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?"

Comments

Does Star Trek teach us nothing!

[Zygote-IC-]

One word:
Khan

Re:Does Star Trek teach us nothing!

[nounderscores]

Come on. It doesn't matter what "we" learn or if science fiction teaches "us" anything. The bottom line is that some nations will ban the technology, and other nations will endorse it to some degree. In the offchance that everybody outlaws the technology... the old saying goes that only outlaws will have it.

The bottom line is that some people eat the apple of knowledge. If they die, then we move on. If it turns them into gods, then those who do not endorse the technolgy will have to battle uphill against a technically superior foe.

Just look at gunpowder and steam engines. People used to think that gunpowder should be used in fireworks and steam engines disturbed the spirits of the dead.

Then trainloads of troops began to cross the british empire and her ships ruled the waves.

Of course if the spirits of the dead were really offended they would have sabotaged the steam engines and britain would have ended up like kahn... all bitter and superweapon having, but defeated by the other folks.

Really, technology not about right and wrong. It's about power.

Has buffy season 7 taught you nothing?

Re:Does Star Trek teach us nothing!

[Zaak]

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

Hemophiliacs?

[MBslug]

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?

Re:Hemophiliacs?

[AchilleTalon]

Of course, no.

However, it still left the following question unanswered: "What about the hemophiliacs who has not the chance and/or money to be GM and avoid the pain? Will he be stigmatised in a society where genetic modifications will be routinely applied?"

Please, note I am not answering yes to my question. However, there is also a bad side to GM. Personnally, I don't have a dogmatic approach to the problem. GM may be good, even great. However, we must also avoid blind enthousiasm for it.

Re:Hemophiliacs?

[Bendebecker]

It all is a matter of how extensive the modifications are. GM can be used to fix 'genetic defects'. The great danger is: what is your definition of genetic defect? Will there be a future where having looks that aren't at the level of a supermodel be considered a gentic defect? It would be great to cure hemophilia, hereditary forms of cancer, and other such diseases and someone will eventually do so regardless of legality. The bottle can't hold back a genie like this forever, some will inevitably flock to it like sailors to a siren. However, we all now what happened to the sailors who did flock to the sirens.

Re:Hemophiliacs?

[Charm]

What if what you think is a bad gene is really a good gene? In the instance of a disease like Sickle Cell Anemia, what is a disease on one hand is also a protection against malaria. Imagine if you had a genetic disease and it was removed. Later on a plague (like SARS) moves through civilisation and you get it because the gene you had removed confered immunity. Bad luck there. Genetics is always a game of dice even if you are GM'd.

Sci-Fi prior art (Red Dwarf)

[JamesSharman]

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:

After the World Cup new rules had to be created for GAS (Genetic Alternative Sports). Scotland fielded a genetically engineered goal keeper that was 8 foot high and 16 feet across, thereby filling the entire goal. Somehow they still failed to qualify for the second round.

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..

Re:Sci-Fi prior art (Red Dwarf)

[foo fighter]

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.

You are right: if mind- and body-altering drugs were not stigmatized and prohibition-ized in modern, western society we wouldn't see "clean" humans in any part of life, not to mention sports.

Why not take crystal meth to make a deadline at work? Why not smoke a joint at coffee-break to take the edge of an especially stressful day? There aren't any good, recent studies I'm aware of that show these actions negatively impact worker productivity. (Nor any that promote it, to be fair.) But these actions are so thouroughly stigmatized that not only would I be fired for them, I'd also probably be jailed as a criminal for altering my own body.

Now what if I take a course of action that permanently raises my stamina and stress-coping capabilities. Perhaps it's via medically induced genetic mutation or manipulation. It's not hard to draw a line from temporary personal manipulation to permanent personal manipulation and see that not only will the later be stigmatized, but that it will probably be more stigmatized.

I see it every day in my role as a systems administrator/analyst. People fear change. People don't want to think about change. People don't want to act on change. People tend to respond to change with confusion and anger. Changes of a quasi-magical nature, that is, most anything dealing with cutting-edge science, especially scare people and their brains shut down. People stop thinking rationally and call for the change to be crucified.

To get people to accept change, other people who can and do think about and act on change need to sell the positives and repeat their (sound-bite-ified) message over and over and over and over until a critical mass of people believe it, whether or not they understand it.

If the people at the top levels of Government decided to start a two-decade long marketing campaign selling the wonders of personal genetic modification, in two-decades you'd be hard pressed to find an unmodified human. In the same way, if our top leaders sell the fears of personal genetic modification, in two-decades our jails will be full of people who altered their bodies in society unapproved ways.

Gene fetishism

[redragon]

The thing that amazes me is that people assume just because we make someone physically "better" than someone that they're going to be an olympic athelete. I just don't buy it. Most of those people work their as*es off to get there. Just because someone has a genetic pre-disposition to being an athelete doesn't make you one.

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...

Re:Improve upon our faults. OCing the Human Brain?

[sigep_ohio]

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.

Concerns

[Dark Lord Seth]

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.

Re:Improve upon our faults. OCing the Human Brain?

[guybarr]

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.

Frankenfood

[Obiwan Kenobi]

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.

Re:Frankenfood

[vidarh]

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?

This is bullshit. For decades the worlds food production have been way above amount of food required to feed the worlds population. In the early 70's the number stood at about 130% of the needed amount.

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.

I'm not saying that GM food is inherently bad, however I don't think you're doing GM foods any good by making claims that have no basis in reality.

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.

The country you are referring to is likely Zimbabwe, and if so then what you're saying is complete and utter bullshit.

While Mugabe is a murderous madman of a dictator (much more so than Hussein), his decision to stop GM food imports was made for a very good reason:

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.

In the end the grain was milled to flour before being distributed in Zimbabwe.

The same was the case for the other African countries who raised objections to importing GM grain.

Re:Frankenfood

[Obiwan Kenobi]

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.

Re:Frankenfood

[Nosher]

I'm fairly neutral about all this stuff, but I would still question a couple of your assumptions: just exactly where does a resistance to glyphosate (a widely used herbicide made by a certain famously litigous megacorp) occur in nature? For 'tis this gene that was inserted into Bt Corn making it impervious to this weedkiller. That's something a whole level above regular cross breeding as it works by the insertion of more-or-less artificial genetic code. Also, most of these crops never make it anywhere near the "third world" as the patents on them normally preclude such non-profit uses.

When did we decide "no more progress?"

[Kombat]

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.

Re:When did we decide "no more progress?"

[hetairoi]

There are tons of questions here, and I think that's more why many scientists are lobbying to have restrictions on GM of anything, much less humans. What if a child is found to have some disease while in the womb, and doctors perform GM and fix the disease, but the modification also CAUSES the child to have MS? Think about it, how many times have you made a minor change to some code that couldn't possibly affect anything else only to find that it blows out everything else?

Even with the advancements in science and medicine this century much of what doctors do is guesswork. Now think about how each computer out there has a different setup, different video cards, different processors, you have to understand everything about that system to diagnose a problem. Many doctors out there are pretty clueless as it is, imagine if everyone that came in for a physical had all sorts of minor differences. I could see a major problem with doctors misdiagnosing problems simply because they didn't know that John Doe had a GM'd liver.

AS far as how society will react to GM humans, I think it will depend on how much of a modification is done and why. If someone is modified to be 8 feet tall so they can play basketball, many people will see this as wrong. But someone modified to correct a disease or deformity I think would be accepted. Of course, you will always have that group that screams about 'purity' and 'God didn't intend these people to live' but that's really nothing new. It's all an individual perspective.

I'm not really against genetic modification and I think modifying my kids to be basketball players would be great (on the other hand, my kids might have objections), but I do think there are far too many unanswered questions and far too many things that we don't understand yet to start modifying and re-engineering people. The potential benefits outweigh the potential dangers in my opinion (not that I even have 1/100th of the information that I would need to really make that call).

Before diving headlong into something that could be enormously destructive to an individual, a society and an ecosystem I think there should be much much more research and understanding.

This is just my individual perspective, feel free to deviate.

Re:When did we decide "no more progress?"

[Keck]

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?

She's right - a common problem with scientific advances is to underestimate the magnitude of 2nd and 3rd order (unintended) effects. Humans are notoriously bad at foresight beyond the simplest predictions. The problem is that (we) science-minded types run into is that we don't assume or count on people ABUSING the things we come up with. But they do, and usually in far greater numbers than they use inventions in a good way. It's not enough to say "People are still responsible for their actions" because what we will have done is made it far more likely that we will destroy ourselves, much sooner than before our latest "Advance" came to fruition.
Let me propose this idea to you: Broaden and enhance your definition of "advance". I personally think we are long on technological and communications advancements, such that we are limited by our own (think average joe) education and morality. Yes, morality. Without some compass we would (and do) slide down a slippery slope towards the dregs of what humanity can be. When you've gone the wrong way, the most progressive man is the one who turns back FIRST..

Re:Improve upon our faults. OCing the Human Brain?

[TrippTDF]

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.

Re:Improve upon our faults. OCing the Human Brain?

[oblivionboy]

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 :)

Re:Argh horrible

[richie2000]

imagine a beowolf cluster of GM-Humans..

Just watch The Matrix again. :-)

A new Slashdot interview: Chris Claremont?

[thud2000]

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....

Re:Improve upon our faults. OCing the Human Brain?

[dbrutus]

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.

Furry community

[wowbagger]

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!

General Motors Employees Are People, Too

[Dfiant]

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!)

Plant genes only? Not so.

[sean.peters]

and how the only spliced genes in plants are from other plants

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

Re:Improve upon our faults. OCing the Human Brain?

[mrtroy]

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...

When did we decide "Progress is God?"

[DeadScreenSky]

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.)

Monsanto and planned obsolescence

[phossie]

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).*

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 /. 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.

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

[tekrat]

Genetic Engineering:
"GE, we bring good things to life!"

*rimshot*
I hadda do the joke. Don't ban me from Slashdot!

Flip Side

[4of12]

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.

Reality Check

[shotfeel]

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?

Relax

[Gray]

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.

Previously, in Fiction

[dasunt]

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.

Higher levels of natural selection at play

[Tired_Blood]

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.

Re:Higher levels of natural selection at play

[sigep_ohio]

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.

Re:Improve upon our faults. OCing the Human Brain?

[Thing 1]

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.

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.)

Too simplified a response

[Ra5pu7in]

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?)