The way this article is written makes me appreciate when articles address the parties involved by Title and Name instead of He or She or just his first name.
Mr. Jiankui would have been less confusing. Editors should be able to identify issues like this and adjust the writing to avoid confusion IMHO.
Edit: it looks the parent comment was edited after I posted this, and said something along the lines of "I wish articles used the researcher's actual name instead of He or She".
Using that in the article would have made things much less confusing. But journalists tend to avoid titles - perhaps especially when the person in question has apparently done something bad.
Surely Jiankui is his _given_ name then, not his _first_ name as in China the given name comes second, no? So, He Jiankui [xiansheng?] for how Westerners would write Mr. Jiankui He.
"Surely Jiankui is his _given_ name then, not his _first_ name as in China the given name comes second, no? So, He Jiankui [xiansheng?] for how Westerners would write Mr. Jiankui He."
To be honest, if you are not intimately familiar with what names tend to be family names and what names tend to be first name in a given culture, you're just hopelessly boned in English media unless they explicitly call it out for you in the article, because sometimes they leave the names in the Oriental ordering, and sometimes they "conveniently" switch them around for you without saying so. (Statistically speaking, I have to imagine there have been cases where the writer switched it to the English order, and then another writer or the editor switched it again, returning to the Oriental order without realizing it....) The end result is, I suggest everyone cut the English-speakers significant slack on this front when they read an article, because even understanding how names work in the East is still not enough to prevent errors.
This is a massively contested issue in the DuoLingo forums.
Mainly I wanted to emphasise that "first name" is often used in Western culture to mean "given name" but they're not synonymous and using the term "first name" confuses the situation.
> Surely Jiankui is his _given_ name then, not his _first_ name
first name = given name = forename = personal name; family name = last name = surname
But you're right that for cross-cultural clarity I should have used "given name" instead of "first name", I just have real trouble remembering that term (english is not my mother tongue, and my mother tongue is much more prescriptive about these terms).
Think how simple it would be to 'launder' genetically modified babies (at least in the US). Just leave them on the front step of a hospital and you're good to go.
I can't imagine it would be that difficult for a reasonably sophisticated organization to keep track of the child as it grew up, and with popularity of genetic testing you could probably find them again anyway.
I don’t have the faintest idea of what your scheme is supposed to accomplish?
Edit, after turning off strict mode: if you’re thinking of a doctor performing fertility treatments trying to hide their experiments with CRISPR: that’s trivial. Just don’t tell anyone. Stealing babies from mothers after birth to then leave them at hospital doorsteps would actually seem to be ... counterproductive?
Edit 2, after consulting my equally puzzled dog: you do realize these babies weren’t actually created in a test tube, right? As in: there were still a womb and the person attached involved in the process.
If you wanted to introduce a gene into a population without it being identified as intentional, and by whom.
Here's an example for your next scifi thriller: a docility bomb. Identify a few dominant genes that intensify the social conformity bias--it's already hardwired into humans to varying degrees--and make 1000 babies with those adjustments. Leave them on 1000 doorsteps across your opponent's country. If each baby grows and has two children, that's about 3000 in one generation, 9000 in the next, etc. At some point you're affecting the population's voting, working, and revolting tendencies.
After what we've seen in long-game US politics lately, this kind of thing is more plausible than reality.
To my (very) untrained mind, it does sound like a scifi thriller plot: that is, extremely implausible.
First, the logistics of doing gene modifications for 1000 babies and then leaving them on 1000 doorsteps across the a country like the US without getting caught or anyone catching on seems....challenging.
Second, each baby won't have two children, at least not in any developed country. The birth rate per woman in the US is at like 1.8 and likely to fall further by the time these babies are able to procreate. This is well below the replacement rate, so even if you select the first generation to only be girls, the second generation would only be ~half girls and it'll shrink from there. So if the birth rate falls to 1.5 and remains constant, the second generation would be 1500, but only 750 girls. The next generation would be 1125, but only 562 girls, etc.
Third, even if the birth rate was higher, this would still take forever to have any noticeable effect. Like centuries.
Fourth, how do you ensure that these mutations don't migrate into your country? Especially over that kind of time span.
Fifth, would these mutations even be stable or predictable over time? No idea, not my field, but I'd be curious. Also, it seems like there's a very good chance they'd be detected with future technology and genetic screening.
Finally, this kind of centuries-long quest would compete with a lot of more time-tested ways to destabilize a country. Why not just go to war, use biological weapons, propaganda, economics warfare, cyber warfare, etc, etc? So much easier and you get your results in a decade instead of 300 years.
An even better thriller plot would be for there to be some completely unpredicted positive benefit of the change - e.g. that the modified kids are far more intelligent or immune to heart disease or <something>.
Some crazy long-term thinking is going on. Ten years ago, if you had proposed a bunch of the US govt was taking mountains cash to represent overtly foreign interests, that social media has been largely co-opted in order to influence elections, etc etc.. it would have been preposterous. Truth is stranger than fiction.
Genes don't work like that. Popular conception has it that DNA is like source code, but the reality of how genes and biological systems work requires a few addenda:
* The source code is completely undocumented and is written in a variant of Malbolge.
* We don't actually have a reference for that variant of Malbolge, so we're guessing what half the instructions actually do.
* The compiler is buggy and will only rarely compile your code correctly.
* The code itself is not modularized in any sane way. The code for left-pad, for example, also contains code that scans for bitcoin-stealing attacks and automatically removes them when run.
Any sort of idea such as "edit genes to make people taller [or more docile]" is well beyond our ability to understand, especially since a fair amount of those phenotypes are not driven by actual changes in DNA (welcome to epigenetics).
> ... “it’s a fairly outrageous assumption that any change to this region would lead to some benefit,” Ryder says. “He made new mutations, and there’s no reason to think that they’d be protective—or even that they’d be safe.”
True.
> What’s shocking about this “is the blatant disregard of all the rules and conventions we have in place for how one should approach any proposed intervention,” said Leonid Kruglyak, a geneticist at the University of California at Los Angeles, on Twitter.
That's like saying no one can stab you because it is illegal.
It would seem that the systematic error lies squarely on academia and business ignoring each other for far too long.
ED:
Clearly I have failed the communicate what I mean...
There are two different cultures both using the same tools. One believes it controls the tools and gets to set rules for how they are used. The other does not.
Juxtapose, the censorship board for TV in my country, which decided that calling Yugo surplus "genocide canteens" is bad, but reprehensible filth like Fear Factor and Big Brother is OK for prime time. Clearly, opinions do differ and are allowed to differ. - I call into question: Is the case of bioethics vs. business similar?
>> What’s shocking about this “is the blatant disregard of all the rules and conventions we have in place for how one should approach any proposed intervention,” said Leonid Kruglyak, a geneticist at the University of California at Los Angeles, on Twitter.
>That's like saying no one can stab you because it is illegal.
It's like saying no one should stab you because it is illegal.
Clearly I have failed the communicate what I mean...
There are two different cultures both using the same tools. One believes it controls the tools and gets to set rules for how they are used. The other does not.
Juxtapose, the censorship board for TV in my country, which decided that calling Yugo surplus "genocide canteens" is bad, but reprehensible filth like Fear Factor and Big Brother is OK for prime time. Clearly, opinions do differ and are allowed to differ. - I call into question: Is the case of bioethics vs. business similar?
There does not seem to be two different cultures in this respect though. This guy is very well known in Western circles and consulted with US scientists on ethics questions. This guy's University in China has condemned what he did.
In fact his actions are directly contrary to his own statements and presentations on the ethics of using this techniques on humans. See item 9 in the article. A paper by him on the ethics of this question, written some time ago and in a lengthy review process, was even published in The CRISPR Journal just 2 days after the story broke. His actions directly violate his stated principles in the journal.
If it's ethically defensible to abort a child based on its sex (or for any other non-medical reason), it should be ethically defensible to mess with its genome.
I, for one, welcome our new Chinese designer baby overlords.
Poor comparison. Let's not forget that it's legal for people with hereditary diseases to procreate, would you compare that with "poisoning the water supply"?
Furthermore, here are some legal ways to crudely "engineer" the DNA of your future offspring:
- smoking
- drinking
- legal prescription drugs
- exposing yourself to ionizing radiation
That counts for both males and females, of course with pregnant females the effects are vastly amplified.
Non-engineered life, in comparison to (hypothetical) well-engineered life ... is indeed less valuable, because it has lesser affordances. Same as any tool or machine, and same as today; insofar as e.g. medics differ from thieves, officers from enlisted, ambulatories from cripples, etc.
Why is the mere "seeming" part, important?
And why lament the devaluation of cottage industry instead of noticing the large net-increase-in-value being delivered by factories?
> it would increase pressure on others, or other nations, to follow suit so as not to fall behind in the “race race” of eugenics
Good; then the transition from non-engineered to well-engineered life will have that much less room for pointless and expensive violence.
> genetic engineering might make populations more susceptible to epidemics
This hypothetical does not merit the kind of absolute opposition that I am seeing in this thread and this article.
As usual, this is entirely a question-of-facts. In this particular case the relevant questions-of-facts are: what affordances the organic life provide, what affordances the GM life provide, and how do those two sets' sums-of-value compare.
> it is not actually defensible to abort fetuses based on sex.
Only if a person believes in souls. Otherwise human fetus and human newborn up to age 1y or so is indistinguishable from any higher animals that humans kill en masse. Human babies are born undeveloped by design.
> genetic engineering might make populations more susceptible to epidemics
Or the other way around including some incurable or debilitating diseases. There is no statistics to prove either point.
> it would increase pressure on others, or other nations, to follow suit so as not to fall behind in the “race race” of eugenics
Which is awesome if you believe in transhumanism and bet on more good vs. evil from technology.
> it would seem to devalue non-engineered life, directly threatening the universal dignity of all human beings
Not an argument for non-believers in souls. There is no inherent dignity of any kind in not using gene modification vs. not using it.
Epidemics != disease. See my other comment to a similarly confused poster.
Even if you believe in transhumanism, I don't see how forcing others into that believe system would be "awesome". I like Chocolate Chip ice cream, yet I would oppose a law making it the only allowed flavour.
Other than that, I don't get what souls have to do with anything. I don't believe in God, or souls, or even dualism. Yet dignity, defined as each individual being worthy of respect (as opposed to being a collection of molecules expendable in the service of any other goal), would seem rather fundamental to our code of ethics.
I think by "souls" you're actually just referring to morality in general. And yes, if you subscribe in anything-goes nihilism, then I have nothing to answer you. Except that I'll be coming to rob you of your soul as soon as it becomes beneficial to my narrowly-defined interest.
> Epidemics != disease. See my other comment to a similarly confused poster.
If you are concerned about gene diversity then yes it is a valid concern. But I must say that with my absolute zero knowledge in this area I still suspect that it is not that easy binary yes/no question and not yes/no consequences of it. E.g. It could be that edits would be sufficiently different and make it non-issue. It could be that edits will eradicate those same corrupted genes that make humans susceptible to epidemics. Or again, you could be right. No way to tell right now.
Next to other concerns. Again, you are worried about dignity of humans. From my point of view fetuses and newborns up to 1y are not human. They are alive but cognitively on a level of animals. At least concerning fetuses it is most definitely true. And so we should allow parents to do whatever non-harmful procedures on them. Defining non-harmful will be very hard.
I'm not anarchist or nihilist or similar. I just feel that we need to progress in gene modification area and fast. And I don't think that any single group of humans can dictate to the other group what they could do unless it is something morally awful. If for example, you oppose gene editing then I think I can't force you to do gene editing but I also think that you can't ban me doing it.
PS: just in case - I do think that gene editing should be a government regulated industry, only not extremely regulated and not affected by ANY religious view of any religious group.
> - it is not actually defensible to abort fetuses based on sex.
If it's ethically defensible to abort fetuses for no particular reason (i.e. general legalized abortion) then it follows that abortion for any particular reason is ethically defensible.
> - genetic engineering might make populations more susceptible to epidemics
genetic engineering also might make populations less susceptible to epidemics
> - it would increase pressure on others, or other nations, to follow suit so as not to fall behind in the “race race” of eugenics
That's indeed a possibility.
> - it would seem to devalue non-engineered life, directly threatening the universal dignity of all human beings
First of all, there's no such thing as "universal dignity of all human beings", different societies have different conceptualizations of "dignity" and its consequences. Even then, why should being genetically engineered threaten your dignity or that of others? Engineered humans are still humans. Their DNA isn't necessarily any different than what some natural mutation could've come up with.
> If it's ethically defensible to abort fetuses for no particular reason (i.e. general legalized abortion) then it follows that abortion for any particular reason is ethically defensible.
It does not follow. Similar: even in "employment-at-will" jurisdictions, where you can fire anyone at any time without giving justifications, you are not allowed to fire someone for a slew of protected reasons, such as becoming a whistleblower, their sex/age/sexual orientation/race, or joining a union.
> genetic engineering also might make populations less susceptible to epidemics
It may make populations less susceptible to disease. It's extremely unlikely that homogenisation of genes would lead to increased resistance to epidemics.
It is possible that it could boost resistance - for instance I have a grandmother with a weird immune system flaw - for some reason she cannot retain immunity to chicken pox at all - she caught it every time someone in her large farm family got it as a child!
While diversity ensures better coverage genetic engineering could "patch the holes" as it were.
> It does not follow. Similar: even in "employment-at-will" jurisdictions, where you can fire anyone at any time without giving justifications, you are not allowed to fire someone for a slew of protected reasons, such as becoming a whistleblower, their sex/age/sexual orientation/race, or joining a union.
...which is a contradiction! Legislation like that arises through conflicting requirements coming from different directions. So, if you want to fire someone based on their race, you must not disclose it, but you can still do it. It obviously doesn't make sense, it just happens to be the law.
I'm not talking about the law anyway, I'm talking about ethics. Really the argument I am making is that maybe abortion for any reason isn't ethically defensible, but if it is, then all kinds of other things become defensible on that platform.
> If it's ethically defensible to abort fetuses for no particular reason (i.e. general legalized abortion)
The absence of a legal prohibition doesn't mean something is ethical; it can mean that the perceived incidental costs of policing it (remembering that this is always done by human institutions, which are both fallible and corruptible) outweighs the benefits.
This is fairly clearly articulated as the justification of the broad free speech protections in the US, for instance (not all protected speech is also ethical speech), and the same can quite easily be the case with generalized legal abortion (it emphatically is in the US, where the right to abortion rests on Constitutional provisions which, just like the protection of free speech, deal with the costs allowing the government to regulate certain areas, even to address unethical conduct.)
> The absence of a legal prohibition doesn't mean something is ethical
Nobody claimed otherwise. Legality is not the point.
> ... it can mean that the perceived incidental costs of policing it outweighs the benefits.
That's an ethical defense. We can disagree about the costs and benefits of abortion or genetic engineering, but purely based on principles I don't see how you can defend non-medically indicated abortion but not genetic engineering.
> > The absence of a legal prohibition doesn't mean something is ethical
> Nobody claimed otherwise.
Yes, you did, when you said: “If it's ethically defensible to abort fetuses for no particular reason (i.e. general legalized abortion)”
That is an explicit statement that the legality of abortion necessarily implies the ethical acceptability of abortion.
> > it can mean that the perceived incidental costs of policing it outweighs the benefits.
> That's an ethical defense.
It's an ethical defense of the legality of a thing that does not depend on the ethical acceptability of the thing itself.
> We can disagree about the costs and benefits of abortion or genetic engineering, but purely based on principles I don't see how you can defend non-medically indicated abortion but not genetic engineering.
One can defend the legality of non-medically indicates abortion but not designer babies theogh genetic engineering because one believes that permitting government inquiry into the justification of abortion (given the fallibility and corruptibility of government) poses an unacceptably high risk of intrusion into legitimate bodily autonomy that is not warranted by the benefits of the prohibition, whereas the same is not true with human genetic engineering (either because the latter does not as closely impact legitimate bodily autonomy issues or because the potential public impacts of each instance of gene editing warrant accepting greater costs to control it.)
> That is an explicit statement that the legality of abortion necessarily implies the ethical acceptability of abortion.
No, it isn't. Read carefully: If aborting a fetus for no particular reason (as in "general legalized abortion") is ethically defensible, then...
> It's an ethical defense of the legality of a thing that does not depend on the ethical acceptability of the thing itself.
That's a fair point. Nevertheless, I would maintain that many pro-choicers would consider abortion itself ethically defensible, regardless of the implications of its legality or lack thereof.
> One can defend...
I find this sentence unreadable. Since you are not keen on defending the ethics of abortion, but rather the ethics of the legality of abortion, it's probably moot anyway.
It’s legal because it’s not done, thankfully. The second it appears in birth gender statistics, it would become illegal, just as it is in, for example, India.
Those who strongly favor male offspring may be a small minority. Even without intervention, there will be more male births. That ratio differs geographically. It would take a lot of sex-selective abortions to show a clear correlation.
You appear to be conflating ethics and legality. It is perfectly legal (for now) for social media giants to spy on their US users in increasingly intrusive ways, but many would argue there are lines in there that cross into unethical. Perhaps legislation will follow to enforce this ethical stance over the coming years as has happened in the EU, but the absence of such legislation does not preclude it from being unethical. The objection to Google's interest in the Chinese market is another example where ethics and legality don't match up.
Anecdotally, I personally find it ethically indefensible to abort a child due purely to sex, despite otherwise being pro-choice.
I know this is probably an unpopular opinion, but CRISPR babies were going to happen eventually. Just like the atomic bomb. Not a matter of if, but when.
If we don't villainize the creators of the atomic bomb (Fermi, Oppenheimer) I see no reason why we should villainize this man.
My thoughts exactly. The cat is now out of the bag, and the rest of the developed world will now be forced to keep up, even if it’s against their ethics.
Doesn't look like anybody is scrambling to jump on the train to the lowest possible ethical standard just yet. Even the reaction within China is actually rather encouraging. There are many arguments against allowing such experiments with human life, and it seems as if, just maybe, this could be a case where ethical standards are actually spreading slightly faster than the technology to break them.
The reasons for doing so are more practicality and having more to lose. If the baby would have risked some sort of horrifying genetic disease like say the one which causes your flesh to grow back as bone the risks would be totally justifiable.
It is an irony of medicine that dire circumstances make what would otherwise be recklessness permissible since they have nothing to lose.
That said once the technology is ready it would be outright immoral and stupid not to use it. Like not vaccinating against smallpox because it is unfair to those who aren't or not providing education because it would make the educated better off than the uneducated.
How is this case different? The baby would otherwise have been heavily at risk for AIDs because her parents have AIDS. Meanwhile people with the homozygous CCR5 mutation are immune to AIDS.
Because a) AIDS is a manageable disease already, b) only one the father has AIDS, and c) in this case of fertilization, there are other protocols that can guard against spreading HIV to the mother and baby.
In other words, the baby quite likely would not have had AIDS in the first place.
HIV is "manageable" already, but only in the sense that it requires, for survival, a lifelong commitment to a daily drug cocktail that has serious side effects. And it's always possible that the virus might mutate and escape the antiretrovirals.
The treatment under discussion is a cure. It would lead to a normal life, free of drugs. It's a sad return to the days of paternalistic medicine to withold superior treatment because, in the opinion of a third party, the inferior treatment is adequate.
It's exposed by prospective subject parents that when asked what if the experiment went wrong, He's assistant simply said "Don't worry, we would help dispose of the baby."
The small private hospital that approved and held the experiment is one of the "Pu-tian clique", notorious in China for their customarily misleading, predatory and fraudulent medical pratices.
The hospital boss also invested in He's two bio startups, one of which is hawking a failed American 3rd-gen gene sequencing machine "Helicos" that he bought from his American professor, now goes by the name "GenoCare", billed as "the world's most accurate", monopoly-breaking, "fully originally and domestically invented" by him.
What's more scary is the public opinion about this in China.
When first reported on by state media "the People's Daily", being touted as a glorious historical breakthrough, netizens cheered with overwhelming joy and pride.
Then came critical pieces, netizens appeared to calmed a bit, "Foreign masters displeased!", some started to worry about it,
"What if the girls start to pollute the gene pool? It's horrifying."
"It's outrageous and immoral, burn He and the girls to death!"
"Sterilize them!"
"This is an American conspiracy."
"I'll be blunt here, the morons who oppose it, don't ever join the line when gene-optimizing treatments come out."
"Human thought can't keep up with the advance of technology, it'd be a disaster."
"Some people are always jealous of other country's tech, yet here they also don't want to be the first one."
From the outside it seems like they're notorious in China for having power and not being han chinese. Lets not let their ethnic stereotypes go unquestioned.
The "Pu-tian clique" monopolized the Chinese private hospital industry, capitalizing on China's loose regulations and enforcement, started off by peddling snake-oil-like panacea across the country.
People making a big stink out of ethical concerns virtually ensure that this stuff is going to happen first in a place with the least concern for ethics. China seems to be where the action is on this front.
People worry about designer babies or baby hitlers (to name a few of the cliches). In reality people are trying to fix serious genetic defects and the science to do that in a responsible way is kind of near impossible to conduct in most reputable universities because of ethics. So, it's happening in a much less responsible way elsewhere by people who want to cash in on the obvious demand for any kind of snake oil or real solutions in this space.
As to your other points: Avoiding genetic risks is easily doable with technology that (for that very reason) is generally accepted, such as in-vitro genetic testing for risks, or prenatal screening with the option of abortion.
There is opposition to that technology still, which goes to show that the approach you're advocating is actually the status quo. It's not like reproductive medicine has been standing still.
Beyond that, I don't see how western democracy embarking on such designer baby experiments would change anything, except for just doing the evil deed ourselves: If we decide something is unethical, having moved the line would not stop others from going further still, at least within the frame of your argument.
> Avoiding genetic risks is easily doable with technology that (for that very reason) is generally accepted, such as in-vitro genetic testing for risks, or prenatal screening with the option of abortion.
Woah. I'm not opposed to abortions, but suggesting that killing a future human being due to a gene defect is ethically superior to fixing that defect is beyond comprehension to me. That's on the same level of twisted priorities as Jehovah's Witnesses that would rather let their child die than allow a blood transfusion.
At some point you need to take a step back and ask yourself, what is more important: Clinging to some very abstract ethical values, or saving the life of a human being.
There are no “abstract ethical values”, and the reasoning why GMO-babies are considered unethical are well-documented in this threat, I’m not going to try to discuss the ethics of abortion from first principle here because it would just end in wasted time without barely scratching the surface of what you can easily find on Wikipedia.
> reasoning why GMO-babies are considered unethical are well-documented in this threat
I don't dispute that genetic engineering on humans is ethically controversial, that's not the point. The point is that you're saying that it's more ethical to kill a developing human being than to fix its gene defects.
One of those options bears abstract, vague risks which may or may not come true, while the other option has a concrete, 100%-certain outcome, which is the death of a human [1].
Ok, but consider the case in aggregate. The first case, or abortion case, is ethically dubious. But consider if this technology takes off and is poorly regulated and done badly. The aggregate consequences to me are worse than the first case.
I'd rather cull a few elephants than try to bio engineer elephants to survive environmental catastrophes, with the possible broad reaching and irreversible consequences on the wider elephant gene pool and environment.
Not saying abortion in case of genetic defect is a light issue, but I'd rather the cure not be worse than the disease.
> People making a big stink out of ethical concerns virtually ensure that this stuff is going to happen first in a place with the least concern for ethics. China seems to be where the action is on this front.
What's the alternative, because this is a big deal. Even if we ignore where this is going eventually which will be designer babies there's still the issue that when you run this experiment you're creating a person with a permanently altered genome, in many cases that edit will be heritable and there's no way we know of to fix this other than in embryos so if it goes wrong the best that can be offered is palliative care. Simply because other places will be unethical isn't a reason to lower the ethical bar in places with standards.
Assume it will happen eventually and act accordingly to ensure that happens under reasonable circumstances instead of just blanket forbidding everything until somebody changes the status quo anyway. It just delays the inevitable; it doesn't prevent it and it ensures somebody else gets the glory, technology and benefits.
IMHO cloning or gene modifications are not inherently scary but doing that in a way that has a high failure rate probably is bonafide scary. The scandal is not that people are doing this but they are doing it poorly. When the result is healthy individuals things are great. But otherwise things are not so great when the result is lots of late stage abortions, still born babies, or children with all sorts of unforeseen genetic defects and issues. So, I'd prefer this to happen in modern research institute under reasonable conditions where progress is possible instead of being forbidden and taboo for decades.
Even stuff like stemcell research is highly controversial still, not because of the above but of all sorts of ethical cliches about baby hitlers, designer babies, etc. So, we're not doing all sorts of research that could contribute to curing common defects on the off chance that somebody reenacts the Boys of Brazil or somebody's religious believes or might be confronted with the notion that this Darwin dude might have been on to something after all.
> Assume it will happen eventually and act accordingly to ensure that happens under reasonable circumstances instead of just blanket forbidding everything
That's kind of what's happening. We're studying it thoroughly in animal models because we still don't know that we can do this reliably and safely there first. Just because we're not ready to allow human testing doesn't mean progress will get frozen.
Designer babies are inevitable. From a sheer evolutionary perspective, the group willing to use a successful design mechanism is going to beat out the one that is not over the course of a few generations.
However, the problem here is that we do not currently have the ability to create designer babies. We have a few clumsy tools that resemble the tools we'd actually need to do it, but in much the same way that a butcher's knife resembles a scalpel. It's an improvement over the era where what we had was a jackhammer, but it's still not suitable for the task. Any attempt to get serious about human germ-line editing with the current toolset isn't going to work. That means, there is very little likelihood of successful, happy outcomes, and a lot of room for unhappy, dangerous, or deadly outcomes.
Before people seriously start trying this, we need to tip that balance to a point where it's at least interesting to discuss. An ethical discussion would have to revolve around costs and benefits, and it's a really easy discussion when it's basically all costs and no benefits. We don't need to invoke any particular philosophy or argue about utilitarianism or the virtues of deontology or what we should be deontological about in that scenario.
So while I don't have a complete answer, one step to the "risk reduction" you ask for is that we still need better tooling so we're not trying to do the equivalent of performing brain surgery with a butcher's knife, before there's even anything all that interesting to discuss. We should have those discussions sooner rather than later, but as the article alludes to, "we" collectively actually have. (The fact we have no ability to enforce that discussion is a problem of some sort, though.)
At least human germ-line experimentation isn't infectious, though.
Assuming you're referring to my comment about it not being infectious, gene drives (based on my quick reading about them :) ) are still not what I'd call infectious.
But they can get you into a rather nasty long-term scenario where in order to produce a viable baby, the only option is to continue to use gene engineering techniques because all "natural" conceptions will be non-viable because of previous edits and gene drives and such. I've seen some variants of this idea in "the literature" (i.e., science fiction), but perhaps nothing quite as stark as that. Most of "the literature" tends to assume that even in a heavily gene-gineered world, if you just stop engineering, something viable will still survive.
> From a sheer evolutionary perspective, the group willing to use a successful design mechanism is going to beat out the one that is not over the course of a few generations.
Not if the latter is willing and able to summarily exterminate the former in the first generation (or earlier, when they are still developing the tools.)
Possible, but with the current geopolitical line up, general attitude towards ethics by various cultures, and so on, the people willing to exterminate others for such reasons and the people who are willing to heavily use "designer baby" tech appear to generally be the same people, so it didn't seem worth mentioning as a possible outcome.
Something I've thought about throughout the day is karyomapping, which has been repeatedly successfully used to screen out heritable diseases, but absent from this conversation...
The discussion in the news could really benefit from reminding people what techniques we are currently using, to make it clear how this technique increased risk without advancing outcomes, and to make it clear that the objections aren't simply against all genetic tech.
Don't believe it. For the monkey data, they claim at least one cell was "edited" in 80+% of the embryos and that the "edited" embryos survived to blastocyst stage more often than the controls (ie, there was less than zero toxicity):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IXy47dWNQApcNLW-bTSfYD2vxBZ...
I bet this will come out as made up or fatally misinterpreted somehow.
Few slightly technical things not addressed in the linked article but worth pointing out:
- The most prevalent types of HIV prevalent in Asia are the T-tropic X4 strain which does not depend on CCR5 for infection. The proper genetic target CXCR4 is not a viable target for germline gene editing because it's essential for embryo development[0]. In other words, the children would not be immune to HIV in any case.
- The editing was done using a single sgRNA template and a 20bp+ deletion cannot be produced with this setup. Therefore it's likely that the experimenters never attempted to replicate the naturally occurring Δ32 variant in the first place.
- Δ32 is well studied and known to abolish CCR5 function at both RNA and protein levels. However, both of Nana's CCR5 alleles are novel and it's possible that some function may still be retained because the DNA changes are not extensive enough[1]. These edits really serve no purpose and should never have been implanted.
"The most prevalent types of HIV prevalent in Asia are the T-tropic X4 strain "
Great comments.
There is (at least there was when I followed this more than a decade ago) some data to support that x4 tropic HIV is more aggressive/pathogenic, so forcing the infection towards x4 tropism by removing CCR5 may increase the virulence of the infection.(with some caveats on this).
Independent of that. This is mind-blowingly unethical. At very least, He should be ostracized and provided no opportunity to do science, let alone medicine.
(Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with the details of HIV in particular.)
Given that a particular person shall catch a terminal contagion of some sort, is it not preferable that he die to it sooner than later, so as to reduce the number of other people to whom he spreads his infection?
Even if true that the mother was HIV positive, this situation wouldn't justify He's actions for a few reasons. i)They are implanting an embryo in an HIV+ mother, there are other alternatives; ii) For 20 or so years AZT has been used effectively to prevent material transmission of HIV at birth
According to #1 in the article it was the father who was HIV+ anyway:
"Although Nana and Lulu’s father is HIV-positive, neither of the infants actually had HIV."
That was He's justification for the editing. The general consensus from the rest of the community is a) AIDS is no longer an automatic death sentence, and b) there is already effective protocols in place to guard against HIV transmission in this scenario. Well, on top of that, there's c) he appears to have gone around telling people that he was working on an HIV vaccine instead of admitting that he's attempting to CRISPR humans, and d) he seems to have done a pretty bad job of the CRISPR edits themselves. (How bad? We can't even be sure that his CRISPR edit didn't do something like accidentally delete an entire chromosome)
"...He spoke at length with bioethicists William Hurlbut at Stanford University, as well as his son Benjamin Hurlbut at Arizona State University, neither of whom was aware of He’s plans. The elder Hurlbut spent time telling He about opposition to the instrumental use of human embryos in the United States, and the grounds for believing that human life begins at conception."
If someone thinks that women ought to be able to exercise control over their reproduction, and that abortion is a legitimate means of exercising that control that accrues benefits to individuals and societies by being legal, then the belief that human life begins at conception, being a traditional argument against the moral permissibility of abortion, could seem harmful.
Having this belief takes away women's agency of their own bodies. It turns them into second class citizens by making their body worth less than the similar male, solely that they can have a baby.
Moral believes really cannot be considered "correct" or "incorrect". It's sort-of why they are called "moral believes", and not "observed fact".
What's closest to being "correct" is "generally agreed to be good at guiding human behaviour into a direction that may, just possibly, survive the harsh light of passing time without being viewed as crass injustice. Or, you know, wiping out humanity (both senses of the word)".
this guy writes 'he's' instead of his and after a few of those i got totally put off this article. the whole second point is just moot. That being said, playing with genes is about as good of an idea as running with scissors with our current understanding of them...
Well, you missed out on an interesting article. And also I stopped reading your comment when you failed to capitalise "this" at the beginning of a sentence.
It's at least a little bit promising that the reaction to the CRISPR baby has been resoundingly negative. From the technical errors pointed out by scientists in this case, to the visceral reaction to the idea of "designer babies" to most regular citizens.
Of course, we have some short-sighted scientists who only care about their own work and not the long-term implications, like He himself and Church, but the actions and words of these two were roundly condemned.
Hopefully this buys us enough time to see the real long-term implications of starting a Phenotypic Revolution[1], and we can get some world-wide consensus to stop gene-editing in humans.
To me, the reaction has been thoroughly disappointing. Genetic editing of humans could be the most beneficial medical intervention ever discovered, but almost everyone respectable is calling for a total ban on the technique, ostensibly on the grounds that we lack the precision to do it right. But the real reason, if you read between the lines, is an unfounded and tragic fear of enhancing human capabilities. I reject this mindset. We can and should make better people.
You’re ignoring the inevitability of a Phenotypic Revolution if we go down that path. Please read the book so you can get an understanding of what’s at stake.
It was just released a couple of days ago, but it’s an update to our understanding on the origins and evolution of life forms. If you read it now you can be on the leading edge of these conversations before it hits the mainstream.
Do you find humanity worthwhile? If you do, then you should be concerned about starting a process that will lead to the end of humanity.
Just because we are able to split an atom doesn't mean we should end the world through nuclear weapons. Just because we can genetically modify humans doesn't mean we should end DNA-based life on earth through a phenotypic revolution.
It wouldn't be as immediate (likely thousands of years at the shortest), but genetic modifying of humans could start us down the irreversible path within the next 10-50 years. I encourage you to read the book, since it gives the entire overview of the updated hypothesis. It's not a sci-fi novel, just a Biology book with a warning.
Just like the splitting of the atom was beneficial: its a double edged sword that we have no idea how to wield. I do not want am arms race in which the wealthy augment themselves while the rest are left to suffer. That's already a problem given how much medical care is unavailable to even the middle class.
This is inevitable. Folks with a will to do this (edit embryos) can clearly do so. In fact this 'researcher' (or con man) did it 'in secret' which means without any institutional support. If this guy can do it in his basement, then what hope is there of putting the genie back in the bottle?
Folks go to all sorts of crazy medical clinics already, for all sorts of crazy reasons. I predict within the year, the rise of a 'custom baby' clinic in some country with lazy medical ethic enforcement. And folks will flock there and pay through the nose.
All the argument in the OP is irrelevant. The technical reasons this instance went wrong are irrelevant. The ethics argument is irrelevant.
We have to suit up, to prepare to deal with designer babies among us in their thousands, and soon.
I agree. We should embrace and get the most out of this technology, not shun it. Same with genetic engineering for plants and animals in the food chain.
Oh I wouldn't go there. What we'll prepare for is the fallout of inexpertly/incompetently applied technologies resulting in fragile, heath-compromised people by the thousands. There's nobody in the baby business that has to be accountable, so they won't.
Heck you can buy snake oil on the internet and find out the next day that it doesn't work; yet the snake oil is still for sale. What accountability accrues from gene editing where the effects aren't known for months, years or decades? There will be no accountability.
> What we'll prepare for is the fallout of inexpertly/incompetently applied technologies resulting in fragile, heath-compromised people by the thousands.
In other words, something that we are already dealing with as a consequence of too much fast food and video games.
Yep. When over 30% of Americans are obese, and 12% of them in poverty, I find it hard to believe that we really care that much about individual humans. It all seems like anti-scientific knee-jerk moralism from people who don't really understand the technology.
If this gives us a chance to improve humanity, we should embrace it. Yes, there will be missteps along the way - but the ends justifies the means.
CRISPR and the coming/heralded genetic revolution are BIG deals. Right up there with the Internet, the Bomb, and Fire. Our world is going to be very different due to this revolution. Events like these immediately prompt even the most uninterested person to have deep philosophical conversations; it's that simple and yet grand. This stuff is important, yo.
That said, this revolution is a bit different, as it's not just the economics, the social structure, the food, or the power source that is being changed, it's your kids. Placental mammals are, generally, very protective of their young and we spend a LOT of time and food in raising them. Things like the genetic revolution are going to vastly disrupt that relationship, one that is ~65 million years old. Yes, today we have seen the first step in that timeline and it's not here yet. But all of us know that this power, for the perceived benefit of our progeny, is like an apple is to Adam; we have to eat it.
But there's the rub. We're doing this because we'll want our kids to be better off [0]. But then they will not be your kids. At first, they will mostly be your kids, minus some small percents here and there. But as the generations pass (10, likely less?) the relationship between mother and child will become looser and less obvious. The child won't resemble you, won't behave like you, and sooner than you'd think, won't think of you as a parent.
Here's the other thing, they will be Übermensch too. Not at first, yes, and there will be a lot of 'issues' along the way, ones that very much may derail the whole train. But we all know that they will be here eventually (500 years? 200 years?). The kids will be smarter, faster, stronger, gritter, handsome, charming, witty, etc. You won't hate them or fear them, you will want to be them and be around them and have your kids be like them too. Why? It'll be proven to 95% +/- 0.27% probability (give or take) that the gene editing works, just like you'd think, endlessly reviewed and studied over and over.
But then you get these Übermensch kids making their kids even more Übermenschy. And the problem from before comes screaming in. You're doing all this for your kids, that was the whole point, so that they'd be better off, more genetically blessed. But there is no end to that idea and this kid of revolution can really go exponential (provided there is no 'carrying capacity' to genetics that we've not yet discovered). Eventually, the kids get so far away from the parents that they aren't your kids anymore. The whole reason evaporates into this kinda genetic arms race thingy. Yeah, things will go on for another generation or two past that, but not much more.
We really need to examine WHY we all just know we are all going to get into this genetic arms race. We really need to know how these kids of things end; where are the exit ramps and the what do they look like?
We all want the best for our kids, but now we are facing the question of: how do you define your child?
[0] CRISPR may be able to edit genes in situ, yes, but I am focusing on germline editing and assuming that once fertilized, you're pretty much locked into a set of genes and developmental constraints.
This all sounds great but you're somehow forgetting that there are somewhere around 100.000.000 million humans alive today with genes defective to the point that they will kill their owners/hosts/whatever you want to call them.
Just in kids, there's going to be something like 1 million kids currently alive that don't have a beating heart. Babies don't actually need their heart to be beating, diffusion will provide plenty of oxygen to their organs and brains. They may not have a heart at all (that's rare though, more likely it has a hole big enough to disrupt things enough that it won't keep beating, although even a needle sized hole will kill them if it doesn't close).
These kids will, inevitably, grow. And their growth will kill them. The strongest among them will live something like 2 years.
50 times as many kids will have a degenerative disease. This may go from Leukemia to other blood issues right to ALS or MSC or CF. They will generally start dieing off at 6-8 years and some will grow to 25 or so. But they will die. And just in case you think 25 is nice, MSC/CF kids will feel like they're drowning constantly, 24/7, starting at ages 5-8. ALS is even worse. And yes, I get it, stephen hawking grew to 76. But he is an incredible exception and that was only possible with constant, 24/7/365 nurse attention. It is not generally possible. Even for people who get that 24/7/365 attention he grew to literally double the age of the next patient.
And let's just not talk about people with brain misgrowths or epilepsy. Let's just not talk about how horrible that is. Half of them will never have the intelligence of a 3 year old, but they're still mostly in constant pain.
Another roughly-same-size batch will have a serious defect in their bodies that isn't readily apparent. They will suddenly fall ill, and go from happily going to school to dead in 2 months following at essentially a random time. Not because of a disease or condition, but because their bodies really, really can't deal with things that are overwhelmingly part of our environment, going from UV light to pressure differences, to water, some insects, ...
That's the damage our own genes put humanity through. In total somewhere between 2% and 5% (depends on your ethnicity) of people have a serious genetic defect (something that will strongly affect them until the day they die). About 1% will die from it, mostly while very young.
Clearly, despite the potential for abuse (although some of your examples ... are they even abuse ? Mostly not from the only perspective that matters, that of the kids), there is a massive potential for improvement of the human condition as well.
I personally know a fair number of people that would love to have/ are in dire need of 'genetic repair', not just in the germline, but in vivo as well. Unfortunately, I think the numbers quoted are conservative. Have no doubt, the genetic revolution is just that, a revolution. We are in the early stages of this paradigm shift.
My point was more that this revolution is much larger than 'oh no, rich people will have smart kids' or ' rich people will live forever'. The example I exposed upon was that the very basic instincts of placental mammals are going to be challenged (potentially). Genetic engineering at these fidelities has undoubted potential for good for those in severe need of it. Thank God! But just like fire or quantum mechanics, it can do harm as well, and in ways we haven't been thinking about. Like, the fear of 'rich people are going to use the stock market even better with smarter kids' isn't thinking deep enough. With the genetic revolution you're going to have to first define the 'people' part of 'rich people', because that is going to become a variable.
> At first, they will mostly be your kids, minus some small percents here and there. But as the generations pass (10, likely less?) the relationship between mother and child will become looser and less obvious. The child won't resemble you, won't behave like you, and sooner than you'd think, won't think of you as a parent.
Without genetic engineering, how much are your descendants in 10 generations going to resemble you anyway?
This is the point everyone needs to recognize. I predict we will also reach a point where viruses can be engineered, and engineering defenses will be a public health concern.
This is the world to come, and ethics aren’t a viable defense. The gene pool is going to be stirred up in ways we’ve never seen before, and it’s going to be a good reason for us to stop focusing on our differences and start thinking and acting as one species.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] thread"After the talk, He revealed another pregnancy is on the way".
"It is still unclear if He did what he claims to have done."
"But He appears to have leapfrogged over all of those basic checks"
Well, they say He works in mysterious ways...
Mr. Jiankui would have been less confusing. Editors should be able to identify issues like this and adjust the writing to avoid confusion IMHO.
Edit: it looks the parent comment was edited after I posted this, and said something along the lines of "I wish articles used the researcher's actual name instead of He or She".
He is his family name, Jiankui is his first name. That'd be like calling Dennis Ritchie "Mr. Dennis" throughout an article.
[Corrected, I confused my Oriental honorifics.]
To be honest, if you are not intimately familiar with what names tend to be family names and what names tend to be first name in a given culture, you're just hopelessly boned in English media unless they explicitly call it out for you in the article, because sometimes they leave the names in the Oriental ordering, and sometimes they "conveniently" switch them around for you without saying so. (Statistically speaking, I have to imagine there have been cases where the writer switched it to the English order, and then another writer or the editor switched it again, returning to the Oriental order without realizing it....) The end result is, I suggest everyone cut the English-speakers significant slack on this front when they read an article, because even understanding how names work in the East is still not enough to prevent errors.
Mainly I wanted to emphasise that "first name" is often used in Western culture to mean "given name" but they're not synonymous and using the term "first name" confuses the situation.
first name = given name = forename = personal name; family name = last name = surname
But you're right that for cross-cultural clarity I should have used "given name" instead of "first name", I just have real trouble remembering that term (english is not my mother tongue, and my mother tongue is much more prescriptive about these terms).
And given the author I'm ambivalent, I'd be surprised if they had not considered it, though I guess it might be a blind spot.
I can't imagine it would be that difficult for a reasonably sophisticated organization to keep track of the child as it grew up, and with popularity of genetic testing you could probably find them again anyway.
Edit, after turning off strict mode: if you’re thinking of a doctor performing fertility treatments trying to hide their experiments with CRISPR: that’s trivial. Just don’t tell anyone. Stealing babies from mothers after birth to then leave them at hospital doorsteps would actually seem to be ... counterproductive?
Edit 2, after consulting my equally puzzled dog: you do realize these babies weren’t actually created in a test tube, right? As in: there were still a womb and the person attached involved in the process.
Here's an example for your next scifi thriller: a docility bomb. Identify a few dominant genes that intensify the social conformity bias--it's already hardwired into humans to varying degrees--and make 1000 babies with those adjustments. Leave them on 1000 doorsteps across your opponent's country. If each baby grows and has two children, that's about 3000 in one generation, 9000 in the next, etc. At some point you're affecting the population's voting, working, and revolting tendencies.
After what we've seen in long-game US politics lately, this kind of thing is more plausible than reality.
First, the logistics of doing gene modifications for 1000 babies and then leaving them on 1000 doorsteps across the a country like the US without getting caught or anyone catching on seems....challenging.
Second, each baby won't have two children, at least not in any developed country. The birth rate per woman in the US is at like 1.8 and likely to fall further by the time these babies are able to procreate. This is well below the replacement rate, so even if you select the first generation to only be girls, the second generation would only be ~half girls and it'll shrink from there. So if the birth rate falls to 1.5 and remains constant, the second generation would be 1500, but only 750 girls. The next generation would be 1125, but only 562 girls, etc.
Third, even if the birth rate was higher, this would still take forever to have any noticeable effect. Like centuries.
Fourth, how do you ensure that these mutations don't migrate into your country? Especially over that kind of time span.
Fifth, would these mutations even be stable or predictable over time? No idea, not my field, but I'd be curious. Also, it seems like there's a very good chance they'd be detected with future technology and genetic screening.
Finally, this kind of centuries-long quest would compete with a lot of more time-tested ways to destabilize a country. Why not just go to war, use biological weapons, propaganda, economics warfare, cyber warfare, etc, etc? So much easier and you get your results in a decade instead of 300 years.
what does that mean?
Make {Jews, Muslims, Blacks, Gypsies or whatever} sterile in the long term. I am sure, both governments and individuals have thought about this.
Or maybe I believe that my genes are better than your and I want to spread them?
* The source code is completely undocumented and is written in a variant of Malbolge.
* We don't actually have a reference for that variant of Malbolge, so we're guessing what half the instructions actually do.
* The compiler is buggy and will only rarely compile your code correctly.
* The code itself is not modularized in any sane way. The code for left-pad, for example, also contains code that scans for bitcoin-stealing attacks and automatically removes them when run.
Any sort of idea such as "edit genes to make people taller [or more docile]" is well beyond our ability to understand, especially since a fair amount of those phenotypes are not driven by actual changes in DNA (welcome to epigenetics).
If you think about what advances we've had in the last centuries, this could definitely be possible a few decades/centuries down the road.
True.
> What’s shocking about this “is the blatant disregard of all the rules and conventions we have in place for how one should approach any proposed intervention,” said Leonid Kruglyak, a geneticist at the University of California at Los Angeles, on Twitter.
That's like saying no one can stab you because it is illegal.
It would seem that the systematic error lies squarely on academia and business ignoring each other for far too long.
ED:
Clearly I have failed the communicate what I mean...
There are two different cultures both using the same tools. One believes it controls the tools and gets to set rules for how they are used. The other does not.
Juxtapose, the censorship board for TV in my country, which decided that calling Yugo surplus "genocide canteens" is bad, but reprehensible filth like Fear Factor and Big Brother is OK for prime time. Clearly, opinions do differ and are allowed to differ. - I call into question: Is the case of bioethics vs. business similar?
>That's like saying no one can stab you because it is illegal.
It's like saying no one should stab you because it is illegal.
There are two different cultures both using the same tools. One believes it controls the tools and gets to set rules for how they are used. The other does not.
Juxtapose, the censorship board for TV in my country, which decided that calling Yugo surplus "genocide canteens" is bad, but reprehensible filth like Fear Factor and Big Brother is OK for prime time. Clearly, opinions do differ and are allowed to differ. - I call into question: Is the case of bioethics vs. business similar?
In fact his actions are directly contrary to his own statements and presentations on the ethics of using this techniques on humans. See item 9 in the article. A paper by him on the ethics of this question, written some time ago and in a lengthy review process, was even published in The CRISPR Journal just 2 days after the story broke. His actions directly violate his stated principles in the journal.
Hard to reconcile this into something acceptable or understandable.
I, for one, welcome our new Chinese designer baby overlords.
Furthermore, here are some legal ways to crudely "engineer" the DNA of your future offspring:
- smoking
- drinking
- legal prescription drugs
- exposing yourself to ionizing radiation
That counts for both males and females, of course with pregnant females the effects are vastly amplified.
- it is not actually defensible to abort fetuses based on sex.
- genetic engineering might make populations more susceptible to epidemics
- it would increase pressure on others, or other nations, to follow suit so as not to fall behind in the “race race” of eugenics
- it would seem to devalue non-engineered life, directly threatening the universal dignity of all human beings
- your tired meme is tired
Non-engineered life, in comparison to (hypothetical) well-engineered life ... is indeed less valuable, because it has lesser affordances. Same as any tool or machine, and same as today; insofar as e.g. medics differ from thieves, officers from enlisted, ambulatories from cripples, etc.
Why is the mere "seeming" part, important?
And why lament the devaluation of cottage industry instead of noticing the large net-increase-in-value being delivered by factories?
> it would increase pressure on others, or other nations, to follow suit so as not to fall behind in the “race race” of eugenics
Good; then the transition from non-engineered to well-engineered life will have that much less room for pointless and expensive violence.
> genetic engineering might make populations more susceptible to epidemics
This hypothetical does not merit the kind of absolute opposition that I am seeing in this thread and this article.
Last i checked Organic > GMO
Only if a person believes in souls. Otherwise human fetus and human newborn up to age 1y or so is indistinguishable from any higher animals that humans kill en masse. Human babies are born undeveloped by design.
> genetic engineering might make populations more susceptible to epidemics
Or the other way around including some incurable or debilitating diseases. There is no statistics to prove either point.
> it would increase pressure on others, or other nations, to follow suit so as not to fall behind in the “race race” of eugenics
Which is awesome if you believe in transhumanism and bet on more good vs. evil from technology.
> it would seem to devalue non-engineered life, directly threatening the universal dignity of all human beings
Not an argument for non-believers in souls. There is no inherent dignity of any kind in not using gene modification vs. not using it.
Even if you believe in transhumanism, I don't see how forcing others into that believe system would be "awesome". I like Chocolate Chip ice cream, yet I would oppose a law making it the only allowed flavour.
Other than that, I don't get what souls have to do with anything. I don't believe in God, or souls, or even dualism. Yet dignity, defined as each individual being worthy of respect (as opposed to being a collection of molecules expendable in the service of any other goal), would seem rather fundamental to our code of ethics.
I think by "souls" you're actually just referring to morality in general. And yes, if you subscribe in anything-goes nihilism, then I have nothing to answer you. Except that I'll be coming to rob you of your soul as soon as it becomes beneficial to my narrowly-defined interest.
If you are concerned about gene diversity then yes it is a valid concern. But I must say that with my absolute zero knowledge in this area I still suspect that it is not that easy binary yes/no question and not yes/no consequences of it. E.g. It could be that edits would be sufficiently different and make it non-issue. It could be that edits will eradicate those same corrupted genes that make humans susceptible to epidemics. Or again, you could be right. No way to tell right now.
Next to other concerns. Again, you are worried about dignity of humans. From my point of view fetuses and newborns up to 1y are not human. They are alive but cognitively on a level of animals. At least concerning fetuses it is most definitely true. And so we should allow parents to do whatever non-harmful procedures on them. Defining non-harmful will be very hard.
I'm not anarchist or nihilist or similar. I just feel that we need to progress in gene modification area and fast. And I don't think that any single group of humans can dictate to the other group what they could do unless it is something morally awful. If for example, you oppose gene editing then I think I can't force you to do gene editing but I also think that you can't ban me doing it.
PS: just in case - I do think that gene editing should be a government regulated industry, only not extremely regulated and not affected by ANY religious view of any religious group.
If it's ethically defensible to abort fetuses for no particular reason (i.e. general legalized abortion) then it follows that abortion for any particular reason is ethically defensible.
> - genetic engineering might make populations more susceptible to epidemics
genetic engineering also might make populations less susceptible to epidemics
> - it would increase pressure on others, or other nations, to follow suit so as not to fall behind in the “race race” of eugenics
That's indeed a possibility.
> - it would seem to devalue non-engineered life, directly threatening the universal dignity of all human beings
First of all, there's no such thing as "universal dignity of all human beings", different societies have different conceptualizations of "dignity" and its consequences. Even then, why should being genetically engineered threaten your dignity or that of others? Engineered humans are still humans. Their DNA isn't necessarily any different than what some natural mutation could've come up with.
> - your tired meme is tired
I'm actually dead serious.
It does not follow. Similar: even in "employment-at-will" jurisdictions, where you can fire anyone at any time without giving justifications, you are not allowed to fire someone for a slew of protected reasons, such as becoming a whistleblower, their sex/age/sexual orientation/race, or joining a union.
> genetic engineering also might make populations less susceptible to epidemics
It may make populations less susceptible to disease. It's extremely unlikely that homogenisation of genes would lead to increased resistance to epidemics.
> I'm actually dead serious.
That's what's most frightening.
While diversity ensures better coverage genetic engineering could "patch the holes" as it were.
...which is a contradiction! Legislation like that arises through conflicting requirements coming from different directions. So, if you want to fire someone based on their race, you must not disclose it, but you can still do it. It obviously doesn't make sense, it just happens to be the law.
I'm not talking about the law anyway, I'm talking about ethics. Really the argument I am making is that maybe abortion for any reason isn't ethically defensible, but if it is, then all kinds of other things become defensible on that platform.
But in many places with legal abortions, you are allowed to abort because you don't want it.
The absence of a legal prohibition doesn't mean something is ethical; it can mean that the perceived incidental costs of policing it (remembering that this is always done by human institutions, which are both fallible and corruptible) outweighs the benefits.
This is fairly clearly articulated as the justification of the broad free speech protections in the US, for instance (not all protected speech is also ethical speech), and the same can quite easily be the case with generalized legal abortion (it emphatically is in the US, where the right to abortion rests on Constitutional provisions which, just like the protection of free speech, deal with the costs allowing the government to regulate certain areas, even to address unethical conduct.)
Nobody claimed otherwise. Legality is not the point.
> ... it can mean that the perceived incidental costs of policing it outweighs the benefits.
That's an ethical defense. We can disagree about the costs and benefits of abortion or genetic engineering, but purely based on principles I don't see how you can defend non-medically indicated abortion but not genetic engineering.
> Nobody claimed otherwise.
Yes, you did, when you said: “If it's ethically defensible to abort fetuses for no particular reason (i.e. general legalized abortion)”
That is an explicit statement that the legality of abortion necessarily implies the ethical acceptability of abortion.
> > it can mean that the perceived incidental costs of policing it outweighs the benefits.
> That's an ethical defense.
It's an ethical defense of the legality of a thing that does not depend on the ethical acceptability of the thing itself.
> We can disagree about the costs and benefits of abortion or genetic engineering, but purely based on principles I don't see how you can defend non-medically indicated abortion but not genetic engineering.
One can defend the legality of non-medically indicates abortion but not designer babies theogh genetic engineering because one believes that permitting government inquiry into the justification of abortion (given the fallibility and corruptibility of government) poses an unacceptably high risk of intrusion into legitimate bodily autonomy that is not warranted by the benefits of the prohibition, whereas the same is not true with human genetic engineering (either because the latter does not as closely impact legitimate bodily autonomy issues or because the potential public impacts of each instance of gene editing warrant accepting greater costs to control it.)
No, it isn't. Read carefully: If aborting a fetus for no particular reason (as in "general legalized abortion") is ethically defensible, then...
> It's an ethical defense of the legality of a thing that does not depend on the ethical acceptability of the thing itself.
That's a fair point. Nevertheless, I would maintain that many pro-choicers would consider abortion itself ethically defensible, regardless of the implications of its legality or lack thereof.
> One can defend...
I find this sentence unreadable. Since you are not keen on defending the ethics of abortion, but rather the ethics of the legality of abortion, it's probably moot anyway.
at least in the US you can abort a baby for any reason. The only limiting factor is time i believe.
You don't know that it isn't done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-selective_abortion#United_...
Those who strongly favor male offspring may be a small minority. Even without intervention, there will be more male births. That ratio differs geographically. It would take a lot of sex-selective abortions to show a clear correlation.
Anecdotally, I personally find it ethically indefensible to abort a child due purely to sex, despite otherwise being pro-choice.
Legal restrictions and ethical concerns will not prevent it.
Then what?
If we don't villainize the creators of the atomic bomb (Fermi, Oppenheimer) I see no reason why we should villainize this man.
It is an irony of medicine that dire circumstances make what would otherwise be recklessness permissible since they have nothing to lose.
That said once the technology is ready it would be outright immoral and stupid not to use it. Like not vaccinating against smallpox because it is unfair to those who aren't or not providing education because it would make the educated better off than the uneducated.
In other words, the baby quite likely would not have had AIDS in the first place.
The treatment under discussion is a cure. It would lead to a normal life, free of drugs. It's a sad return to the days of paternalistic medicine to withold superior treatment because, in the opinion of a third party, the inferior treatment is adequate.
Actually it isn't.
"Deactivating CCR5 doesn’t confer complete immunity to HIV, either, since some strains of the virus can enter cells via a different protein."
The small private hospital that approved and held the experiment is one of the "Pu-tian clique", notorious in China for their customarily misleading, predatory and fraudulent medical pratices.
The hospital boss also invested in He's two bio startups, one of which is hawking a failed American 3rd-gen gene sequencing machine "Helicos" that he bought from his American professor, now goes by the name "GenoCare", billed as "the world's most accurate", monopoly-breaking, "fully originally and domestically invented" by him.
When first reported on by state media "the People's Daily", being touted as a glorious historical breakthrough, netizens cheered with overwhelming joy and pride.
Then came critical pieces, netizens appeared to calmed a bit, "Foreign masters displeased!", some started to worry about it, "What if the girls start to pollute the gene pool? It's horrifying." "It's outrageous and immoral, burn He and the girls to death!" "Sterilize them!" "This is an American conspiracy." "I'll be blunt here, the morons who oppose it, don't ever join the line when gene-optimizing treatments come out." "Human thought can't keep up with the advance of technology, it'd be a disaster." "Some people are always jealous of other country's tech, yet here they also don't want to be the first one."
From the outside it seems like they're notorious in China for having power and not being han chinese. Lets not let their ethnic stereotypes go unquestioned.
The "Pu-tian clique" monopolized the Chinese private hospital industry, capitalizing on China's loose regulations and enforcement, started off by peddling snake-oil-like panacea across the country.
Should gene-edited babies be a scientific goal, and if so how should risks be reduced?
(Or, alternately, are they inevitable and how should risks be reduced?)
People worry about designer babies or baby hitlers (to name a few of the cliches). In reality people are trying to fix serious genetic defects and the science to do that in a responsible way is kind of near impossible to conduct in most reputable universities because of ethics. So, it's happening in a much less responsible way elsewhere by people who want to cash in on the obvious demand for any kind of snake oil or real solutions in this space.
As to your other points: Avoiding genetic risks is easily doable with technology that (for that very reason) is generally accepted, such as in-vitro genetic testing for risks, or prenatal screening with the option of abortion.
There is opposition to that technology still, which goes to show that the approach you're advocating is actually the status quo. It's not like reproductive medicine has been standing still.
Beyond that, I don't see how western democracy embarking on such designer baby experiments would change anything, except for just doing the evil deed ourselves: If we decide something is unethical, having moved the line would not stop others from going further still, at least within the frame of your argument.
Woah. I'm not opposed to abortions, but suggesting that killing a future human being due to a gene defect is ethically superior to fixing that defect is beyond comprehension to me. That's on the same level of twisted priorities as Jehovah's Witnesses that would rather let their child die than allow a blood transfusion.
At some point you need to take a step back and ask yourself, what is more important: Clinging to some very abstract ethical values, or saving the life of a human being.
I don't dispute that genetic engineering on humans is ethically controversial, that's not the point. The point is that you're saying that it's more ethical to kill a developing human being than to fix its gene defects. One of those options bears abstract, vague risks which may or may not come true, while the other option has a concrete, 100%-certain outcome, which is the death of a human [1].
[1] Again, I'm not arguing against abortion here.
I'd rather cull a few elephants than try to bio engineer elephants to survive environmental catastrophes, with the possible broad reaching and irreversible consequences on the wider elephant gene pool and environment.
Not saying abortion in case of genetic defect is a light issue, but I'd rather the cure not be worse than the disease.
What's the alternative, because this is a big deal. Even if we ignore where this is going eventually which will be designer babies there's still the issue that when you run this experiment you're creating a person with a permanently altered genome, in many cases that edit will be heritable and there's no way we know of to fix this other than in embryos so if it goes wrong the best that can be offered is palliative care. Simply because other places will be unethical isn't a reason to lower the ethical bar in places with standards.
IMHO cloning or gene modifications are not inherently scary but doing that in a way that has a high failure rate probably is bonafide scary. The scandal is not that people are doing this but they are doing it poorly. When the result is healthy individuals things are great. But otherwise things are not so great when the result is lots of late stage abortions, still born babies, or children with all sorts of unforeseen genetic defects and issues. So, I'd prefer this to happen in modern research institute under reasonable conditions where progress is possible instead of being forbidden and taboo for decades.
Even stuff like stemcell research is highly controversial still, not because of the above but of all sorts of ethical cliches about baby hitlers, designer babies, etc. So, we're not doing all sorts of research that could contribute to curing common defects on the off chance that somebody reenacts the Boys of Brazil or somebody's religious believes or might be confronted with the notion that this Darwin dude might have been on to something after all.
That's kind of what's happening. We're studying it thoroughly in animal models because we still don't know that we can do this reliably and safely there first. Just because we're not ready to allow human testing doesn't mean progress will get frozen.
However, the problem here is that we do not currently have the ability to create designer babies. We have a few clumsy tools that resemble the tools we'd actually need to do it, but in much the same way that a butcher's knife resembles a scalpel. It's an improvement over the era where what we had was a jackhammer, but it's still not suitable for the task. Any attempt to get serious about human germ-line editing with the current toolset isn't going to work. That means, there is very little likelihood of successful, happy outcomes, and a lot of room for unhappy, dangerous, or deadly outcomes.
Before people seriously start trying this, we need to tip that balance to a point where it's at least interesting to discuss. An ethical discussion would have to revolve around costs and benefits, and it's a really easy discussion when it's basically all costs and no benefits. We don't need to invoke any particular philosophy or argue about utilitarianism or the virtues of deontology or what we should be deontological about in that scenario.
So while I don't have a complete answer, one step to the "risk reduction" you ask for is that we still need better tooling so we're not trying to do the equivalent of performing brain surgery with a butcher's knife, before there's even anything all that interesting to discuss. We should have those discussions sooner rather than later, but as the article alludes to, "we" collectively actually have. (The fact we have no ability to enforce that discussion is a problem of some sort, though.)
At least human germ-line experimentation isn't infectious, though.
But they can get you into a rather nasty long-term scenario where in order to produce a viable baby, the only option is to continue to use gene engineering techniques because all "natural" conceptions will be non-viable because of previous edits and gene drives and such. I've seen some variants of this idea in "the literature" (i.e., science fiction), but perhaps nothing quite as stark as that. Most of "the literature" tends to assume that even in a heavily gene-gineered world, if you just stop engineering, something viable will still survive.
Not if the latter is willing and able to summarily exterminate the former in the first generation (or earlier, when they are still developing the tools.)
The discussion in the news could really benefit from reminding people what techniques we are currently using, to make it clear how this technique increased risk without advancing outcomes, and to make it clear that the objections aren't simply against all genetic tech.
I bet this will come out as made up or fatally misinterpreted somehow.
- The most prevalent types of HIV prevalent in Asia are the T-tropic X4 strain which does not depend on CCR5 for infection. The proper genetic target CXCR4 is not a viable target for germline gene editing because it's essential for embryo development[0]. In other words, the children would not be immune to HIV in any case.
- The editing was done using a single sgRNA template and a 20bp+ deletion cannot be produced with this setup. Therefore it's likely that the experimenters never attempted to replicate the naturally occurring Δ32 variant in the first place.
- Δ32 is well studied and known to abolish CCR5 function at both RNA and protein levels. However, both of Nana's CCR5 alleles are novel and it's possible that some function may still be retained because the DNA changes are not extensive enough[1]. These edits really serve no purpose and should never have been implanted.
[0]:https://www.nature.com/articles/31261 [1]:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25043019
Given that a particular person shall catch a terminal contagion of some sort, is it not preferable that he die to it sooner than later, so as to reduce the number of other people to whom he spreads his infection?
Why would a child need immunity from the father's HIV infection that hadn't infected the mother?
Aren't those beliefs themselves harmful?
The same applies to stem cell research.
> How are they harmful?
Because it doesn't stop there.
It starts by banning abortion or restricting to some line (heartbeat, 4 weeks, etc..).
Doing abortion then turns into murder, and is charged by the state as such.
As the radicals (this belief is primarily christian) get more entrenched, then this window slides further into conception=life
Then miscarriages and 'intentional miscarriages' itself becomes a crime of murder. This has already happened in Virginia, Tennessee, and other locations around thw rodl: https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a44552/when-a-m...
Having this belief takes away women's agency of their own bodies. It turns them into second class citizens by making their body worth less than the similar male, solely that they can have a baby.
What's closest to being "correct" is "generally agreed to be good at guiding human behaviour into a direction that may, just possibly, survive the harsh light of passing time without being viewed as crass injustice. Or, you know, wiping out humanity (both senses of the word)".
I thought human experimentation like this went out of style after ww2? Isn't this pretty much a crime against humanity now?
Yes, that the name is the same as English's third-plural masculine singular is confusing.
Of course, we have some short-sighted scientists who only care about their own work and not the long-term implications, like He himself and Church, but the actions and words of these two were roundly condemned.
Hopefully this buys us enough time to see the real long-term implications of starting a Phenotypic Revolution[1], and we can get some world-wide consensus to stop gene-editing in humans.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1729861563/
It was just released a couple of days ago, but it’s an update to our understanding on the origins and evolution of life forms. If you read it now you can be on the leading edge of these conversations before it hits the mainstream.
Just because we are able to split an atom doesn't mean we should end the world through nuclear weapons. Just because we can genetically modify humans doesn't mean we should end DNA-based life on earth through a phenotypic revolution.
It wouldn't be as immediate (likely thousands of years at the shortest), but genetic modifying of humans could start us down the irreversible path within the next 10-50 years. I encourage you to read the book, since it gives the entire overview of the updated hypothesis. It's not a sci-fi novel, just a Biology book with a warning.
Folks go to all sorts of crazy medical clinics already, for all sorts of crazy reasons. I predict within the year, the rise of a 'custom baby' clinic in some country with lazy medical ethic enforcement. And folks will flock there and pay through the nose.
All the argument in the OP is irrelevant. The technical reasons this instance went wrong are irrelevant. The ethics argument is irrelevant.
We have to suit up, to prepare to deal with designer babies among us in their thousands, and soon.
Heck you can buy snake oil on the internet and find out the next day that it doesn't work; yet the snake oil is still for sale. What accountability accrues from gene editing where the effects aren't known for months, years or decades? There will be no accountability.
In other words, something that we are already dealing with as a consequence of too much fast food and video games.
If this gives us a chance to improve humanity, we should embrace it. Yes, there will be missteps along the way - but the ends justifies the means.
That said, this revolution is a bit different, as it's not just the economics, the social structure, the food, or the power source that is being changed, it's your kids. Placental mammals are, generally, very protective of their young and we spend a LOT of time and food in raising them. Things like the genetic revolution are going to vastly disrupt that relationship, one that is ~65 million years old. Yes, today we have seen the first step in that timeline and it's not here yet. But all of us know that this power, for the perceived benefit of our progeny, is like an apple is to Adam; we have to eat it.
But there's the rub. We're doing this because we'll want our kids to be better off [0]. But then they will not be your kids. At first, they will mostly be your kids, minus some small percents here and there. But as the generations pass (10, likely less?) the relationship between mother and child will become looser and less obvious. The child won't resemble you, won't behave like you, and sooner than you'd think, won't think of you as a parent.
Here's the other thing, they will be Übermensch too. Not at first, yes, and there will be a lot of 'issues' along the way, ones that very much may derail the whole train. But we all know that they will be here eventually (500 years? 200 years?). The kids will be smarter, faster, stronger, gritter, handsome, charming, witty, etc. You won't hate them or fear them, you will want to be them and be around them and have your kids be like them too. Why? It'll be proven to 95% +/- 0.27% probability (give or take) that the gene editing works, just like you'd think, endlessly reviewed and studied over and over.
But then you get these Übermensch kids making their kids even more Übermenschy. And the problem from before comes screaming in. You're doing all this for your kids, that was the whole point, so that they'd be better off, more genetically blessed. But there is no end to that idea and this kid of revolution can really go exponential (provided there is no 'carrying capacity' to genetics that we've not yet discovered). Eventually, the kids get so far away from the parents that they aren't your kids anymore. The whole reason evaporates into this kinda genetic arms race thingy. Yeah, things will go on for another generation or two past that, but not much more.
We really need to examine WHY we all just know we are all going to get into this genetic arms race. We really need to know how these kids of things end; where are the exit ramps and the what do they look like?
We all want the best for our kids, but now we are facing the question of: how do you define your child?
[0] CRISPR may be able to edit genes in situ, yes, but I am focusing on germline editing and assuming that once fertilized, you're pretty much locked into a set of genes and developmental constraints.
Just in kids, there's going to be something like 1 million kids currently alive that don't have a beating heart. Babies don't actually need their heart to be beating, diffusion will provide plenty of oxygen to their organs and brains. They may not have a heart at all (that's rare though, more likely it has a hole big enough to disrupt things enough that it won't keep beating, although even a needle sized hole will kill them if it doesn't close).
These kids will, inevitably, grow. And their growth will kill them. The strongest among them will live something like 2 years.
50 times as many kids will have a degenerative disease. This may go from Leukemia to other blood issues right to ALS or MSC or CF. They will generally start dieing off at 6-8 years and some will grow to 25 or so. But they will die. And just in case you think 25 is nice, MSC/CF kids will feel like they're drowning constantly, 24/7, starting at ages 5-8. ALS is even worse. And yes, I get it, stephen hawking grew to 76. But he is an incredible exception and that was only possible with constant, 24/7/365 nurse attention. It is not generally possible. Even for people who get that 24/7/365 attention he grew to literally double the age of the next patient.
And let's just not talk about people with brain misgrowths or epilepsy. Let's just not talk about how horrible that is. Half of them will never have the intelligence of a 3 year old, but they're still mostly in constant pain.
Another roughly-same-size batch will have a serious defect in their bodies that isn't readily apparent. They will suddenly fall ill, and go from happily going to school to dead in 2 months following at essentially a random time. Not because of a disease or condition, but because their bodies really, really can't deal with things that are overwhelmingly part of our environment, going from UV light to pressure differences, to water, some insects, ...
That's the damage our own genes put humanity through. In total somewhere between 2% and 5% (depends on your ethnicity) of people have a serious genetic defect (something that will strongly affect them until the day they die). About 1% will die from it, mostly while very young.
Clearly, despite the potential for abuse (although some of your examples ... are they even abuse ? Mostly not from the only perspective that matters, that of the kids), there is a massive potential for improvement of the human condition as well.
My point was more that this revolution is much larger than 'oh no, rich people will have smart kids' or ' rich people will live forever'. The example I exposed upon was that the very basic instincts of placental mammals are going to be challenged (potentially). Genetic engineering at these fidelities has undoubted potential for good for those in severe need of it. Thank God! But just like fire or quantum mechanics, it can do harm as well, and in ways we haven't been thinking about. Like, the fear of 'rich people are going to use the stock market even better with smarter kids' isn't thinking deep enough. With the genetic revolution you're going to have to first define the 'people' part of 'rich people', because that is going to become a variable.
Without genetic engineering, how much are your descendants in 10 generations going to resemble you anyway?
This is the world to come, and ethics aren’t a viable defense. The gene pool is going to be stirred up in ways we’ve never seen before, and it’s going to be a good reason for us to stop focusing on our differences and start thinking and acting as one species.
WTF, The Atlantic? Get some copy editing.