DNA testing already exists within a restricted framework. It's not like parents can pick subjective physical traits when expecting a babies. It doesn't seem crazy to me to expand the list of diseases we test for.
what ethics? a 26-week old fetus is considered to be a bundle of cells, and it is perfectly acceptable to dispose of it for any reason or no reason at all. given that, I see no rationale to prohibit or condemn disposing of undesirable embryos
Sure, you don't need a womb to survive, but you still need a pretty specialized environment. See all the concerns about global warming - mangle our environment just a relatively little bit and we're toast.
You're both humans with your own unique DNA. One of you is a lot younger than the other.
I wouldn't kill a thirty-year-old because they're doomed to get cancer, nor a one-year-old, nor a negative-six-month-old.
While that's true, few born earlier than 32 weeks survive without neonatal intensive care. 20% of babies that do survive birth at 26 weeks develop lifelong health problems.
hm, i don't really see it that way. Is there some magical threshold date, or set of features, which determines the point at which you're no longer OK with disposing of embryos? I'm pro-abortion but I still consider the ethics of abortion to be fraught with potential moral dilemmas.
The ethical dilemmas associated with this won't be in doing it, but in doing it for whom, and its implications for fundamental ideas underlying society, like merit, compensation, and justice.
Where does fault lie for something like criminality, if someone is environmentally disadvantaged and denied low-risk genotype for it? Doesn't the fault then lie in the state? If you live in a society where embryos can be selected for very low risk of criminality, but someone is born without that opportunity, and then causes you harm, isn't that a form of neglect on the part of society?
If I knew for a fact that I'd get terminal cancer by the time I was a young adult, I'd certainly prefer to have never been born. What a miserable life that would almost certainly be, for myself, those who got to know me and then lose me, and for those I would be dependent on.
This, I hope, is another step we take towards near-eradication of genetic diseases. And good riddance
What if your parents found out when you were 12 months old? Would you wish that they had euthanised you at that age, before you were really self-aware, and before they got too emotionally attached to (or financially invested in) you?
I'm guessing maybe you don't have kids? By the time my kid was 12 months old, I was emotionally attached enough that losing her would've been a life-destroying level of devastation. I don't think your thought exercise works, because losing a year-old kid is such a horrible tragedy for the parents.
I'm glad that you were emotionally attached to your child when they were 12 months old, and that is completely normal. I apologise if I gave the impression that I thought parents would find it easy to lose a child at that age.
The point of my thought experiment, though, was not to imagine what a parent would do, but what someone with a terminal diagnose would wish their parents had done.
I accept that this is not an easy thing to talk about, nor are there any easy answers, so I'm not trying to start an argument. If someone wants to think about it, they can, and it's just a difficult hypothetical that came to my mind when I read the original comment.
> What a miserable life that would almost certainly be
What criteria are you using to make this judgement?
> towards near-eradication of genetic diseases
My concern would be that we might be unable to distinguish useful genetic adaptations from disease. How do we actually make these decisions? Examine the DNA and then look for SNPs of concern? Is that a perfect process, or one dominated by statistics? How likely is it that this method will arrive at the expected goal?
>My concern would be that we might be unable to distinguish useful genetic adaptations from disease. How do we actually make these decisions? Examine the DNA and then look for SNPs of concern? Is that a perfect process, or one dominated by statistics? How likely is it that this method will arrive at the expected goal?
We sort of do this at a high level and with less empiricism anyways. We are often trained what characteristics in a mate we find attractive and use selection based on those attributes or make our own independnet choices, discarding these trends. Sometimes we make good choices, sometimes we make bad choices.
The concern I would have more here is that the decision process would be fairly standardized and start to lack diversity more than us making the "wrong" choices as we currently do. We're going to make the wrong choices, period, because we don't have a crystal ball to predict all future cases where some attributes we deem harmful turn out to be more useful.
The way we currently fight this and thrive is through a wide degree of diversity in the selection amd decision process, allowing for a fairly wide diversity of attributes. If the process becomes methodical, we're likely to start converging on fewer and fewer "acceptable" mutations. If we're advanced enough that we somehow can tell good and bad genetic attributes from a survival standpoint then maybe this isn't terrible but I think that is a challenging problem in and of itself. Just assume you can arbitrarily change human attributes around, what is the ideal human?
Then we have the social implications. All of this reminds me of the movie GATACCA.
> My concern would be that we might be unable to distinguish useful genetic adaptations from disease. How do we actually make these decisions? Examine the DNA and then look for SNPs of concern? Is that a perfect process, or one dominated by statistics? How likely is it that this method will arrive at the expected goal?
For a good example of where this can wrong and have unintended side effects, look at the babies that had their genetics edited with CRISPR by He Jiankui. Their genes were edited to make them less susceptible to HIV, yet that genetic modification has biological consequences[1][2] outside of preventing HIV, as the edited gene coded for a receptor protein on cells.
Many factors were overlooked when doing the gene editing[2], and the kids' genes were edited both incorrectly and not optimally. The edits also affect their germline, meaning that their future kids could potentially inherit similar genetic errors.
As a result, the HIV susceptibility "benefit" might not actually be so beneficial, and even if it was, there are strains of HIV that don't use that receptor protein as vector for infection, as well. Research has even suggested that they might be more susceptible to HIV, now, and that their particular mutations could result in shorter lifespans than people without the mutations.
I wouldn't feel too well about having my genome botched for profit before I was even born, learning that I have an outdated version of an edited gene that might kill me, and being told that my kids would potentially inherit some alpha version of a gene that doesn't even work right. The same feelings would apply to lab selected natural mutations, as well.
I think we're at a stage where we do not have a complete, or even satisfactory, understanding of our genome and biology, and the same goes for both our understanding of gene editing and selection, and their consequences. For example, we have a very primitive understanding of how the brain works, and editing, or selecting, genes that are expressed in the nervous system could have serious deleterious effects, which is something that is hypothesized to have accidentally happened with the CRISPR twins[3].
You might have been able to make a contribution to humanity before death. Think of the great contribution to physics from Stephen Hawking. What if he was eradicated because they could test for ALS?
The greatest contribution we will all make is carbon emissions that are ruining the planet. Another reason to skip the kids and rescue dogs. The robots will take care of me in the nursing home.
What I find interesting is that most actual people with cancer don't feel that way. They find meaning in their life, however short, and are glad to have gotten experienced it. It's only cynical people online that think life would be so unredeemably awful that it's better to have never existed. Similarly, you'll often see people on the internet say they don't believe God could possibly exist because there are many people starving around the world. Yet most of the starving poor in the world is religious, often very much so.
Many religious people are born into it. Converting educated adults is an uphill battle. Church planters will admit as much. So not sure asking starving masses is the best evidence that atheism based on the problem of evil is somehow illegitimate.
All that said, once people are born they deserve the digity to decide themselves whether they live or die. With a lot of help and emotional support before making any permanent choices.
Before people are born parent's likewise should have as much information as possible before they have to make a permanent choice for someone else. IMO that should include the option to abort a pregnancy very likely to lead to a lifetime of suffering.
IME many churches, even of the same faith, are trying to win over people who don't believe at all and those who don't believe the same way. So people who don't X, Y, Z as they do are doing it wrong or not truly A, B, C.
Rise of agnosticism and atheism also motivates them to action. After all these are eternal souls bound to suffer forever in flames and darkness.
> these are eternal souls bound to suffer forever in flames and darkness.
This doesn’t make any sense to me (assuming you are not being sarcastic). Does it make sense that Joseph Stalin and Random Joe (who was a good person, but wasn’t truly A, B, C) would both suffer equal fates? What about a person who lived thousands of years ago deep in a jungle and didn’t even have an opportunity? It doesn’t make any sense.
Some churches will interpret certain scriptures as saying the ignorant will hear their gospel after death and before final judgement. IMO it's a lot of hoop jumping nonsense.
I'm assuming by educated adults, you mean atheists. Converting educated religious adults to atheism is also an uphill battle. Perhaps that, like my previous post, says more about the nature of people than about atheism/ theism.
Very few educated adults I know have changed faiths, except to leave the faith of their parents. It appears to me that evidence based education is an obstacle to religion.
I don’t understand this sentiment. I have no preference for whether I was born or not. It is an immutable fact of the universe that I cannot change.
I was a pro-abortion rally (as a supporter of abortion) and an old man asked me, “Aren’t you glad your mother didn’t abort you?” And I told him “not really.”
A cancer deadly in 2022 may be completely and easily curable by 2042. Or it may not. But medicine is progressing at quite a fast pace.
It is dangerous to make such decisions in advance on behalf of people not yet born. My wife was born in the 1980s with a rather problematic heart condition. She is now completely fine aside from a few things she cannot do. I am glad that she is alive and that we were able to meet.
Would be interesting to see if we find other "socially undesirable" traits and if those can be selectively removed - no more crime! No more riots, just a compliant population of workers.
Conversely, you can argue that modern medicine affects humanity's gene pool much stronger in the opposite direction by giving people with diverse genetic diseases a much longer lifespan than they would have had a century ago.
It is extremely important to understand that the test referenced here, a non-invasive cell free test, is a screening test and not a diagnostic test. Screening tests are used to flag individuals for follow-up testing via one of several diagnostic methods. False positives (and false negatives) are expected in this context. I don't think that jumping to conclusions regarding eugenics is at all warranted when discussing this screening test.
> The initial process of polygenic embryo testing looks pretty comparable to the single-gene tests that have been around much longer. First, cells are drawn from an embryo a few days old, and the DNA is processed.
Am I looking at the correct test from the article?
To my knowledge, any test or procedure that involves piercing the amniotic sac, as this one does, carries around a 4% (additional) risk of miscarriage. I'm in a HN out-crowd that doesn't accept those odds in exchange for possibly-incorrect information about the fetus.
In my experience [0], doctors overwhelmingly recommend amniocentesis because it can be used to screen for a number of genetic issues and "wouldn't you want to know?"
[0] all of my experience is with a certain HMO provider that seems to regard pregnancy as a dangerous condition, and every time my wife gave birth in their hospital, one of their first questions during the follow-up appointment is either "how are we going to prevent this from happening again?" or just "so you know how birth control works, right?"
When I was at MIT, my wife’s circle of “moms- / moms-to-be group” was mostly white/asian but had one latino. They had a similar experience with on-campus health of being pushed the “how can we stop this from happening again” messaging from the nurses during routine checkins.
I explicitly remember how shocked they were that only the latino was repeatedly asked if she wanted an abortion every time she had checkups.
These cultural selection pressures are fascinating, esp. in places like NY city where a majority of conceptions do not end in a successful pregnancy in the black community.
Right now it appears unreliable, but once it's eventually proven to be nearly perfect, it should be compulsory with penalties for child cruelty if not followed.
Birthing a child with genetic defects that would be detectable by common methods is morally equivalent to harming a healthy child in the exact same way. In both cases the end state is a damaged human that wouldn't exist if not for the actions of (presumably...) adults. Legal consequences should therefore be equivalent.
I'm aware it's outside of the Overton window now, but so was legal homosexuality not that far ago (in many Western countries) - support was fundamentally religious in nature and eventually disappeared. Assuming general progress in genetics, the situation is going to repeat here. Eventually only a tiny fringe will think it should be legal to make a new kid with no genetic tests during pregnancy (or before implantation).
Fixing found problems with genetic engineering is also fine, if feasible.
Which is precisely the point. Mandating eugenics inevitably harms the out groups. The definition of "birth defect" is highly cultural and you will be imposing your definition on others. You might be comfortable saying that a cleft palate is defect , but what about down syndrom, autism, bipolar disorder, deafness, gender disphoria, below average intelligence etc? There is no easy place to draw the line and even a conservatively drawn line will means extinction for whole groups of people. That is such a drastic choice that of it is to be made, it must happen organically through collective individual choices not an autocratic mandate. Doing it the later way is simply Evil, and I don't use that word for many things. Even the former way carries risks and shouldn't be taken lightly.
I’m a pretty liberal guy, but IVF has never sat right with me. Thousands of dollars to produce a baby when living ones already exist.
Of course adoption is no cakewalk and itself costs many thousands of dollars (plus the emotional toll).
In the end, though, the entire idea of having kids at all is repulsive to me. Why bring another life into this fucked up world? You’re just going to get divorced and traumatize the kid anyway. Better instead to make robots to do the jobs those kids would do when they grow up.
At the very least, leave the baby making to the immigrant families.
Those are some very strong assumptions you're making about why people have children.
I'm glad you've figured out that that's not for you so definitely don't have kids and continue (hopefully?) to contribute to the betterment of those alive today.
People have children for all sorts of reasons. Nowadays they are more emotional decisions or influenced by biological desires but those are still valid. For those who enjoy having and raising children to lead good lives, it is rewarding and makes existence more enjoyable.
The beauty is that most of us can make our own decisions though there is still societal pressure to have kids. Which is obvious because our species will die out without them.
It is interesting how most of the commenters, even here, automatically think about a dystopian future where "a bad result => eliminate the embryo, abort it".
This is a specific kind of dystopia in which genetic damage is "read only" and cannot be altered. But genetic therapies are being developed, too. One day, we will be able to fix quite a lot of those problems already in utero.
This may yet breed another kind of dystopic nightmares, but I would expect a much more mixed scenarios; a better future for some people who would either be aborted or suffer from debilitating conditions for all their lives.
80 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 90.4 ms ] threadA bigger bundle, but still a bundle.
Sure, you don't need a womb to survive, but you still need a pretty specialized environment. See all the concerns about global warming - mangle our environment just a relatively little bit and we're toast.
You're both humans with your own unique DNA. One of you is a lot younger than the other.
I wouldn't kill a thirty-year-old because they're doomed to get cancer, nor a one-year-old, nor a negative-six-month-old.
"For 26 weeks of gestation, the percentages were significantly higher with a survival rate of 81.4% and survival without impairment rate of 75.6%."
https://www.verywellfamily.com/premature-birth-and-viability...
have you not been consuming the news from reputable sources and correct twitter opinions in the past few months?
Where does fault lie for something like criminality, if someone is environmentally disadvantaged and denied low-risk genotype for it? Doesn't the fault then lie in the state? If you live in a society where embryos can be selected for very low risk of criminality, but someone is born without that opportunity, and then causes you harm, isn't that a form of neglect on the part of society?
This, I hope, is another step we take towards near-eradication of genetic diseases. And good riddance
What if your parents found out when you were 12 months old? Would you wish that they had euthanised you at that age, before you were really self-aware, and before they got too emotionally attached to (or financially invested in) you?
Not as hard as losing a one-year-old, I'm pretty sure, but also not just a blip.
The point of my thought experiment, though, was not to imagine what a parent would do, but what someone with a terminal diagnose would wish their parents had done.
I accept that this is not an easy thing to talk about, nor are there any easy answers, so I'm not trying to start an argument. If someone wants to think about it, they can, and it's just a difficult hypothetical that came to my mind when I read the original comment.
What criteria are you using to make this judgement?
> towards near-eradication of genetic diseases
My concern would be that we might be unable to distinguish useful genetic adaptations from disease. How do we actually make these decisions? Examine the DNA and then look for SNPs of concern? Is that a perfect process, or one dominated by statistics? How likely is it that this method will arrive at the expected goal?
We sort of do this at a high level and with less empiricism anyways. We are often trained what characteristics in a mate we find attractive and use selection based on those attributes or make our own independnet choices, discarding these trends. Sometimes we make good choices, sometimes we make bad choices.
The concern I would have more here is that the decision process would be fairly standardized and start to lack diversity more than us making the "wrong" choices as we currently do. We're going to make the wrong choices, period, because we don't have a crystal ball to predict all future cases where some attributes we deem harmful turn out to be more useful.
The way we currently fight this and thrive is through a wide degree of diversity in the selection amd decision process, allowing for a fairly wide diversity of attributes. If the process becomes methodical, we're likely to start converging on fewer and fewer "acceptable" mutations. If we're advanced enough that we somehow can tell good and bad genetic attributes from a survival standpoint then maybe this isn't terrible but I think that is a challenging problem in and of itself. Just assume you can arbitrarily change human attributes around, what is the ideal human?
Then we have the social implications. All of this reminds me of the movie GATACCA.
For a good example of where this can wrong and have unintended side effects, look at the babies that had their genetics edited with CRISPR by He Jiankui. Their genes were edited to make them less susceptible to HIV, yet that genetic modification has biological consequences[1][2] outside of preventing HIV, as the edited gene coded for a receptor protein on cells.
Many factors were overlooked when doing the gene editing[2], and the kids' genes were edited both incorrectly and not optimally. The edits also affect their germline, meaning that their future kids could potentially inherit similar genetic errors.
As a result, the HIV susceptibility "benefit" might not actually be so beneficial, and even if it was, there are strains of HIV that don't use that receptor protein as vector for infection, as well. Research has even suggested that they might be more susceptible to HIV, now, and that their particular mutations could result in shorter lifespans than people without the mutations.
I wouldn't feel too well about having my genome botched for profit before I was even born, learning that I have an outdated version of an edited gene that might kill me, and being told that my kids would potentially inherit some alpha version of a gene that doesn't even work right. The same feelings would apply to lab selected natural mutations, as well.
I think we're at a stage where we do not have a complete, or even satisfactory, understanding of our genome and biology, and the same goes for both our understanding of gene editing and selection, and their consequences. For example, we have a very primitive understanding of how the brain works, and editing, or selecting, genes that are expressed in the nervous system could have serious deleterious effects, which is something that is hypothesized to have accidentally happened with the CRISPR twins[3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#Potential_costs
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair#Scientific_b...
[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/21/137309/the-crisp...
Youre not more likely to be a genius if you have ALS so might as well roll the dice with someone with less health problems.
All that said, once people are born they deserve the digity to decide themselves whether they live or die. With a lot of help and emotional support before making any permanent choices.
Before people are born parent's likewise should have as much information as possible before they have to make a permanent choice for someone else. IMO that should include the option to abort a pregnancy very likely to lead to a lifetime of suffering.
Rise of agnosticism and atheism also motivates them to action. After all these are eternal souls bound to suffer forever in flames and darkness.
This doesn’t make any sense to me (assuming you are not being sarcastic). Does it make sense that Joseph Stalin and Random Joe (who was a good person, but wasn’t truly A, B, C) would both suffer equal fates? What about a person who lived thousands of years ago deep in a jungle and didn’t even have an opportunity? It doesn’t make any sense.
So are many atheists, I grew up with some myself.
>Converting educated adults is an uphill battle
I'm assuming by educated adults, you mean atheists. Converting educated religious adults to atheism is also an uphill battle. Perhaps that, like my previous post, says more about the nature of people than about atheism/ theism.
I was a pro-abortion rally (as a supporter of abortion) and an old man asked me, “Aren’t you glad your mother didn’t abort you?” And I told him “not really.”
Also with the soon revocation of Roe vs Wade, what is the reason for this testing, other than to increase the health insurance costs for you children?
It is dangerous to make such decisions in advance on behalf of people not yet born. My wife was born in the 1980s with a rather problematic heart condition. She is now completely fine aside from a few things she cannot do. I am glad that she is alive and that we were able to meet.
Will be interesting to see how these passive eugenics affects humanity centuries from now from a gene pool standpoint.
From the article:
> The initial process of polygenic embryo testing looks pretty comparable to the single-gene tests that have been around much longer. First, cells are drawn from an embryo a few days old, and the DNA is processed.
Am I looking at the correct test from the article?
To my knowledge, any test or procedure that involves piercing the amniotic sac, as this one does, carries around a 4% (additional) risk of miscarriage. I'm in a HN out-crowd that doesn't accept those odds in exchange for possibly-incorrect information about the fetus.
Are you? A 1:25 chance of miscarrage for a screening test seems very high.
Your question still stands about whether this is piercing the amniotic sac.
[0] all of my experience is with a certain HMO provider that seems to regard pregnancy as a dangerous condition, and every time my wife gave birth in their hospital, one of their first questions during the follow-up appointment is either "how are we going to prevent this from happening again?" or just "so you know how birth control works, right?"
I explicitly remember how shocked they were that only the latino was repeatedly asked if she wanted an abortion every time she had checkups.
These cultural selection pressures are fascinating, esp. in places like NY city where a majority of conceptions do not end in a successful pregnancy in the black community.
Thus the risk is avoidable.
Birthing a child with genetic defects that would be detectable by common methods is morally equivalent to harming a healthy child in the exact same way. In both cases the end state is a damaged human that wouldn't exist if not for the actions of (presumably...) adults. Legal consequences should therefore be equivalent.
I'm aware it's outside of the Overton window now, but so was legal homosexuality not that far ago (in many Western countries) - support was fundamentally religious in nature and eventually disappeared. Assuming general progress in genetics, the situation is going to repeat here. Eventually only a tiny fringe will think it should be legal to make a new kid with no genetic tests during pregnancy (or before implantation).
Fixing found problems with genetic engineering is also fine, if feasible.
Which is precisely the point. Mandating eugenics inevitably harms the out groups. The definition of "birth defect" is highly cultural and you will be imposing your definition on others. You might be comfortable saying that a cleft palate is defect , but what about down syndrom, autism, bipolar disorder, deafness, gender disphoria, below average intelligence etc? There is no easy place to draw the line and even a conservatively drawn line will means extinction for whole groups of people. That is such a drastic choice that of it is to be made, it must happen organically through collective individual choices not an autocratic mandate. Doing it the later way is simply Evil, and I don't use that word for many things. Even the former way carries risks and shouldn't be taken lightly.
Of course adoption is no cakewalk and itself costs many thousands of dollars (plus the emotional toll).
In the end, though, the entire idea of having kids at all is repulsive to me. Why bring another life into this fucked up world? You’re just going to get divorced and traumatize the kid anyway. Better instead to make robots to do the jobs those kids would do when they grow up.
At the very least, leave the baby making to the immigrant families.
I'm glad you've figured out that that's not for you so definitely don't have kids and continue (hopefully?) to contribute to the betterment of those alive today.
People have children for all sorts of reasons. Nowadays they are more emotional decisions or influenced by biological desires but those are still valid. For those who enjoy having and raising children to lead good lives, it is rewarding and makes existence more enjoyable.
The beauty is that most of us can make our own decisions though there is still societal pressure to have kids. Which is obvious because our species will die out without them.
I also don’t care if our species dies out. That will happen long after I am gone
This is a specific kind of dystopia in which genetic damage is "read only" and cannot be altered. But genetic therapies are being developed, too. One day, we will be able to fix quite a lot of those problems already in utero.
This may yet breed another kind of dystopic nightmares, but I would expect a much more mixed scenarios; a better future for some people who would either be aborted or suffer from debilitating conditions for all their lives.