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Scientists Call For Global Moratorium On Gene Editing of Embryos (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Leading scientists have called for a global moratorium on the use of powerful DNA editing tools to make genetically modified children. The move is intended to send a clear signal to maverick researchers, and the scientific community more broadly, that any attempt to rewrite the DNA of sperm, eggs or embryos destined for live births is not acceptable. Beyond a formal freeze on any such work, the experts want countries to register and declare any plans that scientists may put forward in the future, and have these discussed through an international body, potentially run by the World Health Organization. Alongside technical debates about the possible benefits of creating genetically modified babies, the scientists said no decisions should be made to go ahead without broad public support. Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, calls for the moratorium with 16 other experts in the journal Nature. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Feng Zhang, who helped discover and develop the most common gene editing tool, CRISPR, contributed to the article.
The call comes four months after Chinese researcher He Jiankui used human embryos modified with CRISPR to create twin girls resistant to HIV.
The call comes four months after Chinese researcher He Jiankui used human embryos modified with CRISPR to create twin girls resistant to HIV.
Those with the money will do it no matter what. Enhanced humans are a future given.
;)
Just my 2 cents
at least, not unless there's a health issue involved. There's a couple genes that cause childhood leukemia and if that can be edited out go for it. But we're not ready to start making super babies. Not that I don't think we should. Of course we should. But we need a _much_ better understanding of the long term effects before we do. The best way to find that out would be trying to fix the sick.
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I'd mod you up if I could. The individual and collective rewards for gene editing are far too great to ignore. Someone (or likely many someones) will do it, even with the risks.
Anyone who voluntarily follows this moratorium is, by definition, going to fall behind on the genetic arms race. And falling behind means that your society will eventually become the genetically inferior one.
There is one simple fact to consider here; and, it's best to consider its ramifications when or if trying to render something illegal so it won't be done where you control life and liberty of others. "If something is technologically possible to do and there is a market for doing it, then it WILL get done at least one somewhere by at least one somebody." All making it illegal means is that when it is done you end up with a technological deficit, the technological mookie end of the stick.
{^_^}
That is even worse than decision by committee. This is decision by uninformed masses that have no clue how things work and what is and is not important.
While I am all for moving forward with extremely care in this area, letting the public decide about it is the worst idea possible. They will either be panicked irrationally or overoptimistic just as irrationally. Not good at all.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
We aren't evolving anymore or if we are it is not for the better (see Idiocracy), but god forbid we should try to improve ourselves as a species. Boy wouldn't that be awful. It is too bad that only a tiny percentage of the human population is intelligent and the rest are total retards who are against any sort of change. Just imagine if we could give every baby an IQ of 150 or even 180, but most people would regard that as a horrific dystopia I guess. Totally sad that these people call themselves 'scientists'. This is anti-science.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
" We'll have laws instead."
That everyone is breaking anyways, especially if you are wealthy or have power or connections to power. It is always a gas to see folks like you pretend that someone else's idea would never work while looking as your own idea already not working.
There is only 1 law... and that is of the jungle. The rich and powerful just like to hold the threat of anarchy over your head to get you to agree to anarchy anyways. You can be murdered by your government and how many of your fellow citizens will care enough to do anything about that? Not even your own family will do anything, except sue and get some money... your murder would benefit them.
What the poster is really trying to tell you that this just like the war on drugs will set us back more than it would wind up benefiting us. So yes, go ahead and law it all away... you only lose to powerful people getting you to fear your own shadow and preventing you from not being able to do anything while they still get to do everything. Sadly it works all too well.
Stop it before we Bashir head in.
Just another day in Paradise
We are already screwing up our gene pool, sooner or later it will become a necessity to fix it. Consider for example cesarean section, what happened historically when a woman could not give live birth the natural way? Well, as sad as it is Darwin happened and genes that lead to this faulty morphology were removed from gene pool. Now medicine can bypass that particular selection pressure and the genes remain in circulation. That's the same for every life modern medicine saves prior to procreation. Give it enough generations and every life will start in an incubator with constant medical intervention for a lifetime just to not die. If fatal errors do not get removed by natural selection, then we need an artificial method to do it. It may not be an imminent concern, it's fine to wait on it for decades, but it's not wise to put a permanent moratorium on gene editing humans, because eventually we must do it.
Why not edit up some babies that can digest plastic. Then let em loose in all those places that people are complaining about all the plastic pollution. Hell we wouldn't even need to educate them, just let em loose to eat and breed.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.