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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?"
find a former olympic swimmer, handicapped through an unfortunate accident...
pay him money, take his identity, go to gattaca.
One word:
Khan
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..
If genetic modification makes you look anything more like the kids in the picture from that article, then we have nothing to worry about - it won't catch on. On the other hand.. imagine a beowolf cluster of GM-Humans..
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
Seriously, GATTACA has an excellent point. "There is no gene for the human spirit." I'd go further, there is no gene for life.
You must admit, if we could genetically protect our immune systems from AIDS, that it would be a good thing really. But who knows...maybe that new immune system wouldn't work against something else...
- Sighuh?
Somehow I think our understanding of genetics and the way humans develope is too small for any of this to be fruitful in the near future. Thinking ahead, if we could alter our genetic code(ie. create enhanced humans) really we would only be starting back up the process we stopped. The way I see it, through society humans have slowly stopped natural selection from occuring within our own population. The last major occurance of natural selection in humans that I recall was during the Black Plague in Europe. Only people who produced a certain protein on their immune cells(I have forgotten its name) were able to survive the plague. So now the survivors all carried that gene, which helped them and their offspring be immune to similar diseases to the plague. This happens in nature all the time, but in humans it doesn't seem to happen much anymore. Diseases are not always a bad thing, in the long run they are often helpful in preserving a species.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
The rights of GM humans might be an issue soon enough, sure. But what I fear most is the fact that we might lose touch with ourselves and create an upper class society of GM humans, with the new lower class being unable to afford the GM in their family. In fact, what might happen if we carry this too far and create a human that can hardly be desribed as a human any longer? Call me a doomsday prophet but this is what I fear most about GM, the division of the human race into several factions. The upper class and lower class, the new humans and the old humans, the superior humans and the lesser humans... Much like what Hitler dreamed of...
The human genes are one of the few things we should not muck around with too much, except perhaps to remove "bugs" in our genetics which allow for horrible diseases like parkinson and thousands of others. Repairing our DNA? Fine with me, if controlled properly. Enhancing our DNA to give us abilities beyond those of normal humans? No way, imho.
Hate me!
I'm not sure people could even agree on what our "faults" are.
Whats wrong with improving upon our faults?
monoculture vulnerability ?
lack of knowledge ?
and, most importantly, the ethics of performing experiments in humans ? (after all, there can be no more extreme experiment than tayloring an organism)
Remember, in order ot improve, you need to learn, and make a lot of mistakes. These poor mistakes will breath, live, love, laugh and hurt. Do you not, as the originating scientist, have an ethical obligation to these resulting future persons ? What will you do, debug and reboot them ?
I'm not saying this as a christian (I'm not), or as a person who totaly opposes eugenics (I'm not that either) but as a person who believes a measure of ethics is important.
Working for necessity's mother.
The term Frankenfood is just another useless word by which none of the environmentalists can back up.
You see, I too thought that they spliced animal and plant genes together to make better producing crops.
But not so. This is what they would have you believe.
I'm not Flamebaiting, and I'm not Trolling. I was honestly surprised at what I learned from this episode of this show (which is great, btw), and how the only spliced genes in plants are from other plants.
Yes, really. Regardless of what Greenpeace would have you believe.
The environmentalists have made us think that genetically altered food is as bad as can be, and that we should stay away from it. That it's not regulated in any form or fashion. That the food industry runs amok with itself, feeding the world with whatever they can come up with in their Mad Scentist Labs.
But this is completely false. Any GM food is regulated far more than regular food, and these GM foods can save lives.
Dr. Borlog, the scientist who invented GM food, has saved an estimated billion lives in third world countries by making less land make more food. His research and development since the 1970's, when it began, is groundbreaking to say the least. And yet there are groups who protest this on a consistent basis. And you never see any of these group's members starving, do you?
A true tragedy was when an African country decided not to take an American donation of tons of corn because the environmentalists convinced the government of that nation that the genetically altered food was poison. An estimated 25,000 people die every day of starvation, and thousands of innocent people died in that country because of that misinformation.
Now I'm not for a GATTACA like society, but if we can GM a person so they don't get Downs Syndrome, or Cystic Fibrosis, I'm all for it. Most people are against it for moral reasons, not scientific ones.
These kinds of arguments hurt others whether they mean to or not.
For thousands of years, the whole point of human existence was to perpetuate and improve both quality and quantity of life. Every hospital, every ultrasound, every drug and every anti-smoking poster exists solely to increase our lifespans and improve our quality of life. So why all of a sudden are people saying "No" to taking this quest to the gene level?
My sister-in-law has her masters in biology and is persuing another masters in genetic counselling. Curiously, she feels differently than I do about this. I believe that if we have the knowledge and the power to identify a Parkinson's, cancer, MS, Autistic, Down's, Lou Gehrig's, or a thousand other markers in our zygote's genetic code, and to eliminate that threat, then who in their right mind *wouldn't* do it? Why *wouldn't* you want your child to not have to go through the agony of being deaf or suffering through their twilight years consumed in the sad cloud of Alzheimer's?
She, on the other hand, believes that we shouldn't meddle, because if we do as I just described, it's a small step to handing prospective parents a form, letting them choose their baby's sex, hair colour, height, etc. I say, "so what?" Once again, why *wouldn't* you want to let people choose what their children will look like? The child has to have SOME eye colour, it's going to be either brown or blue or green or something ANYWAY, so what's the harm in letting the parents pick?
"We shouldn't be playing God," they say. But aren't we already? Haven't we been playing God since we started artificially extending peoples' lives through drugs and machines? Aren't contraceptive drugs "Playing God?" Aren't C-section births "Playing God?" Why do people accept all of those unnatural interventions, but draw the line at the next logical improvement of life?
I believe that if society can eliminate those horrible genetic diseases from our gene pool, along with reducing obesity and the violent tendencies that produce dangerous criminals (yes, physiological links have been shown), then the sooner society will improve. Yes, it might suck for those of us who are already here and can't re-write our genetic code, but this is not without precedent. Do we deny cancer treatment to everyone, just because there are people who are beyond treatment? Since they won't survive cancer, then no one should? It's ridiculous.
Science, medicine, and arguably society as a whole exist for the sole purpose of improving life. Evolving. I believe if we're at the threshold of these discoveries, that bring such amazing promises to our children and grandchildren, then it'd be counter to all the progress we've made so far in the last few centuries to stop now. We owe it to our children to use our knowledge to improve their lives. That's WHY technology exists.
You can't say in-vitro fertilization and abortion are OK, but genetic manipulation is not. It's hypocritical.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
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
Who defines these "faults"? Someone so short minded as to call them faults? Perhaps they have a real purpose.
To get to a point where we have a genuine grasp of the impact of genetic manipulation of humans (and we have only the smallest inkling of a clue right now), we have to test by trial and error. That means many, many ugly mistakes. How about you start coming up with some accepted ethical policies for dealing with live human "mistakes". Imagine the possibilities for what you could screw up in a person.
What happens when our genetic engineering has impacts that show up over multiple generations? What happens when we have completely ruined our genome? I guess the aborigines will get to repopulate the planet.
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.
Of course you could probably accomplish the same thing by sterilizing everybody who goes to football games
Female-only procreation is still unimplemented.
Working for necessity's mother.
Of course, then there was also the Polymorph:
And there were the Psirens...
But the big furry ones weren't so bad...well, they insisted that Lister marry the chief's daughter, but that was about it. (the books also made references to a GELF revolution of some sort...something about they were making furniture that was really GELFs, or something like that)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
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.
...what about the Ford humans, the Dodge humans, and we can't forget about thos "import" humans from Honda, Nissan, etc. What about them?
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
"...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
Favorite
How about improving on ourselves?
Sure, it's questionable to experiment on children not yet born, but what if we could modify adults with new genes? Would that be ok?
Personally, I'm all for it. I *want* to modify myself, especially since any modifications to me as an adult could be undone if I changed my mind later.
Every time I see the word "frankenfood", I can't help but crack up. Have any of these people even read the story Frankenstein, or even heard about it?
Because if you're gonna stretch that analogy to its obvious conclusion, then the anti-GM folks are the villagers with pitchforks and torches, so overwhelmed by their terror of progress and change that they can do nothing but blindly assault it.
A lot of people have been commenting here about similarities between the GM issues described in the article and the good old X-Men. How about a Slashdot interview with the guy who has probably thought more about these issues than anybody else outside academia over the last 25 or so years ... veteran X-Men writer Chris Claremont? Or if not Claremont, maybe Grant Morrison. I think either would have some real insights here.
I mean sure, a big chunk of the comic stories are standard superhero fare, but especially in Claremont's original run on X-Men these themes were returned to again and again. And again. And again....
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
Okay, so I don't know any, but gosh darnit, I'll fight to the death for their rights! But don't you think it's going a little too far to classify these people as superhuman? I mean, if they were, would I have just had to pay $500 to get my car fixed this weekend? Honestly!
(Hooray acronym clash!)
At least one form of GM food was formed by splicing bacterial genes into corn (bacteria, despite what you may have been taught in high school, are NOT considered plants). The corn had genes from Bacillus thueringensis spliced into it, to make it toxic to insect larvae such as corn borers. A later study showed that pollen from such corn, when dusted on milkweed leaves, was toxic to monarch butterfly larvae (note that it is not known whether corn pollen would migrate to milkweed plants in sufficient quantities in a natural setting to harm butterfly larvae).
Does this mean that all GM food is bad? No. But it does mean that caution is warranted. And don't believe everything you see on Showtime.
Sean
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
What if what you think is a bad gene is really a good gene?
"Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so." -Shakespeare
As far as making genetic changes to the human body, what and to what degree we alter our DNA is not a matter of "good" or "evil," or "good" or "bad," but rather, are we as intelligent as we think we are? The case you gave creates two mutually exclusive outcomes; the first is to cure sickle cell anemia, but at the risk of becoming more susceptible to malaria; the second vice-versa.
Good? Bad? It's neither; just a choice of whether or not we choose to intervene in nature's course.
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.
...
(Transhumanists? WTF? You (and others) gotta lay off the sci-fi) Anyways as I mentioned before, not all genetic modification is inheritable. Gene therapy is one example in clinical trials, right now. I think people in practice have no problem differentiating 'good' changes from 'bad' changes. I don't think anyone has a problem with curing terminal diseases with GM. I'm willing to bet that people will be much more supportive of GM for themselves and others when it cures/treats some problem they have or will have. Like aging
-Sean
Case modding? Head modding? Skull modding? Imagine the little plexiglass windows in peoples heads. Cold cathode wrapped around a throbbing brain. Mmmmmmmmmmmm!
Not on my watch bub....
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.
For thousands of years, the whole point of human existence was to perpetuate and improve both quality and quantity of life. Says who? I am serious. Your basic assumption is flawed. There is no real evidence of this. Regardless of that, many MANY MANY people would disagree with your asssumption, for many different reasons. I myself would take issue with the idea that boosting quantity of life is even remotely positively connected to improving quality. It seems to me that history has shown it to be the opposite, that an increase in population generally leads to a decrease in quality of life. We can't have both. Not everyone is a Progress Junkie like you, and many of us don't trust people that are to make ethical decisions for everyone else. You obviously don't have the perspective or historical background to speak with authority on issues like this. I am not suggesting you can't say what you want to (please do!), but you have to understand that the rest of us are being perfectly sensible in ignoring your advice. (I am also not suggesting that I am the authority on these subjects, but I am not suggesting that everyone should go along with what I believe, either.)
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
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.
[|]
Genetic Engineering:
"GE, we bring good things to life!"
*rimshot*
I hadda do the joke. Don't ban me from Slashdot!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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."
Lets take a step back a do a reality check.
First, some basic genetics. It rare for a single gene (protein) to have a single function, and its rare for a given trait, say height or intelligence, to be governed by a single gene.
Also consider that we all know there are trade-offs and optimizations that have to take place in engineering, including genetic engineering.
So let's say you find a gene where one form predisposes the person to have a higher intelligence (say a more sensitive neurotransmitter receptor). So you put that form into a bunch of test babies and see what happens.
Maybe nothing happens.
Maybe they have an IQ that's 20 points higher on average than the general population.
Maybe the also show an increased incidence of manic depression, or epilepsy, or....
Back to the drawing board, lets try again. We found a gene we can modify to give a child super-strength.
Cool!
Funny how so many of them are completely debilitated by pulled or torn ligaments and tendons, and the occasional broken bone that couldn't handle the extra stess imposed by the super-muscles.
So much for super strength, they end up super cripples.
I'm trying to make a couple points here. First, it will take several generations just to test any given genetic manipulation, more to figure out how the requisite panel of genes will have to be modified to give an overall superior human.
Second, you can't just modify one gene and make an overall better human. There are trade-offs and unexpected consequences. Just because you have the parts manual doesn't mean you know how things work.
The one area where genetic manipulation can pretty much be guaranteed to be productive is in curing genetic diseases, where we know the gene, and we can change it back to "normal".
As for "Frankenbabies", any of you want to volunteer your kids for testing?
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.
Perhaps you should sign up for a brain "enhancement". The guy who gets the most electoral college (not popular) votes gets to be the president.
I agree that medicine and social programs have tampered with the standard notion of natural selection. But humans should also be observed on a higher level of Darwinian selection. Instead of just looking at survival of the fittest WITHIN a species, humans have shown that it is necessary to also look at survival of the fittest OF ALL species. Without this perspective, it is easy to get lost on the question of why humans have succeeded AT ALL. We should therefore look at humans with a point of view of the community rather than the individual. Without the community, humans would never have come to dominate.
One may argue that humans are successful because they are intelligent. Intelligence goes only so far - it's the knowledge that is passed on that is more important. Otherwise, we'd have people reinventing the wheel every generation, and never get to the point of building upon that to even make a cart.
Getting back on topic: Your conclusion on the result of the Black Plague is problematic. If the survivors passed on the gene in question, then why were there so many occurrances of the Plague in the same location over the centuries? Paris just kept getting hit with it into the turn of the 20th century.
I would instead prefer to look at WHY plagues occur and what stops them from re-occurring.
Given the necessity of humans to depend on each other, the tendency is toward denser populations. Conditions within any population produces an environment conducive to any other species willing to adapt. The Black Plague is an example of a special case. It took a while for humans, in general, to adapt to this threat.
One of the 'faults' of humans was to develop cities in identical ways. In particular, I'm thinking of waste disposal - just dump your trash in the trench in the middle of the street and let the rain carry it to the river. Since so many cities had this environment, a single species of parasite can easily infect multiple cities. (NOTE: since this is a geek forum - extend this to computer viruses with everyone using one OS).
You could attack this problem in one of two ways: (a) let individual natural selection take its course or (b) adapt the cities. Until just recently, the approach was (a). Once humans began to adapt as a whole (mandate washing hands before surgery, better waste disposal, water treatment, use of quarantine, etc) then there was less of a strain on the population density of the city. Each of these activities create their own problems, but such is the game of adapting.
Diseases are not always a bad thing, in the long run they are often helpful in preserving a species.
The species would be preserved WITHOUT disease, so I fail to see how having disease helps in preserving the species. Perhaps you could argue that disease acts as a "necessary evil" to produce a "greater good", but since the disease species are inclined to adapt to immunity it's a never-ending battle.
On the topic of GM-humans, I can see using this IF AND ONLY IF human existence would cease without it, including the loss of human interdependence (without which humans could not succeed). I don't see this happening anytime soon, but this would be another way that humanity would adapt to a threat. The oddity is that the result would no longer be "human" - what is being saved is civilization.
This is not my sig.
Agreed.
So the question is, what can we do to advance our understanding?
Experiments. Lots of them. Some will fail, others will not. ("Many will play, few will win?" Hear that (yet again) on the radio yesterday.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I am not so naive to think that GM people would not face a glass ceiling in the workforce, where it is easy to justify not promoting or not hiring someone with other reasons. However, I think if given the choice of having childhood diabetes but no glass ceiling (if I make it to adulthood) or being healthy and having to live with a glass ceiling, I'd take the latter.
However, that would be a personal choice and I would respect the rights of others to reach their own conclusions about their own situations.
Okay, we develop the technology to "improve" people in utero by eliminating "genetic defects." Some of these defects are obvious but others are a matter of opinion. For example, is a short stature a genetic defect? What about red hair? Regarding intelligence, most probably think that more is better. But...there are different kinds of intelligence and we have yet to find a way to measure or quantify reliably what intelligence is, though we all recognize its absence. :) A pulitzer prize-winning author may be mathematically inept while a brilliant mathematician may be unable to chain three sentences together in a conversation.
Among all species in the natural world, evolutionary success derives from a diverse gene pool that gives the species increased ability to adapt quickly to changed circumstances. Developing GM people is likely to reduce diversity by catering to our very human tendency to want to eliminate traits that we find undesirable now but which may be essential for our very survival in the future.
If a certain gene-combination improves inteligence (of whatever metric used at the time...) then I find it highly unlikely that most (responsible, caring) parents will not wish for their child to have that combination; the result, genetically wize, will be a monoculture in terms of that gene combination.
...) to interact with society in a positive manner.
I don't think this is a necessary conclusion at all. What parents see as desirable traits in a child will vary greatly. If I may use a couple of sterotypes for a moment to illustrate my point, while they are over-gerenerlizations, I think there is enough truth behind them to make this point.
Consider a child from Texas, what would the parents view as most desierable? What would they want little Billy to grow up to be? Probably a football quarterback, so they are going to get him traits that are benificial to that, he'll be tall, a bit broader in the sholders, athletic and have good eyesight. They probably would not care as much about logic and math skills, so may not worry about that.
Contrast this with parents from, say San Francisco. They are not going to care about a football carrer for their kid. They will probably be more interested in a kid who is capable in fine arts. So will get genes that promote artistic ability, hand eye coordination. They might not care a whole lot about math and logic skills, though possibly more than the football player's parents.
My point is, people have different ideas of what an ideal person is. This will be reflected in the choices made about their children's genetic code. Will there be some loss in diversity? Sure, I wouldn't argue that, but I don't think we would end up with a monoculture, people just don't have that much of a concensus on what a "perfect" human being is. Add to that the fact that you will never eliminate natural births (sex is just too much fun), and we should still have a good bit of diversity running around.
Again, as I said in other posts, I am not all pro or con GM, but I am pro ethics. It is a system which enables the decision-makers (Doctors, Scientists, Engineers
The problem with ethics, is that they are not very concrete. Consider for a moment what you base your ethics upon. For most people it comes down to something akin to religion, in the broadest sense. Its a set of belifs, which have no factual or logical basis, but we hold on to them, because without them, society would degenerate into a quagmire of hedonism. Thus arguing that something is unethical is really just an emotional plea, but has no logical basis. To base an argument on them, is silly, as what one person sees as ethical might not be so for another person. You can argue ethics till you are blue in the face, but it will get you nowhere, there is nothing which can prove or disprove any argument. The closest thing we can have to ethics is a stong concensus between people as to what is "right" or "wrong". In the case of GM people, there is not enough of a consensus as to what is "right" and "wrong" for it be very clear cut. For you to claim to be pro-ethics is really just a fallacious ploy to try and argue from the moral high-ground. Its an old trick, though I grant, one that still fools a lot of people.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
This issue ties to prejudice and segregation, class distinctions, and the Haves vs. the Have-Nots. Presumably anyone who has been modified will be more capable in some way - making them the better choice for jobs, college, sports, whatever areas that improvement affects. This means you, or your children, or your grandchildren, could be denied opportunities because someone who wouldn't have appeared naturally would exist and be better in some way. These are the fears that drive bans of GM humans.
I think groups like the Olympic committee should be more hesitant about banning all GM humans outright. What if the modification was to remove a predisposition for epilepsy? The athletic ability would be completely unchanged, though the individual may not have been able to compete had the GM not taken place.
Also, I can think of less threatening forms of GM: ending male pattern baldness, removing recessive genes for diseases and deformities (like a cleft palate), completely aesthetic modifications (removal of genes for moles or excessive body hair).
So much of sci-fi is an expression of our fears of the worst that could be produced. What we should learn from Star Trek and Gattaca and others is not that we shouldn't try - but that we need to consider all the possible ramifications in advance instead of just hoping it will all work out.
There are valid issues that will come about if GM becomes feasible. First of all, the unknown quantity of side effects. Will we know until a couple generations later whether removing a recessive gene for male pattern baldness worked and whether it had any unexpected side effects - such as hairy feet? Second, the expense of such treatments. Either treatment is only available to those who can afford it (great mix to create civil unrest and revolution) or subsidized clinics would have to exist (raising our taxes). Third, there will be prejudice and irrational reactions in both directions - that is pretty much a given. There are many more issues, but at least we are considering them now rather than later.
(Random, completely OT thought - could GM be used to alter racial characteristics? Carking?)
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
' 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
In an episode of the original series of Star Trek, the Enterprise encountered a ship, adrift, called the "Botany Bay", upon which humans from past history had put genetically modified superpeople that had gotten out of hand and been exiled. Their leader, name Kahn, was played by the actor Ricardo Montalban, who was also in some popular ads from Chrysler at the time, featuring cars with "fine Corinthian leather" seats and appointments. Much hilarity and cross-referencing ensued.
Virg