Despite laws meant to prevent genetic discrimination, the world of Gattaca is a highly stratified one with two distinct classes: the valids—who have the right genes, the most prestigious jobs and the highest quality of life—and the in-valids, who were conceived in the typical fashion and are relegated to menial work and relative poverty. Eugenics also risks creating a genetically homogenous population that is far more vulnerable to disease and freak deleterious mutations than a diverse one.
Isn't their significant evidence that more diverse gene pools, even unexpected combinations of genes are usually more adapted in several ways, because of heterosis [0]. It seems foolish that this one new factor would make eugenics any more successful than its last phase of popular. Not to mention it the deeply-held 'moral repugnance'[1] aspect.
Variation can be deliberately increased, not just decreased. And PGD creates an incentive for the former: the greater the difference between your own and your partner's DNA, the greater the expected benefit from informed selection.
I was just going to mention that: given economies of scale custom babies will probably share a lot of identical prefab genetic blocks for every specification since it would be far cheaper than engineering every trait from scratch.
At that point there would be enough GM humans walking around that a virus might evolve to attack only them, and it would spread like wildfire among the population given the lack of genetic variation, the only exception being old regular humans and maybe a few of those with parents wealthy enough to get them tailor-made without any of the preexisting "parts" that the majority uses.
Heterosis just means there are twice as many factors to worry over. If it becomes too faddish to pick the exact same two genetic codings for a particular gene or select away every gene not on a preferred list, we still lose and immense amount of variability within a generation.
The ultimate end is not even to simply pick the contents of the 46 chromosomes. It is medically plausible to purposefully create human chimeras -- basically it when fraternal twins happen to combine to become one fetus. ("We have selected these 46 chromosomes for the neural material, and these other 46 for the skeletal-muscular system. Looks like we have a few fetuses where the combination took to the right locations. We destroyed many eggs, but it is all worth it so your son can be the best, right?")
Lots of reasons to leave randomness in, from a societal viewpoint. But nobody will stand up and say "screw over my kid so society benefits". We're all mostly selfish, exquisitely selfish when it comes to kids, we will all want our child to be the one that is guaranteed to come out useful and productive.
That's exactly the pitch of the doctor in Gattaca.
The world is harsh and unforgiving, genetic is only a tiny fraction of all the possible problems, why would you not give your kid the best chances with the things you can control ?
Yes, I think it will happen. There is a market for this stuff, and, in time, when and why to say N-O will become less and less obvious.
There are problems with genetic selection. But I think the larger problem will be the personal toll of new found ways of negatively assessing ourselves, and pointlessly diagnosing our inevitable sundry personal weaknesses as medical syndromes.
One reason why it might _not_ happen - lack of demand. Clearly I have a very small sample so it's merely an anecdote, but I haven't met anybody that wants this for themselves, even if they think other people will want it.
I know some people will want it, but it would need to be near universal for something like Gattaca to become reality.
Hmmm...my wife and I are trying right now and we would 100% want it. Not for sex, eye color, or hair color, but essentially everything else I would want if given the option.
I'd think gene therapies for people who discover that they're predisposed to diseases after DNA screening would have greater demand. There's a lot more people currently alive than being born. Each generation cares about its own survival more than future ones.
Doesn't everybody do a chromosome check now? Lots of people (most people) want it and do it, or something like it. Its currently limited only by what is affordable.
Probably outing myself as the hippy around here, but my wife and I opted out for all 3 of our kids.
The entire traditional / medical / western / whatever you want to call it model of childbirth in New Jersey is very much about making you acutely aware of the things that you should be afraid of during the pregnancy. All of these things are detectable with a litany of very expensive tests! And you will be lectured and browbeaten to hell and back if you decline, so I imagine that factors heavily into the popularity of chromosome tests these days.
I hope it all worked out for you. Much of the testing has results that are not actionable (short of abortion) so that helps decide what's worth doing and what's not.
The value of information depends on how that information will change your actions.
Current prenatal testing, in essence, warns you about some (not nearly all) harsh diseases, and people may choose abortion after finding that out. There are some diseases where it actually allows a cure/therapy even before the embryo is born; but currently that's rather rare; so in general, if someone has already decided that they won't do an abortion, then doing those tests has no practical value at all.
If I had the financial resources, and the science was well understood, I'd definitely consider it. I hold no sentimental attachment to the "natural" way of doing things -- cancer is natural, but that doesn't preclude me from seeking chemotherapy. Similarly, why wouldn't you use new medical science to make your baby as healthy as possible? And, if you've accepted "screening for genetic defects" as an acceptable use of the technology, why would "selecting for the most desirable traits" not be?
Nature and nurture are just two factors that contribute to a child's wellbeing and success in life. If you'd be willing to send your child to a private school in the hopes of giving them a better education and a leg-up on the competition, why not give them better looks and higher intelligence (were it possible), as well?
I've yet to see any convincing ethical arguments as to why this would be wrong. So far, every argument made in opposition to designer babies seems to boil down to "it's not natural". Well, neither is agriculture, medicine, the Internet... as a species, we've gotten to where we are by changing nature to suit us. Why should procreation be any different?
I think this is a very big conversation for me to fire off a quick HN comment. I'm mostly ignorant about this, and my Christian faith probably clouds my judgement, so it's difficult to say whether I'm being objective and rational.
However, I'm not convinced that medical science is there yet, so my child is just an iteration for big pharma. Perhaps we produce a whole generation of intelligent children who develop Alzheimer's when they're 25. I realise that argument is made against every new technology (especially medical), but making an active choice somehow makes me culpable and it would be harder to live with it.
Also, there's the idea of what happens if this becomes universal. Since some traits seem universally desirable, all parents will choose to grant them. So if everyone is given the genes to be massively intelligent, is that a good thing?
Then there's the quality of life argument, which makes me deeply uncomfortable. Essentially, choosing a fully-sighted embryo over a partially-sighted one implicitly says "partially-sighted people are likely to have lower quality of life than fully-sighted ones", and that sounds wrong both ethically and practically.
This is a really difficult debate, though. Put in the hypothetical situation of having to choose, I guess I would end up choosing the best possible embryo, but I'd rather not have to make the choice to begin with.
> I'm not convinced that medical science is there yet
Agreed, but I think it's a matter of if, not when. As our knowledge of gene expression, epigenetics, protein folding, and the like increases, the set of things we can't do will shrink.
>Perhaps we produce a whole generation of intelligent children who develop Alzheimer's when they're 25
It's certainly possible that we'll leap before we look, but I'd hope not. We've had examples of that in the past, but the result of those tragedies is that research processes have improved. They're far from perfect, but they've certainly gotten better.
>So if everyone is given the genes to be massively intelligent, is that a good thing?
I'd say so, yes.
>choosing a fully-sighted embryo over a partially-sighted one implicitly says "partially-sighted people are likely to have lower quality of life than fully-sighted ones", and that sounds wrong both ethically and practically.
I think, on average, it's simply an objective fact that "full-sighted people have a better quality of life than partially-sighted people". I can't think of any way that astigmatism has improved my life, and it's something I plan on rectifying permanently once my finances allow it.
As for being ethically wrong, I don't see it. Just because someone is perfectly capable of living a happy and fulfilled life with a birth defect doesn't mean the lack thereof wouldn't be preferable.
>I'd rather not have to make the choice to begin with.
Keep in mind, not choosing is itself a choice. Just as you'd feel guilty if the procedure caused a birth defect, I think you'd also feel guilty if your child was born with a birth defect that you chose not to screen for or take steps to select against. That said, there we finally find an ethical quandary: the nature of the procedure would mean choosing to select against that defect would mean choosing not to have your child, and that's not something most parents would care to think about when looking at their kid. There's a big difference between choosing which fertilized egg to implant and looking at your kid and wishing you had chose not to have them. I think most people would be okay with the former, but would likely (and rightly) recoil in horror at the latter.
> So if everyone is given the genes to be massively intelligent, is that a good thing?
> I'd say so, yes.
My thoughts on this are overshadowed by Brave New World. I realise how enormously snobbish and arrogant this sounds, but there are some jobs where having an enormous intellect would definitely be a burden. So either we have to automate those jobs (not necessarily possible), accept that some people are going to be very unhappy, or breed a specific group of people with lower intellects.
I guess this is a variation on the 'tragedy of the commons' - something that's wonderful for your child and my child would probably be a disaster if it were given to everybody's child.
> Just because someone is perfectly capable of living a happy and fulfilled life with a birth defect doesn't mean the lack thereof wouldn't be preferable.
I think sometimes disabilities are part of what make them amazing people. Would Beethoven have written such wonderful music if he had full hearing? From what I've read of Dame Evelyn Glennie, she seems to say that her deafness taught her to hear the music in a different way. So I'm worried that removing everything we perceive to be a defect results in a rather bland human race. It would be better to work on improving society so that being blind didn't cause many people to become depressed, for example. Adding lifts and ramps to buildings as well.
> Keep in mind, not choosing is itself a choice.
I'd like that the choice is not even possible. If the choice can be made confidently by a large proportion of the population, then it would inevitably go this way.
Yes you're right, a lot of this does depend on what we're considering a defect and at what stage. We have obviously done the whole Down's Syndrome scan, and we had no idea what we would have done if it had come back positive. If I could have done this pre-conception, then it would be a more comfortable decision. But if the question was about being short-sighted (which both my wife and I are), or whether we'd prefer a more athletic child, then the question gets much harder.
Why does "partially-sighted people are likely to have lower quality of life than fully-sighted ones" feel wrong to you? In the extreme cases (say, Tay-Sachs disease) it is clear that some people will definitely have a lower quality of life than others, so in general there is a difference, and it's only a question for which problems the genetic quality-of-life differences are insignificantly small compared to other factors.
But sight (IMHO) is a very important thing.
Think of it this way - to compare apples with apples, let's talk about a single person, not two people who can be wildly different. The moral dilemmas have different answers for different people, so think from your personal perspective:
If you would/could make some currently fully-sighted person become partially-sighted, would it be a neutral thing or an evil thing, according to your beliefs? Would you have a duty to avoid doing that?
If you would/could make some currently partially-sighted person become fully-sighted, would it be a neutral thing or a good thing, according to your beliefs? Would you have a duty to do that?
If you had an ability to choose between some person being partially- or fully-sighted; or flip a coin instead (50% chance of only partial sight) - would you avoid making the choice? Is it ethical to avoid making the choice?
> Why does "partially-sighted people are likely to have lower quality of life than fully-sighted ones" feel wrong to you?
Usain Bolt obviously has two pretty amazing legs, and my legs by contrast must look 'less able'. But I'd be offended if you assumed that Usain Bolt has a better quality of life simply because he has 'more able' legs.
So with this gene selection we end up in selecting only those with the legs of Usain Bolt.
I feel the same about sight. I'm fairly short-sighted so wear glasses, and my glasses are kind of part of my personality. Even if somebody wanted to pay for the laser surgery, and it was a guaranteed success, I can't say that I'd definitely do it.
So in the case of your questions - if somebody asked me to improve their sight, and it was in my power to do so, then I would do it. But I don't think it would guarantee them a better quality of life.
If you have a hereditary genetic disease risk that you need/want (depending on the disease) to screen against, then the process is about as follows:
1. Make up a few (say, 6) in-vitro fertilized eggs;
2. Extract a cell (or multiple cells at later stage, depends on the tech) to run the genetic tests;
3. Discard those who carry the mutation;
4. Depending on random factors, now you have 0-4 potential embryos. If you have many, you need to choose which one(s) will be put in the mother.
And this is the interesting part. At that point you already know quite a lot about each of those genomes - at the very least you definitely know all of their genders, but you do know (or can easily know) much much more already with the current tech. You have to make a choice anyway from that 'menu' of the few genomes that were just created. And absolutely any choice other than complete randomness will be biased towards something. So, the question to society, what amount of choice is 'acceptable'? Is throwing dice ok? Is looking at simulated extrapolated portraits ok? Is looking at statistical data allowed before making the choice?
I think part of the reason I'm uncomfortable with this is that those characteristics I would most desire for my chlid, are not selectable. For example, happiness, gratitude, tolerance, etc. It's not clear whether greater intelligence makes you more or less happy.
I think the demand is there. I don't think a goodly chunk of religious folks[1] will object to removing certain problems from their children. It might get dicy the farther you go, but there are some many things parents struggle with that removing birth defects and future problems would be pretty popular. Sex selection is going to be a problem though.
I think the problem will be on the supplier side. I look back at the cloned cats that don't look like the original (different hair color) and think that genetic selection will be very interesting from a Tort point of view.
1) ok, Christians in US - cannot really speak for the others
I can imagine the class system argument (though I'd like to hear it, because it is interesting and not that straightforward), but what about the others?
The race of the child is alredy determined by my choice - if I marry a person of my race, then our kid will be the same; and if I desire a child of race X, then I can go and have lots of kids with someone of that race.
And what is the cruelty difference between not making a frozen egg into a baby because of its genes, and not making a frozen egg into a baby because you decided you don't want more kids?
Class: Genetically-clean babies will grow into a new class of their own, automatically favored by government, hiring practices, schools etc.
Racism: The external indicators of race will be under the parent's control. Look what rich people do to become more whitebread; imagine what parents will do to make their babies more acceptable. The entire process will enable racism on a level beyond any in history: prenatal genocide?
Cruelty I mean by the prejudices 'natural' babies will endure simply by being born into a world that favors others. They will be branded even before they are born, as inferior, through no choice of their own.
I'm actually reading your examples as arguments for doing it - if the decision point is "should I do this for my next kid", then:
Class: No matter what class I am, I would definitely want my kids to [have a chance of] go a class higher than I am, and if I would deny my kids that opportunity for my own reasons, then that would be an evil, selfish act against my children;
Cruelty: If such society really is likely, then the same argument applies even more; I have a clear duty to protect my kids from such cruelty, and that duty is more important than the need to protect myself from some discrimination or conserve financial resources;
Race: well, it doesn't apply for me (same race marriage, all embryos would be the same), so I can't honestly say how it'd feel - but yes, given current experience in many countries it will mean that there will be a bias of skin color. But does it have horrible consequences? I mean, the current effect of gender-biased abortions in large Asian countries results in skewed gender rates and the excess males w/o mates will create social unrest; but race IMHO is generally a cosmetic difference, so nothing really changes if suddenly all of Earth decides to have white, black or purple skin.
And that is exactly why this will become a runaway success/runaway societal problem. Because no sane parent would opt-out and put their own child at risk.
Race is far more than cosmetic; but lets address that part.
If many parents choose to blunt the racial characteristics (not just skin color but eyes/lids, nose width, lips, limb length, jaw, teeth) it will serve to make any 'normal' child with those characteristics a real standout. Racial characteristics become almost proof of genetic inferiority. There's no problem with that?
Calling it cosmetic was a gross oversimplification, sorry. Race may be a very differenting feature, but all the research on it is very controversial. That being said, what I mean is that there are only two options - if some racially related features are objectively superior, then we as a species actually should select towards those features; and if all racial features are equal in 'goodness', and then it is purely cosmetic and it doesn't matter which option people choose.
As for the second statement - Any 'improvements' that are sufficiently large to matter will probably be sufficiently large to detect; the problem is about how we treat "genetic inferiority" as such, not really about how it is detected - by looking at racial characteristics, blood samples, asking your parents or your next-gen-facebook-DNA-profile.
I feel that your points sum up, in essence, to 'this will lead to more inequality'. And yes, it will. Probably the only thing that can make it equal is to ensure that everybody can do that (although we can't ensure even that everybody can eat or not be a slave) - since we definitely can't ensure that nobody will do that.
If people in disadvantaged racial or ethnic groups can choose to have their children born with the same skin color (or whatever physical signifier people use) as children of the privileged race just by checking a box on a form, many will do so to allow their children to avoid the prejudices that they would otherwise struggle against.
But while their decision is rational for them individually, it perpetuates racism in the culture by reaffirming that the skin color of the privileged is the "right" skin color, which reduces the pressure on the society to examine its prejudices. Children of those parents with the wrong skin color who can't afford the treatment will still be discriminated against, but there will be fewer of them then there would otherwise be, so they'd be even more isolated and unable to effect change.
If this cycle continues to a point where the cost of the treatment becomes zero, eventually everybody chooses to give their children the privileged skin color, and the disadvantaged group effectively disappears. Is that genocide? I dunno. But it's definitely something.
These dilemmas have been common to disadvantaged groups throughout history -- see the struggles light-skinned black people in America have had with the morality of "passing" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_%28racial_identity%29), or the tensions that can emerge in Jewish families when a child marries a Gentile. Genetic modification would just make the process of choosing to "opt out" of your own race easier, which would tempt more people to try it.
The problem is that all of those are things that would affect other people, not you. You may be perpetuating racism, classism, etc. by genetically tailoring your baby, but if you're in a position to do something like that odds are you're not in a group that's disadvantaged by racism or classism anyway. So you hurt others, but from a pure self-interest perspective the only impact on you is that your baby is even more advantaged than it otherwise would have been.
Self-interest is the prime motivator of human behavior, so if we want to avoid a future like this there will either have to be objections that speak to it directly ("It's too expensive!" "There's a 5% chance of horrible complications!" etc.), or laws will have to be made to prevent it in the same way that we prevent people from other forms of self-interested behavior that hurt society at large.
Laws against healthy babies are problematical. That's why this problem is unique. It demands we practice enlightened self-interest at a pain-point we are ill-equipped to support- hurting our children.
What makes you think you know what is better for your off-springs than random chance?
I consider diseases and human frailties a great part of what makes us humans. If we all had sharp teeth and powerful bite, we wouldn't drive cars, we'd chase furry animals and bite them with our powerful jaws. Occasionally stopping to hang around in the trees and eat fruits.
There a bunch of cases where we definitely know that it is significantly different than random chance. There are embryos whose expected lifespan (because of their genome) is, say, a year, or who are expected to die soon after or before birth; and it is definitely not a great part of what makes us humans. We can do better, and eliminate a lot of suffering for families.
The likely problem is the potential for increased suffering for future generations, not necessarily to the child to be immediately born.
There are genes that a usually superior when heterogenous. Sickle cell is the classic example. But it is quite possibly true that Tay-Sachs is also heterogeneous superior -- there is circumstantial evidence that it has been positively selected for.
If people feel it is necessary to make the smartest children possible, the grandchildren will risk immense unnecessary suffering, unless they are brought into this world under the loving care of a genetic counselor.
But surely humans beat randomness at many if not most tasks. This argument is not as much about whether we get sharper teeth or not, as it is about possibly saving a kid about a genetically inherited disorder. You may consider human suffering to be what defines humanity, but those who suffer most certainly don't.
Good point, but evolution works on larger timescale. Are we any good at building bridges that can last more than millenia? How about two? How about twenty five?
I'm just saying humans tend to optimize for the short term.
Suffering is essential because without suffering, there is no empathy.
The article explicitly mention that this is not the case. If anything, it poses the question of how much genetic engineering is too much.
And about betting randomness... I recall sometime reading about this certain ethnic group, which is taboo to single out and which has a disproportionate amount of Nobel prize winners (amongst other interesting features). The work describe how this people had both, compared to baseline population, higher than average IQ and higher than average propensity to some rare autoimmune disease that affects the brain. It turns out they had a higher incidence of several genetic mutations that each individually made you smarter (thus adaptive), but when found in the same individual made him sick.
Now, extrapolate this to a bunch of helicopter parents, micromanaging optimization to this or that characteristics in their own kids genotype. To me it sounds to much like a bunch of script kiddies merging commits to an arcane, critical, undocumented legacy system.
> What makes you think you know what is better for your off-springs than random chance?
The same thing that makes me think that I am better at building a bridge than random chance -- while the correlation between my predictions of the results of my actions and the actual results of my actions is not perfect, it is definitely greater than zero (which is what the correlation would be from random chance).
> If we all had sharp teeth and powerful bite, we wouldn't drive cars, we'd chase furry animals and bite them with our powerful jaws. Occasionally stopping to hang around in the trees and eat fruits.
[citation needed]
Humans already are better long-distance runners than just about any other animal [1]. As a general rule, we don't spend all day running, despite the fact that we probably could.
I take issue with all of the following selection criteria:
> myopia
> alcoholism
> addictive susceptibility
> propensity for violence
> obesity
> Low Risk of Colorectal Cancer
> Longest Expected Life Span
> Least Expected Life Cost of Health Care
All of them are vague, probablistic, unscientific, and mostly dependent on complicit human behavior. In other words, you select for one of these pseudo-"traits" (because there's no hard, deterministic science to prove genetic origins for all of these, conclusively with 100% certainty), and then the best laid plans are destroyed when the human being confronts unforgiving realities beyond the womb.
--but, but, but chance! No guarantees in life! Blah, blah, blah...
Don't apply hard science to select for "hope". Select for 5 fingers, sure. Whatever. At least you know you're getting what you paid for.
But, for the love of god, don't select for the "let's hope he stays out of jail" gene. That's a social, behavioral, circumstantial outcome, based on the decision making of the other human beings a person surrounds themselves with.
I take heavy issue with selecting for or against cancer genetics in particular. A lot of actual cancer outcomes rely on circumstances, environment and behavior. Beyond that, cancer is by-and-large a normal outcome for tissues that don't fail for other reasons. Any organ or tissue that doesn't get killed by something else, on a long-enough timeline, will be killed by cancer. Given that premise (the inevitability of cancer) it only makes so much sense to target "cancer genes" as a selection criteria.
Oh, and by the way, if you have any sort of problem with genetically modified foods, then you should take the exact same issue with genetically modified humans.
Monoculture induced by inbreeding, selective breeding and artificial selection is a killer that destroys at time-scales beyond individual generations. Just look at Chihuahuas and their propensity for asthma, or German Shepherds and their weird leg problems.
This is to say that any damage we do now, we won't necessarily be alive, to feel or understand the ramifications of. If all of us collectively decide to choose the absence of an adaptation, and that adaptation becomes essential a century after the fad, say hello to blight, extinction and perhaps the collapse of human civilization. Keep in mind that the loss of civilization (modern human society, and it's trappings of education, and scientific method) has the absolutely damning knock-on effect of being rendered into a scenario where it is no longer possible for humanity to "undo" it's own ruin.
Why? Because when you place a human social group in a suspended state of "less than grade-school quality" education for more than a generation or two, you'll find that on the other end, the group's descendants live in a state of uneducated superstition, lacking disciplines that engage in true scientific rigor (which can be enormously expensive). No more 4 year university STEM fellowships in this barren apocalyptic wasteland. Think in terms of what has happened to Afghanistan, where several decades of war have produced a generation denied of modern society. Now, imagine that same population also suffering from genetic disorders, induced by a fashion trend no one remembers. Only nature will decide who lives in such a scenario. But wait, it gets worse, given tendencies for human xenophobia, what if genetic choices made now, produce a form of future "racism" among uneducated apocalyptic cultures which we can't anticipate?
Okay, sure. This is the Michael Bay Extreme Nightmare Scenario™.
But still, we're toying with "science" that we don't fully comprehend, and all the while, we seem to be approaching it with all the solemnity of a coked-up Fashion designer caterwauling across a runway during Fashio...
I know this might sound bad but I actually think the reality portrayed in Gattaca is not that bad. I mean, if you put aside the discrimination faced by that part of the population born the natural way, you have a society where almost everyone is healthy and will live longer than previously possible, and is of great contribution to the community. I think that's our future and it doesn't scare me that much, what actually scares me are the endless genetic mutations that result in a wide array of tumors and untreatable diseases.
One of the problems is that it will create an environment where individuals are strongly encouraged and pressured into pursuing a particular type of career or avoid XYZ other activities. Reminds me of the stereotypical asian parent forcing their children to become lawyers or doctors, when the individual would much rather pursue sports, arts or something else entirely. One of the most critical aspects of success is motivation and desire to accomplish X. When everyone around you is saying you should do Y because of your genetic makeup it could lead to a lot more dissatisfied human beings.
This is a great point, it would definitely reshape society as we know it, and maybe for the worse. We can only speculate, but I sure hope that if there'll be a way to pick the healthiest embryo and have a child that will live longer than otherwise possible, we won't let some prejudices and morality issues stand in our way to a better, healthier society.
This is an interesting avenue to explore - one thing is features that are general improvements (say, not having some deadly disease); but there are many features that would facilitate specialization - helping you in one way while hurting in another.
A mild example in Gattaca is the six-fingered pianist - which in essence means that 'being a pianist' has to be chosen by others before you are able to think and decide.
And there are obviously horrible possibilities of specialization, like deliberately creating conscience-less embryos for military needs or autism-squared embryos for specialized uses (as suggested in Frank Herbert's Dune, for example).
vaguely related - i recently read margaret atwood's oryx and crake, which is another dystopian biotech future, and i rather enjoyed it. she's pretty cynical (and quite amusing at times) and while you can pick holes in many of her arguments the overall jaundiced view of stupid selfish humans screwing themselves over is pretty convincing.
(weirdly, some of what she predicted - about 10 years ago now - seems to be coming more true in software. you can't help but think of google when you read descriptions of the biotech corporations, with their compounds designed to isolate superior employees ;o).
A dystopian novel about some hip Silicon Valley company finding the secret sauce to objectively rank human beings with software, because of the difficulty in hiring good programmers, is just too painfully apt to imagine.
Culture and life (what you eat, how you exercise, how you live) weights more than genetics, unless you get visibly impaired by some genetic problem. For the by far big majority of people those are the factors that should be taken into account, not the base material, but how you grow up, what you learn, how you are.
Of course, if you have enough money to genetically design your children, probably have enough money to feed and raise them right, give them access to the best education, and probably have time to be with them, and is that what will make the difference, not so much to have the best of the best genes. But even without the designer genes, nor growing in a rich family normal people still have the potential to be great in whatever they do.
But is not designing the problem, is being discrimined later by people with access to your genetic info (something not very private as we leave traces of it everywhere), if that impairs your access to education or work, that will affect what you are too. Just labeling those that discriminate based on genetics as aryan race fans could put those practices in a negative enough light to avoid it to spread.
> Culture and life (what you eat, how you exercise, how you live) weights more than genetics, ...
To what extent you have been outsmarted by robots is determined mostly by genetics. But if slum-dwellers were given basic income and a negative income tax, it would be impossible to farm them for votes, so they have been indoctrinated to believe that they are smarter than robots and have been cheated out of jobs. This keeps them voting for the next handout, keeping the welfare bureaucracy and its "leaders" in power.
We are living in a vicious genetic dystopia today.
Naturally you will read not a word of this in Scientific American. They are hyper-leftist and cannot imagine a future of automated prosperity without their kind to centrally plan it. (One of the reasons they continue to moonbat against Reagan to this day was his vast expansion of the negative income tax.)
Huh. I always thought Gattaca was a commentary on what we already have. It seemed to me an allegory about poor minorities making it into the rich upper class.
The genetically engineered angle seemed like a small plot device, not a central feature. If we take health and wealth of the typical first worlder and compare it with that of the average third worlder, it already looks pretty Gattaca to me.
Good science fiction is almost always about the present, not the future. As Ursula Le Guin put in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness[1] "Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. (...)Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying."
Sometimes it's about both. When I watched Gattaca, I was really impressed with how well they tied together a broad social commentary on the present with a more literal warning about the impending future.
It's about both because they are often the same thing. How we deal with the present informs us how we may react to the future, and how we view hypothetical future situations tells us something about our present, often by drawing parallels that point out the ways in which our assumed (often inherited) beliefs are often in opposition with our stated, rational beliefs.
It's always boggled my mind that some authors have such little regard for science fiction. In my opinion, it's one of the most powerful contexts you can use, when done well.
> If the past is irrelevant, then we are equally irrelevant to the people living in 2113. They don’t care what we think about morality, public policy, fashion, economics, or anything else. It doesn’t matter what we “decide” about designer babies or anything else. It’s their world. They will view us with contempt. Or with pity. Get used to it.
Forget the custom-baby angle, did anyone catch this little nugget?
" Their tests cannot recognize every possible shade, but they are specific enough to distinguish between brown, blue and mottled brown-blue eyes, as well as brown, black, blonde and red hair. Such studies are intended to help solve crimes, but clinicians at fertility clinics could easily adapt the strategies for PGD. "
Sounds like a lot sooner (now?) law enforcement will be able to determine a lot more about a potential suspect with just DNA. Or am I not reading that correctly?
That's exactly what the're saying - law enforcement has had that ability (DNA -> likelihoods of visual properties, not 100% accurate of course) for some time already, and they can use it on embryos as well.
I wonder if say 50 years from now, we'll be like those religious conservatives who don't want to let women do whatever they want with their bodies (mainly talking about abortion here).
Will we also be the ones demanding that the new generations have no right to design their children, while they'd argue that we should just "mind our own business" and that it's not government's place to decide how to effectively "create" their own children.
I think this century will see a lot of interesting changes, and not just technological, but also societal. Can we design our own children? Can we marry robots? Can we change our gender? Should the government be able to monitor our thoughts to protect us from terrorism? Will we still have the nonsense "war on terror" even 50 years from now, or will we end all "war on abstracts" by then, just like we are about to end the war on drugs?
A lot of new questions will need a lot of new answers as new technologies start making all sorts of new things possible.
I don't see this as anywhere near the same argument as abortion and I think trying to tie it into the abortion debate will not be helpful or truthful for anyone.
The 'science' in Gattaca is just an excuse for segregating human beings based on some arbitrary criteria. As others have pointed out this is nothing new.
What is extremely irritating is that people actually think that genetics works the way it is portrayed in the film. This is patently false. Yes, some portion of what an organism is is determined by the primary sequence of its DNA. It turns out that the contribution of primary sequence alone is quite small. Look at all the naive genome wide association data sets that have revealed that primary DNA sequences are in most cases very poor predictors of phenotype. This should't be surprising to anyone who has even a cursory understanding of evolution and the interaction between ecology and development. Yes, this is classic nurture vs nature stuff.
The fact that people want to claim that science could actually give us a universal, deterministic and predictive answer about the future should quickly alert us that the principles on which they are basing their predictions is not science and not predictive, but instead an ideology based on prejudice rather than evidence.
'Remember, genes are NOT blueprints. This means you can't, for example, insert "the genes for an elephant's trunk" into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There -are- no genes for trunks. What you CAN do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals.' - Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Nonlinear Genetics"
The eye-color part of the article must not be factually correct, unless there have been some very recent developments in understanding genetic influence on eye color. Craig Venter, the first human being to have his genome sequenced, pointed out in interviews[1] that even after the sequencing, no one could tell for sure from the sequence that he has blue eyes. Just in the last day, an article following up on last week's American Society of Human Genetics conference[2] pointed out that genetic studies have continually overpromised and underdelivered, and there are still many very basic issues of human genetics that are embedded in deep uncertainty.
As the article kindly submitted here points out, people are already demanding designer babies. They used to try to get those by looking for sperm donations from the Nobel laureate sperm bank,[3] but that project had disappointing results, and the sperm bank is no longer in operation.
Researchers on human genetics I know locally (who analyze the data from the Minnesota Twin Families Study) use a photograph of two identical (monozygotic) twins from Germany[4] (from a different source, I think the original medical journal source, rather than the blog I link to here) to show that although genes are certainly very influential on human development, environment, including differing choices of lifestyle, matters too.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadIsn't their significant evidence that more diverse gene pools, even unexpected combinations of genes are usually more adapted in several ways, because of heterosis [0]. It seems foolish that this one new factor would make eugenics any more successful than its last phase of popular. Not to mention it the deeply-held 'moral repugnance'[1] aspect.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis
[1] http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2624677/Roth_Repu...
Apart from other -more serious- problems, obviously, but genetic similarity is not necessarily a good thing.
At that point there would be enough GM humans walking around that a virus might evolve to attack only them, and it would spread like wildfire among the population given the lack of genetic variation, the only exception being old regular humans and maybe a few of those with parents wealthy enough to get them tailor-made without any of the preexisting "parts" that the majority uses.
It starts off with a picture of hell, and then shows him overcoming it.
The ultimate end is not even to simply pick the contents of the 46 chromosomes. It is medically plausible to purposefully create human chimeras -- basically it when fraternal twins happen to combine to become one fetus. ("We have selected these 46 chromosomes for the neural material, and these other 46 for the skeletal-muscular system. Looks like we have a few fetuses where the combination took to the right locations. We destroyed many eggs, but it is all worth it so your son can be the best, right?")
The world is harsh and unforgiving, genetic is only a tiny fraction of all the possible problems, why would you not give your kid the best chances with the things you can control ?
There are problems with genetic selection. But I think the larger problem will be the personal toll of new found ways of negatively assessing ourselves, and pointlessly diagnosing our inevitable sundry personal weaknesses as medical syndromes.
I know some people will want it, but it would need to be near universal for something like Gattaca to become reality.
The entire traditional / medical / western / whatever you want to call it model of childbirth in New Jersey is very much about making you acutely aware of the things that you should be afraid of during the pregnancy. All of these things are detectable with a litany of very expensive tests! And you will be lectured and browbeaten to hell and back if you decline, so I imagine that factors heavily into the popularity of chromosome tests these days.
Exactly, which we weren't gonna do. It's a complicated issue for sure, but it did work out for us. Thanks.
Current prenatal testing, in essence, warns you about some (not nearly all) harsh diseases, and people may choose abortion after finding that out. There are some diseases where it actually allows a cure/therapy even before the embryo is born; but currently that's rather rare; so in general, if someone has already decided that they won't do an abortion, then doing those tests has no practical value at all.
http://www.webmd.com/baby/guide/prenatal-tests
Nature and nurture are just two factors that contribute to a child's wellbeing and success in life. If you'd be willing to send your child to a private school in the hopes of giving them a better education and a leg-up on the competition, why not give them better looks and higher intelligence (were it possible), as well?
I've yet to see any convincing ethical arguments as to why this would be wrong. So far, every argument made in opposition to designer babies seems to boil down to "it's not natural". Well, neither is agriculture, medicine, the Internet... as a species, we've gotten to where we are by changing nature to suit us. Why should procreation be any different?
However, I'm not convinced that medical science is there yet, so my child is just an iteration for big pharma. Perhaps we produce a whole generation of intelligent children who develop Alzheimer's when they're 25. I realise that argument is made against every new technology (especially medical), but making an active choice somehow makes me culpable and it would be harder to live with it.
Also, there's the idea of what happens if this becomes universal. Since some traits seem universally desirable, all parents will choose to grant them. So if everyone is given the genes to be massively intelligent, is that a good thing?
Then there's the quality of life argument, which makes me deeply uncomfortable. Essentially, choosing a fully-sighted embryo over a partially-sighted one implicitly says "partially-sighted people are likely to have lower quality of life than fully-sighted ones", and that sounds wrong both ethically and practically.
This is a really difficult debate, though. Put in the hypothetical situation of having to choose, I guess I would end up choosing the best possible embryo, but I'd rather not have to make the choice to begin with.
Agreed, but I think it's a matter of if, not when. As our knowledge of gene expression, epigenetics, protein folding, and the like increases, the set of things we can't do will shrink.
>Perhaps we produce a whole generation of intelligent children who develop Alzheimer's when they're 25
It's certainly possible that we'll leap before we look, but I'd hope not. We've had examples of that in the past, but the result of those tragedies is that research processes have improved. They're far from perfect, but they've certainly gotten better.
>So if everyone is given the genes to be massively intelligent, is that a good thing?
I'd say so, yes.
>choosing a fully-sighted embryo over a partially-sighted one implicitly says "partially-sighted people are likely to have lower quality of life than fully-sighted ones", and that sounds wrong both ethically and practically.
I think, on average, it's simply an objective fact that "full-sighted people have a better quality of life than partially-sighted people". I can't think of any way that astigmatism has improved my life, and it's something I plan on rectifying permanently once my finances allow it.
As for being ethically wrong, I don't see it. Just because someone is perfectly capable of living a happy and fulfilled life with a birth defect doesn't mean the lack thereof wouldn't be preferable.
>I'd rather not have to make the choice to begin with.
Keep in mind, not choosing is itself a choice. Just as you'd feel guilty if the procedure caused a birth defect, I think you'd also feel guilty if your child was born with a birth defect that you chose not to screen for or take steps to select against. That said, there we finally find an ethical quandary: the nature of the procedure would mean choosing to select against that defect would mean choosing not to have your child, and that's not something most parents would care to think about when looking at their kid. There's a big difference between choosing which fertilized egg to implant and looking at your kid and wishing you had chose not to have them. I think most people would be okay with the former, but would likely (and rightly) recoil in horror at the latter.
My thoughts on this are overshadowed by Brave New World. I realise how enormously snobbish and arrogant this sounds, but there are some jobs where having an enormous intellect would definitely be a burden. So either we have to automate those jobs (not necessarily possible), accept that some people are going to be very unhappy, or breed a specific group of people with lower intellects.
I guess this is a variation on the 'tragedy of the commons' - something that's wonderful for your child and my child would probably be a disaster if it were given to everybody's child.
> Just because someone is perfectly capable of living a happy and fulfilled life with a birth defect doesn't mean the lack thereof wouldn't be preferable.
I think sometimes disabilities are part of what make them amazing people. Would Beethoven have written such wonderful music if he had full hearing? From what I've read of Dame Evelyn Glennie, she seems to say that her deafness taught her to hear the music in a different way. So I'm worried that removing everything we perceive to be a defect results in a rather bland human race. It would be better to work on improving society so that being blind didn't cause many people to become depressed, for example. Adding lifts and ramps to buildings as well.
> Keep in mind, not choosing is itself a choice.
I'd like that the choice is not even possible. If the choice can be made confidently by a large proportion of the population, then it would inevitably go this way.
Yes you're right, a lot of this does depend on what we're considering a defect and at what stage. We have obviously done the whole Down's Syndrome scan, and we had no idea what we would have done if it had come back positive. If I could have done this pre-conception, then it would be a more comfortable decision. But if the question was about being short-sighted (which both my wife and I are), or whether we'd prefer a more athletic child, then the question gets much harder.
But sight (IMHO) is a very important thing.
Think of it this way - to compare apples with apples, let's talk about a single person, not two people who can be wildly different. The moral dilemmas have different answers for different people, so think from your personal perspective:
If you would/could make some currently fully-sighted person become partially-sighted, would it be a neutral thing or an evil thing, according to your beliefs? Would you have a duty to avoid doing that?
If you would/could make some currently partially-sighted person become fully-sighted, would it be a neutral thing or a good thing, according to your beliefs? Would you have a duty to do that?
If you had an ability to choose between some person being partially- or fully-sighted; or flip a coin instead (50% chance of only partial sight) - would you avoid making the choice? Is it ethical to avoid making the choice?
Usain Bolt obviously has two pretty amazing legs, and my legs by contrast must look 'less able'. But I'd be offended if you assumed that Usain Bolt has a better quality of life simply because he has 'more able' legs.
So with this gene selection we end up in selecting only those with the legs of Usain Bolt.
I feel the same about sight. I'm fairly short-sighted so wear glasses, and my glasses are kind of part of my personality. Even if somebody wanted to pay for the laser surgery, and it was a guaranteed success, I can't say that I'd definitely do it.
So in the case of your questions - if somebody asked me to improve their sight, and it was in my power to do so, then I would do it. But I don't think it would guarantee them a better quality of life.
1. Make up a few (say, 6) in-vitro fertilized eggs;
2. Extract a cell (or multiple cells at later stage, depends on the tech) to run the genetic tests;
3. Discard those who carry the mutation;
4. Depending on random factors, now you have 0-4 potential embryos. If you have many, you need to choose which one(s) will be put in the mother.
And this is the interesting part. At that point you already know quite a lot about each of those genomes - at the very least you definitely know all of their genders, but you do know (or can easily know) much much more already with the current tech. You have to make a choice anyway from that 'menu' of the few genomes that were just created. And absolutely any choice other than complete randomness will be biased towards something. So, the question to society, what amount of choice is 'acceptable'? Is throwing dice ok? Is looking at simulated extrapolated portraits ok? Is looking at statistical data allowed before making the choice?
I think the problem will be on the supplier side. I look back at the cloned cats that don't look like the original (different hair color) and think that genetic selection will be very interesting from a Tort point of view.
1) ok, Christians in US - cannot really speak for the others
I can imagine the class system argument (though I'd like to hear it, because it is interesting and not that straightforward), but what about the others?
The race of the child is alredy determined by my choice - if I marry a person of my race, then our kid will be the same; and if I desire a child of race X, then I can go and have lots of kids with someone of that race.
And what is the cruelty difference between not making a frozen egg into a baby because of its genes, and not making a frozen egg into a baby because you decided you don't want more kids?
Racism: The external indicators of race will be under the parent's control. Look what rich people do to become more whitebread; imagine what parents will do to make their babies more acceptable. The entire process will enable racism on a level beyond any in history: prenatal genocide?
Cruelty I mean by the prejudices 'natural' babies will endure simply by being born into a world that favors others. They will be branded even before they are born, as inferior, through no choice of their own.
Class: No matter what class I am, I would definitely want my kids to [have a chance of] go a class higher than I am, and if I would deny my kids that opportunity for my own reasons, then that would be an evil, selfish act against my children;
Cruelty: If such society really is likely, then the same argument applies even more; I have a clear duty to protect my kids from such cruelty, and that duty is more important than the need to protect myself from some discrimination or conserve financial resources;
Race: well, it doesn't apply for me (same race marriage, all embryos would be the same), so I can't honestly say how it'd feel - but yes, given current experience in many countries it will mean that there will be a bias of skin color. But does it have horrible consequences? I mean, the current effect of gender-biased abortions in large Asian countries results in skewed gender rates and the excess males w/o mates will create social unrest; but race IMHO is generally a cosmetic difference, so nothing really changes if suddenly all of Earth decides to have white, black or purple skin.
If many parents choose to blunt the racial characteristics (not just skin color but eyes/lids, nose width, lips, limb length, jaw, teeth) it will serve to make any 'normal' child with those characteristics a real standout. Racial characteristics become almost proof of genetic inferiority. There's no problem with that?
As for the second statement - Any 'improvements' that are sufficiently large to matter will probably be sufficiently large to detect; the problem is about how we treat "genetic inferiority" as such, not really about how it is detected - by looking at racial characteristics, blood samples, asking your parents or your next-gen-facebook-DNA-profile.
I feel that your points sum up, in essence, to 'this will lead to more inequality'. And yes, it will. Probably the only thing that can make it equal is to ensure that everybody can do that (although we can't ensure even that everybody can eat or not be a slave) - since we definitely can't ensure that nobody will do that.
But while their decision is rational for them individually, it perpetuates racism in the culture by reaffirming that the skin color of the privileged is the "right" skin color, which reduces the pressure on the society to examine its prejudices. Children of those parents with the wrong skin color who can't afford the treatment will still be discriminated against, but there will be fewer of them then there would otherwise be, so they'd be even more isolated and unable to effect change.
If this cycle continues to a point where the cost of the treatment becomes zero, eventually everybody chooses to give their children the privileged skin color, and the disadvantaged group effectively disappears. Is that genocide? I dunno. But it's definitely something.
These dilemmas have been common to disadvantaged groups throughout history -- see the struggles light-skinned black people in America have had with the morality of "passing" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_%28racial_identity%29), or the tensions that can emerge in Jewish families when a child marries a Gentile. Genetic modification would just make the process of choosing to "opt out" of your own race easier, which would tempt more people to try it.
Self-interest is the prime motivator of human behavior, so if we want to avoid a future like this there will either have to be objections that speak to it directly ("It's too expensive!" "There's a 5% chance of horrible complications!" etc.), or laws will have to be made to prevent it in the same way that we prevent people from other forms of self-interested behavior that hurt society at large.
What makes you think you know what is better for your off-springs than random chance?
I consider diseases and human frailties a great part of what makes us humans. If we all had sharp teeth and powerful bite, we wouldn't drive cars, we'd chase furry animals and bite them with our powerful jaws. Occasionally stopping to hang around in the trees and eat fruits.
The likely problem is the potential for increased suffering for future generations, not necessarily to the child to be immediately born.
There are genes that a usually superior when heterogenous. Sickle cell is the classic example. But it is quite possibly true that Tay-Sachs is also heterogeneous superior -- there is circumstantial evidence that it has been positively selected for.
If people feel it is necessary to make the smartest children possible, the grandchildren will risk immense unnecessary suffering, unless they are brought into this world under the loving care of a genetic counselor.
But surely humans beat randomness at many if not most tasks. This argument is not as much about whether we get sharper teeth or not, as it is about possibly saving a kid about a genetically inherited disorder. You may consider human suffering to be what defines humanity, but those who suffer most certainly don't.
I'm just saying humans tend to optimize for the short term.
Suffering is essential because without suffering, there is no empathy.
I'm reminded of the episode http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Masterpiece_Society_%28e... in which a technology created to help blind, helps crew to save the society, which couldn't conceive it because it was too perfect.
And about betting randomness... I recall sometime reading about this certain ethnic group, which is taboo to single out and which has a disproportionate amount of Nobel prize winners (amongst other interesting features). The work describe how this people had both, compared to baseline population, higher than average IQ and higher than average propensity to some rare autoimmune disease that affects the brain. It turns out they had a higher incidence of several genetic mutations that each individually made you smarter (thus adaptive), but when found in the same individual made him sick.
Now, extrapolate this to a bunch of helicopter parents, micromanaging optimization to this or that characteristics in their own kids genotype. To me it sounds to much like a bunch of script kiddies merging commits to an arcane, critical, undocumented legacy system.
The same thing that makes me think that I am better at building a bridge than random chance -- while the correlation between my predictions of the results of my actions and the actual results of my actions is not perfect, it is definitely greater than zero (which is what the correlation would be from random chance).
> If we all had sharp teeth and powerful bite, we wouldn't drive cars, we'd chase furry animals and bite them with our powerful jaws. Occasionally stopping to hang around in the trees and eat fruits.
[citation needed]
Humans already are better long-distance runners than just about any other animal [1]. As a general rule, we don't spend all day running, despite the fact that we probably could.
[1] http://discovermagazine.com/2006/may/tramps-like-us
But, for the love of god, don't select for the "let's hope he stays out of jail" gene. That's a social, behavioral, circumstantial outcome, based on the decision making of the other human beings a person surrounds themselves with.
I take heavy issue with selecting for or against cancer genetics in particular. A lot of actual cancer outcomes rely on circumstances, environment and behavior. Beyond that, cancer is by-and-large a normal outcome for tissues that don't fail for other reasons. Any organ or tissue that doesn't get killed by something else, on a long-enough timeline, will be killed by cancer. Given that premise (the inevitability of cancer) it only makes so much sense to target "cancer genes" as a selection criteria.
Oh, and by the way, if you have any sort of problem with genetically modified foods, then you should take the exact same issue with genetically modified humans.
Monoculture induced by inbreeding, selective breeding and artificial selection is a killer that destroys at time-scales beyond individual generations. Just look at Chihuahuas and their propensity for asthma, or German Shepherds and their weird leg problems.
This is to say that any damage we do now, we won't necessarily be alive, to feel or understand the ramifications of. If all of us collectively decide to choose the absence of an adaptation, and that adaptation becomes essential a century after the fad, say hello to blight, extinction and perhaps the collapse of human civilization. Keep in mind that the loss of civilization (modern human society, and it's trappings of education, and scientific method) has the absolutely damning knock-on effect of being rendered into a scenario where it is no longer possible for humanity to "undo" it's own ruin.
Why? Because when you place a human social group in a suspended state of "less than grade-school quality" education for more than a generation or two, you'll find that on the other end, the group's descendants live in a state of uneducated superstition, lacking disciplines that engage in true scientific rigor (which can be enormously expensive). No more 4 year university STEM fellowships in this barren apocalyptic wasteland. Think in terms of what has happened to Afghanistan, where several decades of war have produced a generation denied of modern society. Now, imagine that same population also suffering from genetic disorders, induced by a fashion trend no one remembers. Only nature will decide who lives in such a scenario. But wait, it gets worse, given tendencies for human xenophobia, what if genetic choices made now, produce a form of future "racism" among uneducated apocalyptic cultures which we can't anticipate?
Okay, sure. This is the Michael Bay Extreme Nightmare Scenario™.
But still, we're toying with "science" that we don't fully comprehend, and all the while, we seem to be approaching it with all the solemnity of a coked-up Fashion designer caterwauling across a runway during Fashio...
A mild example in Gattaca is the six-fingered pianist - which in essence means that 'being a pianist' has to be chosen by others before you are able to think and decide.
And there are obviously horrible possibilities of specialization, like deliberately creating conscience-less embryos for military needs or autism-squared embryos for specialized uses (as suggested in Frank Herbert's Dune, for example).
(weirdly, some of what she predicted - about 10 years ago now - seems to be coming more true in software. you can't help but think of google when you read descriptions of the biotech corporations, with their compounds designed to isolate superior employees ;o).
Of course, if you have enough money to genetically design your children, probably have enough money to feed and raise them right, give them access to the best education, and probably have time to be with them, and is that what will make the difference, not so much to have the best of the best genes. But even without the designer genes, nor growing in a rich family normal people still have the potential to be great in whatever they do.
But is not designing the problem, is being discrimined later by people with access to your genetic info (something not very private as we leave traces of it everywhere), if that impairs your access to education or work, that will affect what you are too. Just labeling those that discriminate based on genetics as aryan race fans could put those practices in a negative enough light to avoid it to spread.
To what extent you have been outsmarted by robots is determined mostly by genetics. But if slum-dwellers were given basic income and a negative income tax, it would be impossible to farm them for votes, so they have been indoctrinated to believe that they are smarter than robots and have been cheated out of jobs. This keeps them voting for the next handout, keeping the welfare bureaucracy and its "leaders" in power.
We are living in a vicious genetic dystopia today.
Naturally you will read not a word of this in Scientific American. They are hyper-leftist and cannot imagine a future of automated prosperity without their kind to centrally plan it. (One of the reasons they continue to moonbat against Reagan to this day was his vast expansion of the negative income tax.)
The genetically engineered angle seemed like a small plot device, not a central feature. If we take health and wealth of the typical first worlder and compare it with that of the average third worlder, it already looks pretty Gattaca to me.
[1]Full text here: http://somethingcompletelydifferent.wordpress.com/2011/02/15...
It's always boggled my mind that some authors have such little regard for science fiction. In my opinion, it's one of the most powerful contexts you can use, when done well.
Vincent: You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back.
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=24266
" Their tests cannot recognize every possible shade, but they are specific enough to distinguish between brown, blue and mottled brown-blue eyes, as well as brown, black, blonde and red hair. Such studies are intended to help solve crimes, but clinicians at fertility clinics could easily adapt the strategies for PGD. "
Sounds like a lot sooner (now?) law enforcement will be able to determine a lot more about a potential suspect with just DNA. Or am I not reading that correctly?
Will we also be the ones demanding that the new generations have no right to design their children, while they'd argue that we should just "mind our own business" and that it's not government's place to decide how to effectively "create" their own children.
I think this century will see a lot of interesting changes, and not just technological, but also societal. Can we design our own children? Can we marry robots? Can we change our gender? Should the government be able to monitor our thoughts to protect us from terrorism? Will we still have the nonsense "war on terror" even 50 years from now, or will we end all "war on abstracts" by then, just like we are about to end the war on drugs?
A lot of new questions will need a lot of new answers as new technologies start making all sorts of new things possible.
What is extremely irritating is that people actually think that genetics works the way it is portrayed in the film. This is patently false. Yes, some portion of what an organism is is determined by the primary sequence of its DNA. It turns out that the contribution of primary sequence alone is quite small. Look at all the naive genome wide association data sets that have revealed that primary DNA sequences are in most cases very poor predictors of phenotype. This should't be surprising to anyone who has even a cursory understanding of evolution and the interaction between ecology and development. Yes, this is classic nurture vs nature stuff.
The fact that people want to claim that science could actually give us a universal, deterministic and predictive answer about the future should quickly alert us that the principles on which they are basing their predictions is not science and not predictive, but instead an ideology based on prejudice rather than evidence.
As the article kindly submitted here points out, people are already demanding designer babies. They used to try to get those by looking for sperm donations from the Nobel laureate sperm bank,[3] but that project had disappointing results, and the sperm bank is no longer in operation.
Researchers on human genetics I know locally (who analyze the data from the Minnesota Twin Families Study) use a photograph of two identical (monozygotic) twins from Germany[4] (from a different source, I think the original medical journal source, rather than the blog I link to here) to show that although genes are certainly very influential on human development, environment, including differing choices of lifestyle, matters too.
[1] http://health.usnews.com/health-news/articles/2007/09/11/cra...
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_genom...
[3] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4700156
[4] http://thesameffect.com/check-out-identical-twins-otto-and-e...