Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Argue the US Ban on Human Gene Editing Will Leave It Behind (vice.com)
Alex Pearlman, reporting for Motherboard: As the biotech revolution accelerates globally, the U.S. could be getting left behind on key technological advances: namely, human genetic modification. A Congressional ban on human germline modification has "drawn new lines in the sand" on gene editing legislation, argues a paper published today in Science by Harvard law and bioethics professor I. Glenn Cohen and leading biologist Eli Adashi of Brown University. They say that without a course correction, "the United States is ceding its leadership in this arena to other nations." Germline gene modification is the act of making heritable changes to early stage human embryos or sex cells that can be passed down to the next generation, and it will be banned in the US. This is different from somatic gene editing, which is editing cells of humans that have already been born. The ban, added by the House of Representatives as a rider to the fiscal year 2016 budget, could have far-reaching implications if it continues to be annually renewed, according to the authors. It "undermines ongoing conversations on the possibility of human germline modification" and also affects "ongoing efforts by the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] to review the prevention of mitochondrial DNA diseases," including some kinds of hearing and vision impairments, among other serious illnesses that tend to develop in young children.
Putting in place these limitations allows us to find alternative solutions, its great to fix unborn babies, but currently 100% of the human population has been born, so fixing problems in aged individuals maybe better to encourage.
If the adjustments are "simple" fixes like curing a disease by correcting a mutation or two, I see no problem with it.
But if it's about making a "super race" by fiddling with body type or the brain, then I say let other countries be the guinea pigs and learn the hard road lessons of fiddling.
You are implying some arbitrary normal human as a baseline reference. And the only difference between those two scenarios is whether you are moving someone up to that baseline or past that baseline. But why should we set the goalpost at average human instead of setting the goalpost of optimum human potential? Most of us who aren't Olympic-level athletes and super-geniuses all has some genetic conditions that hold us back from reaching the greatest heights of human achievement. If those conditions can be fixed genetically, then why shouldn't they be? That's like saying that only people who are bad at math should be allowed to use calculators.