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The Rights of GM Humans
An anonymous submitter writes "Some of the powers that be -- not just talking heads -- go on record about our genetically enhanced future in this Village Voice article. The anti-doping watchdogs of the Olympics say they'll ban GM athletes, and even athletes who have a grandparent with an enhanced germ-line. Would Ivy League schools slap a quota on these people to fend off the enraged parents of the "normal majority?" Imagine how a politician would fare if it became known she'd been tweaked in utero. Human history is rife with aristocide and mob attacks on perceived elites. Today lawmakers and regulators are eager to ban the technologies that would be needed to create a new breed of intellectually and physically superior people. But who's willing to stand up for the rights of this future generation? Environmentalists already deride GM crops as "frankenfood," so how far behind could the demonization of GM people be?"
Whats wrong with improving upon our faults? Other than the obvious christian responce. The Human genetic code is not sacred, IMHO. Maybe Humans will be tweeked, sorta like we tweek our computers. Overclocking the Human brain? Interesting.
Lostkandeh Ravernerd.
How will the future consider children who may be cured by simple GM of diseases? My friend's son is a hemophiliac. A genetic modification could save him from an early death and a lifetime of pain. Would this change make him a GM freak? If so, are you saying that he should suffer this disease because God ordained it?
The more you scare people, the more they will pay you
Red Dwarf covered this issue. After the proliferation of genetic enhancements the world sporting bodies stepped in banning genetic enhancement. The response was the creation of Genetic Alternative sports, the Genetic Alternative sports killed normal sports inside a couple of years, of course even that required a few rules:
Joking aside, I'm unsure what would happen in the real word. Sports. We haven't seen a "Narcotics alternative sports" emerge after drug taking was banned, however the critical difference may be in how socially acceptable genetic enhancement is. Whoever makes the decisions is going to have trouble either way though, I can see the headlines now Little Johnny kept out of school sports record books because of asthma treatment..
On the outset, it does seem like a really, really cool idea to be able to OC the human brain, but stop and think about the social repercussions. Remember how there were always those guy in high school that did amazingly well in their classes, were stars of the basketball team, and never got a pimple? Remember how much you hated them?
Imagine if their parents were just rich enough to buy that. Instead of nature deciding who's going to be smart, athletic, top of the class (I know environmental factors are just as important, but bare with me) parents just buy the features they want. Think about how you felt towards the kids that were gifted in school. Now thing about know they were made that way, not just lucky.
GM'ed people, while interesting, would have a really, really hard time. Most of us would probably be very bitter towards them and the people that could afford to have GM work done on their children.
As an American (not that I am particularly happy with this country right now), I have always believed that anyone can become president, a CEO, whatever they want. However, I think this is the final divider between the haves and have-nots. OCing the human brain seems harmless, but the social repercussions are endless.
Well, there's two ways to look at this issue. In the first case, the Human genetic code is sacred, and those that believe so will continue to run a pure line in the human race. They will come up with the people who look at it in the second case, where it's ok to modify, and have been modified.
:)
Now to talk about genetically superior people, begs the question of exactly what superior means. Because the reaction of the first, unmodified group when it has to deal with the second, modified group will depend largely on this.
If the second, modified group consists of people with large sexual organs that have responses on demand, and turn out to be the envy of every member of the opposite sex, and with no obvious negative side effect, group number one, might actually start thinking that group number two isn't so bad. The same could happen in the case of some modification that effectively prevents some kind of disease from happening (or corrects a defect found in the womb). If we continue along these lines, we could eventually get a sort of homogenous population of typical genetic modifications, that are all sort of modified in one form or another. The stigma having been removed.
However if the second group, comes along (like the AC that submitted the post), and, maybe because he/she is unable to get a date due to their absolute lack of desire or ability to develop social skills or intimacy with another human being, or because they have delusions of being a Hussain, decide that they CAN be superior, and this is what they will push...then naturally things won't go over well with the unmodified humans.
In this case we'll have a new kind of racism, where unmodified humans, fearing a threat from the Moddies, will take progressively stronger and stronger measures against them (ala X-Men, maybe), and then who knows where it will end.
IMHO: Alot transhumanists all take a very bad line with this regard, aggressively pushing some kind of new humanity on everyone. The new humanity being superior, or more evolved, or whatever. I've noticed that most of the (few)transhumanists I've met, all have qualities that prevent them from forming social relationships they would like (and lets face it -- with girls), and somehow think that tweaking their bods are going to solve their problem. But it wont. Nothing can replace relating with another human being. Eric Erickson -- Intimacy vs Isolation. And it's sad, because there's alot of work these people can do on themself to correct this, without having to go to the extreem of some imaginary fantastic gene mod. But if they don't want to see it...
Anyways, for me personally, I'm just going to wait it out, so that I can place my order for a genetically engineer, custom build sex slave to have around the house. This will absolve all the annoying tedium of having to "relate" to my girlfriend. Now that's what I call progress
People always go on about how genetic engineering will result in a elite group consisting of only those rich enough to afford the treatment. Can someone explain why the treatment will be so expensive that only the rich can afford it? Surely a retro virus that enhances one person will work on everybody? And since when were virii hard to mass produce? Sure, a group of rich people could try and keep it away from the general public, but in the long term this would be practically impossible, given the potential profit for anyone sneaky enough to leak it to the black market. I just don't get the maths. Economies of scale would result in much higher profits by selling cheap to everybody than by selling at a high price to a select group.
IANAG but this seems like luddite nonsense to me.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Genetic manipulation from a capitalistic world must support other capitalistic ventures. That's a sad fact we sometimes forget when we're thinking about advancements in science. If we lived in socialist world, then there would be a fair chance we'll get physically and mentally superior GM'd people.
But the first task of GM is not to create more intelligent people, no. The first task they'll have to undertake is to enable people to eat more unhealthy food without getting fat. Yes, beauty comes before brains in alphabet.
Besides, altering intelligence might not be so good an idea: it would generate more resistance to stupid laws, stupid politics, and stupid corporations. The people in charge of GM-corporations do not generally fall into the category of free-thinking liberalists. They're after money, not freedom.
History tells us that tech comes in two basic flavours:
1. Tech that can be propagated at low cost (either financial or knowledge cost), generally tends to have a beneficial effect on mankind. Sometimes, this kind of tech is perceived as a threat by the powers that be and they "try" to suppress it. Examples, the loom, printing press, penicilin, the internet.
2. Tech that involves a high cost often is exploited (or at least an attempt is made to exploit it) by those who can afford it, in order to maintain their positions in society relative to those that can't. Examples: fossil fuel tech, nuclear tech, and GM tech.
Sure, within 20 years, most people will have access to basic GM via whatever "universal healthcare" operates in your country. But this will only be for those GM mods like resistance to various diseases etc that are huge drains of money on everyone. The really interesting GM tech (brain mods etc) will be "boutique" mods that only the wealthy will be able to afford. Free market. Yay.
The real question is how will the non-GM'ed (eg, the poor, the third-world etc) folk be discriminated against.
Answer: same as they are now.
"...who may be cured..."
Yes, we might be able to cure hemophilia, leukemia, any number of nasty genetic diseases - but those people will still die, eventually.
Should we consider our finite genetic clock a 'defect'? If we consider that clock not a defect for whatever reason, then how should we consider all these other defects that just stop the clock earlier? I don't pretend to have the answer - and anyone who says they do is full of it - but I would certainly suggest that altering the code of life may affect the meaning of life...
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
I think scientists grossly overexaggerate the usefulness of the Human genome sequencing project. So you know the sequence of the genome.
We still have to find all of the coding portions of the genome and separate them from non-coding portions.
We still have to find a way to infer the structure and function of a protein from its sequence.
We still have to find a method to engineer proteins systematically and by design. (No guess and check..)
We still have to find a method to model and simulate how multiple proteins and genes interact in order to give us the behavior of the entire system. There are no genes that do one thing or provide one attribute. They all contribute to the behavior of the system, but not linearly and usually unpredictably.
We still have to find a way to alter human DNA successfully, without triggering the immune response too much, and without causing cancer.
We still have a LONG way to go before we see genetically modified humans.
I'd say we'll see many more GM foods and animals long before some guy feels he can get it right on the first try. But that's what engineering is all about...knowing exactly what is going to happen when you create something so that it _will_ work on the first try. (How many buildings collapse spontaneously?)
Not until we understand the complex interactions (and there's a LOT of them) in the body will we be able to engineer biological systems with a supremely high degree of aforeknowledge.
Salis
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Starvation today isn't caused by lack of food, but lack of food distribution, fuelled among others by IMF policies (IMF has for ages pushed for high revenue crops such as coffee and tobacco instead of food in the 3rd world) and anti dumping measures in the west.
Add to that that most GM food is sold in the industrialized countries, and your idea of GM food saving lives becomes ridiculous.
Don't you understand you just nulled your own argument? GM food is saving lives because the excess found in industrialized nations is not being distributed. This means that if we can get the local farmers in troubled areas to use GM crops, then they will produce more food for their family and surrounding areas. Then the trouble (and money required) to move all this extra food around won't be required.
That extra 130% isn't getting where it is needed because of greed and politics. So we can make 200% more than what's needed, but if it can't get to starving people its all for naut.
Zimbabwe has always been one of the largest food exporters in Africa. A large part of their market is the EU and other countries that have strict rules on import on GM food. If any of the imported grain had been replanted in Zimbabwe, it would have been a disaster for the countries food export as they would have faced severe restrictions on export to a wide range of countries.
Again, the argument collapses on itself. That food would've saved thousands of lives but, on account of greed and politics, was denied. Even if it was later accepted, people died in its delay. And that is not acceptable in my book.
We had tons of bioethic forums in the high school I went to, so this is a topic I've been interested in for a little while...
What I'm most concerned about is what this is going to do to the rest of society. What are we going to do when all men are not created equal? Will we as a society develop an inherent inferiority complex (as opposed to the small personal ones that we develop through time)?
I think these are more important questions to ask rather than the hypothetical rights of GM humans. Its highly doubtful that there will be any legislature against such people to classify them as "non-humans"(i.e. deprived of the rights given to them by the law). If a person more attractive, smarter, and more athletic than you is "non-human" than what does that make you?
The current state of affairs is exactly that, a situation where genetic modification technology is so crude that animals like Dolly, when they are viable at all, largely have various genetic defects associated with them.
Still we have scientists filled with hubris rushing to produce almost certainly defective clones. We can't even get Democrat/Republican mainstream agreement that birthing so many defective humans in experiments is just wrong. They're bickering over the lost economic opportunity of therapeutic cloning.
There may come a day when we can quickly and without error make clones or gene modifications. At that point we can get into whether human souls need to be carried around in a stock, biological chassis assembled the old fashioned way. We're just not there yet and we need to stop our current crop of frankensteins from creating armies of humans doomed to painful genetic diseases and early death.
I was thinking about this once - consider:
1) The body modification crowd - the carbon units running around with bolts/pins/rings through every body part they can pierce. In the extreme, there are folks like the snake man and the cat man, who are getting surgery to look like, well, a snake-man and a cat-man (dude)!
2) The furry crowd - folks who fantasize about being anthropomorphic animals.
Now enter GM. Given a sufficent level of understanding of genetics, what is to prevent somebody from modifying themselves to be an antropomorphic wolf or whatnot?
Now consider the other side of the coin - there will be folks who tweak their pets - at first to cure things like hip displascia, but also to make the animal a better companion (we've been doing this for millenia - consider recent studies that show that dogs are better at reading human body language than wolves, even when the wolf was raised from a puppy by humans).
Now consider some of the ludicrous laws that used to exist in places like South Africa - determining who is "white" and who is "black" by ancestry.
We might very well end up with a situation in which two individuals, indistinguishable by inspection, are accorded different rights, because one is a anthropomorphic wolf (a wolf made to look human) and one is a lupopomorphic man (a man made to look like a wolf).
Imagine the legal mess that will be!
www.eFax.com are spammers
The first arguement is circular reasoning. First, you are assuming improving our faults will result in a monoculture. This will not happen. If I am having a boy, I may not want something changed on him entirely different than someone else. Making my child's hair a different color will not result in a monoculture whatsoever.
Lack of knowledge? The very improvements we make may allow for better reasoning, thinking, and memorization.
Ethics? Too much empahasis is put on poor judgements regarding ethics. Why is GM'ing unethical? Is getting rid of cancer in people through GM unethical? I would say it would be unethical to NOT use this technology.
This whole post is a troll...
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
Not for much longer, if you believe Cloneaid's 2 employees and the Raelians Cult: "Boisselier said the group's next endeavor is to construct the ''Babytron,'' an artificial womb."Suckers Lining Up For The "New Religion" Reading the article, I am amazed that people still put superstition over science.
DNA based encryption with software developed
If any of these GM traits are dominant, eventually the whole population will get the mods for free from their parents, meaning that (a) the companies doing them need to make all the money they want up front, and (b) eventually NO ONE will be eligible to compete in the Olympics.
Think about it.
Monsanto has admitted, on the record, that they know their GM products have an estimated 30-year life cycle before they're obsolete. In this subject, obsolete means, for example, that pests have developed resistance to the pesticides grown into the New Leaf Potato (TM).*
/. in general of the value of the scientific method. "But you're arguing against progress!" No - I'm arguing that as much work, if not more, should go into studying the effects of these "advances" as went into producing them.
Serving up Monsanto products to third-world farmers is akin to filling our depressed inner cities with paycheck advance loan companies. The farmers become dependent, but their problems have not been solved. If anything, we've just allowed Monsanto to apply a backhoe to a hole that those farmers and their (necessarily) short-term outlook couldn't dig any deeper on their own.
I won't even bother trying to convince
The real world of cause and effect is not limited to 1-to-1 relations... and that is one of the real bases of what used to be the organic movement. "Conventional farming" has only been around within the last few (relative) years. Before that, everyone was organic. In reality, we have very little data on the effects of industrial food production techniques. While some effects are quick and obvious, others take many years for us to notice.
Hope you have enjoyed this note from the field,
-j
* Addressing a post a few branches up: just because it's organic doesn't mean it's not poison. Nearly all pesticides (all that I know of) are neurotoxins. There are a few effective "organic" - meaning considered organic by FDA and others - pesticides. It's organic, ie naturally occurring, but does that make it safe to eat? No more so than arsenic. Just because "the only genes spliced in are other plant genes" does not make those genes and the plant they form safe for you to eat.
[|]
We fear the unknown.
The scope of genetic manipulation is well beyond the common or even uncommon comprehension, we have decades of literature which point to possibility of abominations when man attempts to deal himself a new hand in the natural order poker game. But what do we really know? At this point we can identify pieces much like the engine of a car, we know what something may do but do we understand it's true scope? Imagine that limited knowledge applied to something as simple as an internal combustion engine, many things would seem unnecessary and therefore we would remove them and in the scope of the engine alone perhaps we would be correct in doing so, thus we would remove air conditioning, heating, and other 'niceties'. That is where in the essence we stand, knowing little more than a mechanic with some amount of theory.
Genetic engineering is the future, and perhaps it will be a dark future. Turning the gulf between the 'haves' and the 'have nots' into a chasm akin to the Grand Canyon. This is always a possibility however other possibilities exist, the elimination of diseases which are encoded into our very existance. Arguments will abound in all arenas, but science must and should go forward. It is important now more than ever that science go forward, in a responsible manner. The creation of law which restricts scientific progress is an abomination in and of itself.
Bastion
I'm in the middle of reading Francis Fukuyama's Our PostHuman Future which I bought a week ago. It deals with exactly this subject, how biotechnology will affect our fundamental human nature and what the implications of this might be for politics. (Politics seems a lesser issue in some ways to me than the possible changes to human nature. Imagine "humans" bred and conditioned specifically to serve perfectly a dictator.)
The obvious "solution" to the problem of regular people feeling jealous or betrayed about a wealthy class that breeds itself into a position of superiority is to breed the regular people (or to drug them) into not feeling so jealous or betrayed.
As our understanding of human behavior improves, this may be introduced gradually.
IMHO, it has already started in some ways. I see most of my fellow citizens letting their minds be sotted with various drugs (alcohol, chief among them) and watching television constantly to become indoctrinated into some kind of culture based on raw emotions, sex, violence, and whatever other levers and buttons their minds expose to the world.
Our society's experience up to this point with self medication and with setting up hierarchies to govern society has been fraught with all kinds of problems. If we haven't been able to deal with those problems effectively, then it's probable we won't deal very well with the power of self-modification on the scale that future biotechnology permits.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You'll notice the lack of bioengineered animals running around the lab.
A super smart/strong mouse isn't something the microbiology scene can whip up just yet, and they fry mice like popcorn.
Doing the same thing with humans is a ways off and immeasurably more difficult as you can't flip baby humans over and chop out their spinal cord on a whim to check out your handiwork.
The whole entire motivation behind genetic modification of humans is self-improvement (eternal youth first and foremost). The drive behind modern medicine is exactly the same, which is why they will eventually be part of the same basic disipline- notice how much more acceptable medical justifications are in this argument. The perversion of the idea of making oneself immortal is a form of compromise in that we acknowledge that the technology is not there today, nor will it be possible all at once (at our current rate of progress), so we want the incremental benefits bestowed upon our offspring (the partial genetic remnants of ouselves). Once we settled on the idea that we will not directly benefit from genetic modification our focus changed from merely fix what is broken (heal disease and stop aging) to something more creative, enhancements to the potential offspring (uber-humans) and making the offspring more genetically like ourselves (cloning). The reason we are all upset about this topic is that we can not reap the benefits ourselves. If we could, we would; I dare you to see through the illusions we feed ourselves and accept the fact that we are just jealous and fearful of those who will benefit from this technology. Then, you could stop whining and crying and work to advance this technology to the level that it will be applicable to us. Or you can use your creative juices to pretty lie to deceive yourself with.
In Heinlein's "Beyond this Horizon", in addition to the typical gun-toting libertarian utopia, there was a rather interesting approach to Eugenics.
Basically, instead of creating new genes, couples would go to the genetic engineer when they wanted a child, and their child would be created from the best possible combination of their genes. If the father had one gene for diabetes, and another non-diabetic gene, the non-diabetic gene would be choosen for his offspring. If the mother had one gene for flat feet, and another gene for a normal arched foot, only the arched gene would be choosen for her offspring.
Now, this is an interesting approach, and one that has several benefits going for it. First of all, you aren't introducing new genes to the germ line - you are only maximizing the genes that are there. Second, its a harder policy to criticize - Its easy to pass a law against giving people new genes, its harder to pass a law preventing a mother from giving her son Tay-Sachs disease.
Another reason the plagues continued was simple genetics. My plague example was intensionally sparse on details, because like you pointed out there were a variety of factors involved. But the genes responsible for immunity came in two forms, 1) you got sick but still lived or 2) you never got the plague. people in group (1) probably only had one immunity gene, while the people in (2) had two immunity genes. Therefore, not every child born of plague survivors would carry the immunity, thus allowing the continued risk of infections. But on the whole, the european gene pool was significantly affected by the plague.
As far as community, many animals have highly social structures(communities) like wolves, bees, whales, yet these animals still abide by selective pressures. By the way, many of the most intelligent creatures on earth form communities, and it doesn't seem coincidental. The two probably go hand in hand, or in effect they are mutually inclusive. Which would leave me to think that if left to run its course, we may be just the first species to achieve sentience on this planet.
These topics are just too deep, sometimes I think I should keep my mouth shut.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
Really, technology not about right and wrong. It's about power.
But the use of power is what right and wrong are all about. If you have no power to do a thing, then whether it's right or wrong doesn't really matter.
It can be argued that technology is morally neutral, but the use of technology cannot be.
TTFN
' For an example, in modern industrialized societies, it takes a lot of resources to raise a child, so couples are having fewer, and are postponing them until they have saved up enough. Not everyone does the same thing, of course, but it's definitely a trend, and becoming the social norm - large families were once considered a blessing, are now looked down upon, and you may think a 25 year old mother is still young, but not compared to 15 or 16 year old mothers common in the past. ' Good point. I hadn't thought about that originally, but that is only partly true. While developed countries are seeing an increased number of small families, this really only correlates to the middle and upper classes. Lower income families are still generally very large and very young. This results in a balancing effect on the selective pressure with regards to women. I guess my original statement should have been that humans are messing with selective pressures with very little understanding of the consequences. Who says living longer is a good thing? Living healthier is good, but healthier and longer are two different things.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
> How many is too many?
Enough that the line between a work of fiction and reality become blurred in ways unsupported by scientific advances of the era.
> Spurious comment aside, it's been shown that genetic traits such as the Kenyan gene that allows for sustained aerobic exercise produce excellent long distance runners, and the whole superpower cold war during the eighties produced olympic atheletes that were shaving tenths of seconds off times for huge investment.
There's a fundamental difference here. Firstly, the "Kenyan gene"? Can you explain with some concrete examples who "it's been shown" by? Moreover, completely accepting the assumption that it does exist, it qualifies as a lucky break, not a concerted effort to build a better athlete. Also, the efforts put forth by athletes in the '80s by U.S. and Soviet althletes was still an effort within the confines of human physique. While it's true that they were paid and supported so that they could train full time, any country could do the same with one or more "star athletes" and have a reasonable chance to compete. In your suggested world, only those countries advanced enough or rich enough to perform the genetic mods would have a chance to win these contests, which runs counter to the ideals of the Olympics, where Jamaica can field a bobsled team if they so choose.
> So perhaps rather than putting money into things which have no real human benefit (millimetre wave radar, and *do not* get me started on the whole idea of 'defence') it would be interesting if there was some kind of move towards body modification as a means of getting an edge in competitive games.
How convenient that you can foretell the future well enough to know which scientific advances are worthy of pursuit for human benefit and which aren't. How, exactly, do you know what advances in RADAR will mean to the human race in twenty or fifty years? Are you aware that nuclear medicine, which saves thousands of cancer patients yearly, developed from the Manhattan Project? Try not to inject your politics into the study of science. Trying to say that the study of one field of science over any other is necessary for the benefit of humanity has always been, and continues to be, very short-sighted.
> Retractable claws would be cool, too.
Well, yeah, okay. They would be. But how do these qualify as a genetic enhancement, instead of a cybernetic enhancement? Somebody has been reading too many X-Men comic books.
Virg