that family forever.
No! Danger! The unknown! FEEEAAAR!!
It’s not the unknown, off target editing is a known problem.
Thanks for the ignorant comment.
How else are we going to get catgirls? 🤷
I guess I have to rethink my opposition to engineering humans now. 😞
nanomachine tech, obviously
It’s not gene manipulation if you build a new body and transfer your consciousness into it
She sounds like she’s part of the Epstein class.
Oh god please don’t let Utah hear about this
I still don’t have my strawberry the size of an apple. They have no clue how to do more than tiny tiny changes without killing the embryo. I am in favor though of the concept. Too many disabilities and such tied to genetics. Sure they want to just make people pretty and smart. But they don’t even know what makes a person smart genetically. Disease is probably what they actually know best (which they don’t know that well). So logically that is where they will endup really.
I’m honestly surprised it hasn’t been happening already. Maybe I just watched too much Fringe and Orphan Black.
A Chinese couple paid a guy to gene edit their embryos so the babies were resistant to HIV.
Did the editing cause other off target effects? who knows.
For anyone reading this guy’s comment, this really did happen.
Of course it did. The person who did it was jailed in China. It is illegal to genome edit with federal funding in the US, but it is legal in private companies, because you can do anything for profit in the US.
I would be honestly suprised if it wasn’t already happening. Probably has been for a few decades if you have enough money and the right connections.
me2
this gives me Theranos vibes.
