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Genetically Engineered Children
A reader sent us a ABCNews story about the future of genetically engineered children. It's a bit fluffy, but creates some interesting questions, particularly in regards to the ethical questions. The synopsis of some of the people quoted is that most parents will actually do it, because they will want superior children. What do you folks think?
I'd genetically engineer my children in a secind.
I would enhence thier spelling abilities, and
sences of humur.
I am personally more concerned about the future of genetically engineered mice. Anyone else has the feeling that they're trying to take over the world? Damn, this feels bad.
"it's only natural" - parents want their genes passed on and on and on and on, and "superior" children would pass on more genes.
dillie
I am of the opinion that we are largely defined by our so-called imperfections. It is our imperfections that add character and flavor to otherwise bland personalities.
Where would I be without my imperfections? I would be another boring person slogging away through this world, not standing out from the herd.
Where would I be if my parents had followed a course of genetically engineering their children? I would NOT be around because I am predisposed to being overweight, under-athletic, and have less-than-perfect vision despite having an excellent mind and capacity for learning and thought.
Where would YOU be under such a system? Probably non-existant.
I'm not arrogant enough to think that I would be perfect enough to slip through their filters, but I am arrogant enough to think that I deserve just as much right to exist as a "perfect" engineered alternative.
Scarey prospects indeed.
Let imperfections reign,
Jason
# Jason A. Dour
# Jason A. Dour
# Founder / Executive Producer - PJ Harvey Online (pjh.org)
I suspect that most prospective parents would hesitate to resort to genetic enhancement of their offspring. However, if this becomes available, many parents will feel compelled to make use of it just to keep their children competitive. The only way to prevent this domestic genetic arms race is to strictly regulate genetic enhancement technology. I'm not sure regulation is a good idea, but the alternative scares me.
No sig? Sigh...
Now I don't necessarily approve of it, but once the technology is there, I think GATTACA will happen.
GATTAGA
:) The plot of the movie is basically fast forwarded n years to the future where we now control the genes of every person. Right from birth, your destiny is controlled by your genes - you can work some places, but not others.. and the world is basically divided up by "how good your genes are", and by extension - how useful you are. Think if it as the ultimate in racism. There is a very real possiblity of this happening - I don't believe this society (or any society in existance right now) is fully prepared to start meddling with genetics. It's an all-too-real possiblity that we'll create a world up with the "genetically superhuman", and the "normals" who are by definition, inferior.. and then it's only a short step to an all out war. This is something you'll read about over and over again - it's a well-used plot in science fiction. Heed their warnings.
If you've seen the movie, that's all I need to say to get my point across. For those that haven't, go see it right now - it was one of those pivotal sci fi movies you should have seen.
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Wait.. If I say "Yes, kids should be genetically engineered," does that imply that I'm going to have sex some day? Hell yes!
:-)
...Brave New World? That's what this reminds me of. The Alpha pluses, the Epsilons, the class divisions. I think this could either be very good or very bad. It could be very good and have the benefits of eliminating a lot of genetic based diseases, but it could also fragment the class and social structure with groups of "I'm better than your because they streamlined my chromosomes before I was born" type of ideaology. I personally already got enough of that type of crap in high school thanks....
Deitheres - Master of... er... something.
-- .sig files go when they die?
Child: Mommy, where do
Mother: HELL! Straight to hell!
I've never been the same since.
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
I've heard it said that one of the most important jobs someone can ever have is the job of raising a child. It is the responsibility of the parent (in a perfect world) to raise a child who can survive in this world. It is the ultimate accomplishment if the child can do more than survive and actually prosper.
That being the case Parents would be remiss in their duties if they didn't at least consider genetic engineering. Their childs prosperity may depend on his or her advantages relative to their neighbours.
IMHO, of course.
J
Oh well, no point in steering now.
One hundred years hence, race might have disappeared as the primary differentiation among persons. Instead, we may bear much more significant differences as the result of parental design.
I think the first and most common use of this sort
of biotechnology will be to correct some of the more horrible genetic defects out there which prevent children from living long and happy lives -- cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease, that sort of thing -- NOT 'tuning' of intelligence or physical prowess. Technology exists now to discover the presence of some of these diseases before birth -- but so far no such genes for smarts or basketball have been discovered (and imho won't be). So don't think 'designer babies,' think 'healthy normal babies...' In the *far* future perhaps 'designer babies' will be possible but I think that's a lot longer down the road than most journalists appreciate.
--
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
hmm.. it could just result in a lot of engineered people bored out of their skull. Think of it.. almost everyone will be either very smart, or strong, agile etc. Or even all of them. but there will always be stupid jobs even though a lot will be automated. Everyone a rocket scientist.. but what about the garbagemen and the people who screw the tops on tubes of toothpaste. . .
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
The gap between the rich and the poor will no longer end at the pocket book...there is a possibility of a multi-tiered society forming (like "brave New World") where the ehnanced citizens occupy high roles, and poor citizens who are not enhanced will be relegated to menial posts.
I think this could inflate to a bad idea for two reasons:
1. People would suddenly lose individuality and personal character. If this kind of technology became available, there would be a sudden change. Everyone would want the opportunity for their kids.
2. I'm weary about having kids that are exponentially smarter than me. Although it might be cool.....
"Hey! Meet my kids! This is my son, Darryl, 4 years old, a Solaris/Linux sysadmin... my other son Darryl, 2.5 years old, a biochemist with a keen interest in group theory... and our daughter, Lucy, 6 months old.... she dreams in German."
Linux: Because rebooting is for adding new hardware.
Maybe we can selectively breed out ignorance and first poster attitudes ;)
Getting Dolly to be born took 300 failed attempts, each time producing deformed embryos. That was easy: at least you don't have the public ready to jail you if you produce deformed lambs.
No extrapolate that to babies: in order to produce genemod humans you need empirical data which you can't obtain without (for now) ghastly research. In order to break this cycle, first you have to watch Dolly (her telomeres are out of whack), then get a reliable method for making Dolly's (without the telomere problem), then move up to primates, and only when you can reliably produce genemod apes, can you even think about working on humans.
I doubt I'll live to see this. Even if I do, by the time anyone's ready to try it we'll have a good enough understanding of the genome that it won't be done for frivolous reasons. (crosses fingers)
Eugenics, the deliberate selection of some people as more "fit", is nothing new. Don't forget that more than half of the states in the union have had laws allowing them to sterilize the "feebleminded." Over 60,000 americans were sterilized involuntarily; these sterilizations continued up to the mid-1970's. And the Buck vs. Bell supreme court decision that upheld the constitutitionality of sterilization has never been overturned.
And don't forget that people have been practicing artificial selection without the aid of a genome map for our entire existance as a species. People attempt to choose the best -- healthy, wealthy, intelligent -- partner to mate with. And on the more morbid side, there are dozens of cultures where female babies (or twins, or babies with birth defects) are killed because they are unwanted. The genome map will accelerate the trend towards eugenics, but it's not like we're moving from a society where no one cares about the fitness of their children to Brave New World.
I hope they make a nice interface to the genetic programming machine, so you can program your kids at home. Oh, yeah, and what will they do with the early alphas?
Why even have children in the first place. Too many things to do, teach them, feed them, look at diapers with shit in them, take them on walks. I would rather RoboKids.. All ya need to do is put in a couple of batteries and upgrade them to KidWin2k. MS would love it too!
As a parent, I frequently have to deal with this question :
do I do what is best for my children, or do I do what is best for wider society ? In the UK, many people feel that a private education is superior to the one provided by the state; if this is so, do I send my kids to a private school, thus weakening the state school system, or do I send them to the allegedly inferior state school ?
The same is to an extent true with genetic engineering of kids - I believe it is not a good thing in the long term, except in certain rare medical situations; I believe society is served by having individuals who are not "perfect" - a world of Pamela Anderson/Harrison Ford clones would be dreadful. Would I choose a genetic improvement to my childrens' intelligence ? Well, maybe, if I could ever work out what intelligence really means. Was Picasso more or less "intelligent" than Einstein ? Would the world be served by a population made up entirely of succesful intellects - 6 billion Bill Gateses - aargh.
Scary. No answers, only questions; however, the really important thing is that we need to keep the science going forward, not run away saying "No, we don't understand this, we should not be researching this subject".
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.
I'm reminded of the scenarios in Player Piano and Brave New World, which do a rather nice job of pointing out the major logistical problem with all this: Someone still has to do the grunt work. As it is, we aren't too far off of Vonnegut's scenario of female PhD's in cutthroat competition for secretarial jobs, and a genetically-engineered meritocracy is only going to aggravate the problem. There will still need to be a "producer" class, which is something that people tend to forget, and in this day and age of cheap mass-market goods made by little kids in China, most people don't want (even if they can afford it) to pay good money for the honest labor of a talented craftsperson. Think of how much less clothing the average person owned when it was usually sewn by someone in the household (by hand even), and how much less than THAT the average person owned when cloth had to be hand-spun and woven as well. Machines DO take care of some of this, but people still must run the machines.
There's also the small matter of the likely high correlation between intelligence and insanity. Remember the "Eve" episode of the X-Files? This holds fairly true in my own life
Trying too hard to "fix" a perceived problem tends to lead to backlash of some sort -- disease-resistant bacteria, anyone? There are two ways this could go, and I don't much care for either of them: An "all the children are above average" scenario, with "deviations" such as CP, Down's Syndrome, or perhaps even homosexuality ruthlessly stomped out, and people becoming ridiculously overqualified for even the most basic jobs; or a *deliberate* system of "breeding" a worker class (either human or AI). Gives me the creeps
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
The article is, indeed, fuzzy. The future innovations it talks about can basically be split into two parts: physical intervention (eg artificial wombs for premature babies) and genetic engineering. The point the article is trying to make is that in the end, people won`t see the difference between them.
I disagree.
People are presently making an incredible amount of fuss over genetically modified food. A lot of this is down to ignorance and hyperbole (one woman was quoted as saying "I don`t want my food to have any of that DNA in it"); nevertheless, it shows that people are, to some extent justifiably, chary of new genetic technology, especially insofar as it has anything to do with them. If they`re making this much of a fuss about soya and tomatoes, how much more are they going to reject trying anything that sounds remotely similar on their own children?
IMHO, it would be great to get rid of hereditary diseases, as mentioned in the article, and other such things. Someone posted earlier that we are defined by our 'defects.' However, would someone with one such 'defect' be any less of a person if they did not have the problem? I don't think that would be the case. More likely that person had potential that they had extreme difficulty realizing because of a problem that hindered them.
:) But I mean, seriously. If you are Joe Average, and your kid is Jean Intelligent, can you really relate to him? You want to be playing games with your kid at 5 years, but he/she wants to be studying physics. I mean, if you know physics, you can join in, but speaking as a father, I know I'd want to be playing with my kids.
I don't think creating superior children is a good thing, though. We might end up creating monsters that want to do away with all of those who aren't genetically superior. (At least it happens in that way in the sci-fi books
In fact, he says, it will be so beneficial that governments may require children to be engineered genetically to prevent development of new socioeconomic gaps.
I think this would be very wrong. if this happens here, I'm moving to another planet.
By the time these "smart" babies are born, they could be taught via direct transmission of electrical impulses into chips implanted in their brains.
"You might download French into the 3-year-old's brain directly," Caplan says.
Now, I'm wondering, did this really fit into the article at all? They were talking about genetic engineering, not implanted chips. They've gone from genetic engineering to cyborgs. (Personally, I'd want to be a cyborg, so it wouldn't be fair:) Plus, it's *upload* not download. Download is a transmission to you, upload is a transmission from you. Sigh. Net commercialization has corrupted the terms brought about by the old BBSes. Anyway, I'm finished rambling.
Hey, you took three cents!
Forget about lasic surgery--just make sure your children have perfect vision to begin with. Sure, we can eliminate various genetic disorders, but most of those are rare--that won't have a major effect on society. Fixing the common problems (most notably vision) can have a huge impact.
Now there's a fine line between that and controlling cosmetic features (hair/eye color) and personality features. And sometimes it gets very blury--is the tendency to be alcoholic a disorder that should be fixed or a personality trait?
And I'm sure governments around the world will react with fear and ban all human genetic alterations, dooming us to added generations plagued with poor vision.
People frequently talk about the ethical concerns over what genetic engineering will do to our society ( or more to the point what it will do to certain individuals over others ) . But htis seems to undercut some of the REAL terrors that may result from our manipulation of the human genetic code . There are real scientific concerns ( understatement ) with regards to 'improving' our own species . I would like ot see the discussion switch to the problems with manipulation of systems that we don't understand. Has anyone considered the possibilities of our engineering our own species out of existence ?
One of the advantages of sexual reproduction is that the gene pool is constantly mixed. If you start placing the same or similar genes into large segments of the population, you're setting the human race up for major problems. Diversity is *not* a problem -- it's one of the things that keeps the human race from dying out. If everybody's got the same genes, then everyone is susceptible to the same diseases. It doesn't matter if it's accomplished naturally (inbreeding - the original genetic engineering), or by genetic engineering. Not a good idea IMHO.
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"Go Metallica. Die RIAA." -- Linus Torvalds
I seem to read into this a distinct possibility for the haves to widen the gap between themselves and the have-nots.
Think about it: the haves already send their children to better school which then gives them better educations-> better jobs-> better lifestyles. The rich will be the first and only (for a long, long time) to be able to afford pre-birth genetic recontruction. They choose to have children that are better, faster, smarter, and stronger. They literally evolve past us 'normal' humans because they have the means and we do not.
Survival not of the fittest.. but of the richest.
Ethics will play less and less into real life as economics takes over.
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rJames.org - illustration
It's "GATTACA" not "GATTAGA" as another reader pointed out. Sorry!
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The =last= thing most parents want is for their kids to be smarter, faster, stronger, more dexterous than they are. Even the best of parents don't want kids who have the mental or physical ability to run circles around them. The =average= parent =WANTS= to be superior to their kids, though. Look around you, and you'll see that that is where most of their self-esteem comes from.
Now, kids born in military bases are another matter. There, there is a strong incentive to produce "ultimate" warriors - brainless thugs. Again, though, the better they engineer them, the less control the "non-engineered" parents and military have, by definition.
I think what we'll see is less a dangerous swing towards creating dangerous superhumans, but more the destruction of intelligence and creativity. THESE are the traits most teachers and parents hate, and make someone "abnormal" or a "freak". THESE are what will go first. THEN we'll see the wholesale destruction of evolutionary shifts. If nature finds trait X to give someone an advantage, then the surrounding people will decide it makes the person "different" - a characteristic that will be stomped on, at all costs.
Eugenic Wars are a very real possibility, with each culture "purifying" it's new generation, making them gray, moronic, inferior clones of their "perfect" parents or the "perfect" society.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Would parents actually do this? I think most would be willing to say that they would do it in a heartbeat. What parent wouldn't want to eliminate the chance of all the genetic diseases? Cystic fibrosis, Down's Syndrome, Hemophelia the amount of genetic diseases are staggering. If you could GUARANTEE that you child didn't have any of those, wouldn't you?
As for "improvements", the issue becomes more sticky. But I think in most cases the parents would be willing to give their children any advantage possible. Look at the prolifieration of all the products that will make your child learn more. Do you think parents wouldn't cut and paste a few genes if they thought it would turn their kid from average to Einstein, or from disabled to Carl Lewis? Many parents will do nearly anything for the good of their children. I don't think a little gene alteration would be beyond most.
Sure there are risks, but what's life without risks?
GATTACA
Believe me, the world protrayed in Gattaca is a whole lot nicer to those with "inferior" DNA than the world we live in now.
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What is really scary is what kind of modification your average US parents would pick... most of them would end up raising jocks, modified to be great football players or topmodels. Einstein would have not existed if his parents had choosen to raise a uber-mench.
Think of all the ridiculous things people do nowadays to get the children they want. They'll have sex upside down on a Sunday at exactly 3:01 am on a full moon if they think it'll give them a child of the right sex. They'll listen to mozart when the fetus has enough cells that they could count them on one hand if they think it'll give them a musically talented child. People have been doing things like this for centuries, and they continue even though most of it has been disproven, and what hasn't is incredibly unlikely to be true.
/all/ the traits parents want. Some parents want a kid who is good in sports, and they don't want him to be super smart, some want pretty kids, and others want smart kids. These kids won't be supermen, they'll just be what their parents wanted, which is a helluva lot better than parents having the kid they didn't want and the kid having to suffer through that the whole "you don't want me" his/her whole life.
If parents are so willing to work hard doing something that probably won't help their kid, they'll be ten times as willing to do something that is certain to 'improve' their offspring.
However, I don't think this is that much of a problem.. the population will even out fairly well anyway, because it'll probably be too expensive to get
If I can prevent my kids from having asthma, or prevent them from being diabetic, having heart disease, contracting cancer, I'm going to do it. This sort of thing has already been done. A couple in Boston who both have Sickle Cell disease were able to have children who did not have the gene. The used the exact same method as what Gattica discusses. I think its a great idea, but lets be realistic, people will never, EVER be allowed to discriminate based on genes, atleast not in the US. There are certain rights that every human-being retains in this country. Everyone here with a big conspiratorial imagination can believe that some enormous class system will arise from this, but I can't see that happen. The most threatening thins, I think, is i the insurance companies were to get hold of your gene sequence and find out how much of a risk you are. That however has already been outlawed.
my $.02 Fire away Flame
Well, I'm a parent and I would never go for this. If you don't think the "designer baby" mentality won't arise ASAP, you're not paying attention to the news. People already pay big money to choose sex. This is a primitive form of the "db". A musician couple recently had an abortion soley because their child may have had a deformed hand, and therefore could not be a musician(which is total load. see Tony Melendez).
And who would be able to afford this technology to "fix" their kids? The rich people, which would seem to lead to a nice cross between "The Time Machine" and "Brave New World".
Our society already devalues human life. This technology will just enable us to accelerate that trend even more.
Mike Latiolais
mpl8925@ksu.edu
I agree completely: GATTACA (well, that's how it's spelled at www.imdb.com) is the science fiction movie one should see.
When I saw it, I almost got scared: It's so realistic (this newsstory confirms that) and mankind is crazy enough to let it happen eventually. I mean: look back about 60 years. A little, obnoxious painter called Adolf Hitler tried to breed the "perfect race" of humans and to eliminate everybody else......
When I read how close the genetic engineering gets to perfection, I get more and more frightened that someone like Hitler might rise again.
And this brings back the ethical part of science. I have always felt, that science and research should take place without etical concirns, however that applications of the research should be carefully considred and evaluated. I am however getting ever less convinced that it is so - maybe there are areas, where we shoud keep our hands out????
Well, I dunno - but it sure is scaring to imagine...
-- "Life is a bitch - and she hates me..."
I agree that the implications (while nothing new, particularly not to sci-fi readers/writers) are scary. But by rising to the top of the food chain and pandering to the lowest common denominator, we've eliminated natural selection. Maybe that's what makes us human. Maybe not. I'm not qualified to say. But what I CAN say is that thousands of years ago those with the genes that more adapted to the environment survived. Those who didn't died out. Pretty simple. You see residual traits from this in people today (I'm not going to go off on an evolution rant . . . today (-;).
So natural selection is out. Survival is not necessarily an issue. However, that cannot stop evolution. If it does, then we devolve (again, I'll skip out on supporting this, because it's lenghty and not necessarily relevant). So how can evolution continue if nature isn't choosing the genes? It's obvious that WE start choosing the genes. I'm not saying we'll do it right. Nor am I saying we necessarily should. But we WILL. yet another thing about the universe I don't like but accept.
And yes, I'm "smart" enough to realize with my genetic code, I'd never make the cut.
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
In-utero gene therapy is the next great frontier. It would enable doctors to tinker with fetal DNA and cure congenital conditions before birth.
This was predicted a long time ago...by Frank Herbert in The Eyes of Heisenberg (1972, I think).
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Is this the ultimate level of evolution ? Could it be that intelligence is not the ultimate point, but a step before artificial modification of our own species ? What is more darwinian than a species engineering itself to be even more adapted to its environment, instead of waiting for mother nature to do the job ?
Man playing God have always been a bit of a touchy subject and I think with good reason.
DNA, Genetics and Cloning are issues that challenges our ideas of what make us human or what we really want humans to be. It seems sad that human values are derived from "success", namely status & wealth, in the rat race not merely for the sake of living. This attitude seems to be adopted by the bioethicist in the article. "In a competitive market society, people are going to want to give their kids an edge" So the point of life then is to have "an edge" over your competitors? So these children's lives are nothing more than beating and competing with the other robots that's going to come out of this? Maybe I'm a backward romantic on life but it would seem that it would be a wrong ideal to enforce on children.
Another problem I can see is the inevitable division of societies into the haves and the have nots. It will create an elitist society, differentiated by some pre-determined conditioning and genetic engineering, much like in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World". The gaps in the wealthy and the poor will not only be entrenched by material wealth but physical superiority as well.
And not that pleasure in "doing" something isn't already hard enough to find. People used to be able to just enjoy the simple things in life, like fixing things that are broken, building that shed in the backyard. Now, the pressures of the rat-race would force most people to just hire in someone to do it for them. It would seem that in the future, no longer will you be able to enjoy the challenges of learning new things by yourself but you'll be able to download and know everything by the click of the button. But what bloody good is that? Sure no one likes exams and you always want to know more, but half the enjoyment is the sense of satisfaction that you have endured and achieved a particular thing. If all you ever wanted to know about everything can be downloaded in minutes- like downloading French as mentioned in the article- then what is there left for you to do?
Happiness is hard enough to find without all these distractions
Once this starts, it marks the end of what we call human. Will time travelers come back to the past and say "What are all these ugly creatures. Oh, they're are ancestors".
It will start out slow, increased intelligence, enhanced physical strength, resistence to disease. But, where does it stop? Hmm, are bodies too fragile, why not an exoskeleton? Senses are limited, why not eyes to see infrared and ultraviolet, why not ears to hear supersonic and subsonic. Emotions cloud are judgement, why not get rid of them?
Yea, why not?
So as people become used to genetically enhanced children they will eventually take the next step and fundamentally change what we call human. Whether it's good or bad, we won't know, only that some day it will happen.
The more you want, the less you have.
I'm up for using genetic science to remove certain diseases like Cystic Fibrosis (sp?), or MSD, etc.. from the child before it is born. But treating the unborn like it was a car and choosing it's features (i.e. choosing eye color, hair color, weight, height, etc...) isn't right. It should all be left up to the chaotic randomness of the Universe so that you don't know what your getting. Its exciting to expect the unexpected..
:P
Arthur Caplan quotes: "Absolutely, somewhere in the next millennium, making babies sexually will be rare..." -- If you ask me, he's nuts. Genetic engineering may be an alternative, but it'll never replace the "natural" way.
And the concept of microchips in the brain is really dumb...Sure it may provide the ability to imbue the entire UNIX manual into a 4 year old's brain, but there's no fun in that...tis better to spend time to learn by trial & error. Eh well, I won't be around when all this happens prolly anyways, cause it's still a good century down the road I think...*coughtechnologicaldarkagecough*
A penny for your thoughts, and I gave my two cents, now where is my change?
At one time, elm trees dominated cities in the Northeast usa. Then, an organism came along with a special affinity for elms, Dutch Elm Disease, and nearly wiped out every elm tree. They had such little genetic diversity that Dutch Elm Tree nearly removed them from the gene pool.
Researchers today are still looking for elm's that have a resistance to this disease (though I think they have a few likely trees).
How about getting breeding children without the gene for sickle cell anemia. Sounds like a marvelous idea, sickle cell being very destructive in Africa.
Except being a carrier apparently gives you some protection against malaria (iirc), which is why such a disease with a negative reproductive impact is still around.
Something that may be closer to many slashdot readers, myopia. Who wouldn't want to free theur children from the need to wear glasses? However, correlations have been found between myopia and intelligence. Is it because four-eyes like to read, or is there a genetic link between brain size and the size of the eyeball? If it comes down to an either or, do you pick between a brainy kid who may need glasses, or a less smart kid who doesn't?
My point, anything that reduces genetic diversity in a species puts that species that much closer to a catastrophic pandemic.
That said, I don't think this will be an issue by the time I procreate again, though I fear my daughter may have to make this choice.
George
The evolutionary purpose of procreation is to maximize the survial prospects of one's own genes, not some other set of genes that were cooked up in a lab. The genes of parents who wish to bear engineered children will, by definition be selected out of the gene pool. Thus the propensity to genetically engineer one's children is not a trait likely to pass between generations. Of course, such engineering may appeal to those who regard their own genes as defective in some way, or indeed those who are sterile, but their enhanced progeny will not feel the same way. In short, there's nothing to worry about.
What matters is that if the technology exists, it will be used. Pure science has never asked why. I can't think of a single technology that has ever been developed but didn't come into use for ethical reasons.
There are whole classes of weapons that have never been used for ethical(and realist) reasons, from hydrogen bombs to uranium in the water supply, but chief among them are the biologicals. Never has a modern biological weapon, such as smallpox, been used against a military or civilian target. Not by a nation, not by a terrorist group, not by an insane but brilliant individual. There are arguments that this is purely out of realist principles, the case being made that once a widespreading biological weapon is employed(and Anthrax, with it's limited infectious capacity, doens't quite count), there's no effective way of preventing your own forces from being infected. But liberal norms apply as well: a basic sanctity of innocents and revilement of weapons without discrimination of their victims has kept biologicals out of warfare in the past, and hopefully will continue to do so.
Second, doesn't anyone else remember the Shapers of sci-fi fame? It seems to me that the wholesale engineering of the populace will naturally result in the creation of separate species. Homo Novus, Homo Astra, et cetera. Over a period of decades, or possibly centuries, is it inevitable that genetic engineering will fracture the human species, or will something stop us?
I don't know if that's good or bad, but I personally wish that I could reengineer myself. Maybe those extropian folks were really on to something . . . The main advantage that I see is that wholesale genetic engineering might enable some form of humanity to reach the stars. Or at least survive on Mars.
The technology has the potential to be abused just like any other technology we've had since fire. Og see bad future, many villages sacked and burned. And pointy stick... in my day we had blunt stick, and we LIKED it!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
When -- not if -- human eugenic engineering becomes a reality, we'll undoubtedly be able to choose the babies' sex. I think that in the West, but even more so in Asian countries, there's a predilection for parents to favor sons over daughters. If this were to happen, the long-term social consequences of adolescent males with lessened chances of finding a mate make me think of Frank Herbert's The White Plague and Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Oh dear. I see an implicit attitude here of "New technology will stop me from having to think and be responsible." There are two glaring examples.
Take the idea that children will be programmed to be resistant to cholesterol. This would only seem natural to someone who thinks that the Western diet is normal. It ain't so. Much better to improve your own nutrition - eat less fat, less refined food, less sugar, more fresh fruit and vegetables, take more exercise - than to provide this kind of quick fix. Still, we already have Olestra, which shows that this kind of thinking is current.
Another example: super smart children who can be taught by downloading information - such as a foreign language - directly into a chip implanted in their brains. Language skills are an important part of cognitive development. They improve naturally as the child discovers more about the world through exploration and play, and is better able to formulate concepts and communicate effectively with other people. The idea that all of this can be bypassed at the age of 3 misses this point. Not to mention that an important part of educating your child is teaching them what to do with their innate gifts. This actually gets harder when children are highly gifted. Some of the most intelligent people I known have suffered from a sort of existential boredom which stops them from achieving anything.
sounds like gattaca..
=--- - flux@aub.com Network Engineering Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO (or Linux) is
"Absolutely, somewhere in the next millennium, making babies sexually will be rare"
This is assuming of course that you'll also create genes stop hormonal 18 year old boys bonking the girl next door. Not bloody likely.
"Absolutely, somewhere in the next millennium, making babies sexually will be rare"
This is assuming of course that you'll also create genes stop hormonal 18 year old boys bonking the girl next door. Not bloody likely.
When I was a student I took an anthropology class and recall that a certain amount of variance or genetic difference is needed within a population to keep it from suffering from founder's effect (the genetic mutations which occur when close family members have children). Most likely a good majority of the population would like their children to have similar qualities and hence they would share common genes. Now, if this starts and becomes widespread would there be enough variance left within the population in the future for people to have children the old fashioned way without their offspring suffering from horrible genetic mutations? In filtering out the genes which cause diseases such as Stephen Hawking's affliction (can't recall the name of it) would we also be filtering out future Stephen Hawkings? If we filtered out all causes of autism would we have any geeks?
Right now we may not like all the traits we've inherited from our parents, but at least we recognize that they did have much choice in them. What about a kid who knows their parents picked their traits?
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they
--
Even if such matters are regulated, however, this doesn't address the issue of using retroviruses or some other form of genetic manipulation to alter our own DNA. That is, it's one thing for governments to argue that you can't change your children's DNA (exceptions will be made for genetic diseases, I think), but it's quite another for them to say you can't alter your own DNA. This is the type of infringement that many people won't stand for. There will be the old "It's my body and my choice" arguments and it will be difficult to fight against such logic. (Of course, governments already regulate illegal drug usage despite the fact that the same arguments can be made). It will be interesting to see how it works out, but we should remember that ultimately it will become a political issue as well as a moral and technological issue. The politicians will ultimately control or try to control human evolution. How's that for a scary proposition?
I want my children to have the best genes possible. Why should they suffer for my own genetic deficits? Or suffer diseases that are easily avoided? Or be more stupid, weak or ugly than they have to, just because of my own angst for change?
This has nothing to do with "staying competitive". I certainly hope other parents will do the same, or better if they can afford it, as I do. My children will be better off if their contemporaries are better off. This is no different than education, I want my children to have the best possible education, but I also want them to live in a society where every child is offered good education.
Please note that most of technofobic sci-fi also predicts totalitarian states to keep their vision sufficiently dark. They are usually written by humanists, who feel the humans have reached perfection. Well, reading the newspaper I desperately hope that is not the case.
On the other hand, how can you refuse parents the right to prevent passing on myopia, asthma and other hereditary ailments to their offspring, if the technology is there?
On the other hand, what if myopia and intelligence have a genetic link?
Mr 20-400 myself
George
that nothing is "simply" "programmed" into your genes. The media (aspecially movies) have made it popular belief that your genes are like a bunch of variables which, once we've decoded them all, can be simply read or changed. Hence the many "scientific articles" claiming that "the intelligence (or any other) gene" was discovered. There is no IQ-gene that when tampered will change your IQ. Humans are NOT computers and genes are not programs that we run. DNA is more like a chemical computer and program in one. While the program "runs", the computer changes, changing the program... This is a chaotic system, changes in genes result in bigger changes then just one specific feature. Due to chaotic nature of this system the results are hard to predict (due to the enormous amounts of parameters and interactions), much like the weather really. "Simulating" results or "reverse engineering" a superhuman would probably require HEXA-bytes of memory, and more computing power than anyone can dream of ...
Genetic engeneering an ethical issue? Not in the first 150 years...
Unabomber, anyone? Not that he is the only futurist to have predicted such things as genetic engineering of children, but him and his less radical contemporaries make a strong case for the Luddites. Sadly, we'll be seeing a lot more of these articles and cases as the technology for this sort of thing progresses.
/me goes off to buy land in Montana...
It's not a question of wether or not it will happen. Only of when.
The rich will then get richer, and better looking, and faster, and smarter, and anything they can afford.
When confronted with the fact that 'everybody is doing it', and the 'keeping up with the Joneses' mentality of the affluent sectors, there's not a question of if. With their considerable resources brought to bear on politicians (law makers), lobbyists (big-time funds), Universities (researchers), the rich will make certain that their children are better designed to run the world when their turn comes.
There is no doubt that there will be some stratification among these 'people'. There will be children specialising in sports, intelligence, comeliness, artistic talent... I'm sure mother nature will be vengeful, but nature is a whore and can be bought, or at least rented for a few generations.
There is no doubt about another thing either. This will be the playground of the rich. They will do what they can to keep it that way. After all, what right has a poor kid to measure up to out perfect little Johnny? Right?
Families will save for a gene-tweak as they now save for homes. They will not manage to do anything other than guarantee a kid free from birth defects. A kid who can earn a living.
The normal person will be the working stiff, while the enhanced homo neogeneticus will live a life of leisure and pleasure.
What do you think, fellow Morlocks?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
"we'll "program" infants to be healthier later in life. "
"tinker with fetal DNA"
"governments may require children to be engineered "
"chips implanted in their brains"
This is tabloid journalism in technology reporting clothing.
NT is based on the premise that anyone who can manipulate a mouse can administer a system. Huh?!?
It's too bad I don't believe in reincarnation. I'd love to be reborn in a genetically altered form a la Nancy Kress' "Beggars in Spain".
Seriously though, I don't see the article as being overly realistic. Fixes to known defects would theoretically be possible since we have working models of how it should work. Creating new and improved genes however is a different story. DNA code is like billions of lines of obsfucated C. There's no telling if the protein you just coded for bigger brains will also result in a smaller liver and complete lack of pancreas.
Add to this the fact that the chance of political groups allowing folks to make test runs of genetically altered babies that might just keel over and die is rather small. I think the 50 year time frame *might* be realistic in a world without ethics or concern for the welfare of any altered progeny. In other words, multiply by 3 (abritrary number) to get 150 years.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
This may not be the best idea. Why? Do a web search for "genetic engineering" look at some of the sites that pop up. Seems like a lot of people are upset or opposed to genetic manipulation, why? They must be anti-science of course! No, there are many reasons, let me just sum up what I can think up off the top of my head:
1) GE companies have poor ethics, there have been numerous times when a GE company has rushed a product to market with out proper research. Infact ignoring much opposing research and even having key players in there company quit, and join the FDA to approve the product. This is not a lie, I suggest researching rBGH and Monsanto if you do not believe me.
2) The human genome is not well understood at all. We've mapped out maybe 9% of a human cell. We have clues at how certain peices work, which is good (I'm not opposed to knowledge), but the human genome is so vast in complex we can not reliably change something with out knowing the consequences. And what serious consequences there could be: it is very possible we could create a new disease or other untold problems, this has already happened in the past due to genetically engineered plants.
3) Nature has been engineering creatures for millions of years through a slow process of evolution, it takes a long time for a new adjustment of a animal to take place. We should ask what kind of affect adjusting a human in such a short time period will take. There is a constant balance that nature keeps between animals. Read darwin. We are preaty much going to change this whole process, or alter it to suit our needs. Is this such a good thing? You decide.
Please if you respond, do so with honest good points, don't insult me or tell me I'm anti-science. I've heard enough of that.
As long as they don't remove the fun from making babies!
Sometimes people are still going to get drunk at the barn dance, clumsily fumble with each other in the haystack, and after a few minutes of huffing and puffing, the deed is done. No MD gets to pick and choose which sperm gets the egg in that scenario. Not all pregnancies are planned. I guess The State might try to pass laws requiring abortions in such cases, but that's likely to lead to a rather bloody revolution.
BTW, I missed the exciting conclusion... who turned out to be Cartman's dad?
Was it Niven's _The Integral Trees_ where modified children suddenly started spontaneously dying because of interactions between various 'perfect' gene sequences? Whole generations of rich kids dropping like flies, leaving the more robust 'naturals' behind.
Bah. Whatever. This is just accelerating evolution. More power to 'em--as long as they accept all the consequences of their choices.
Is anyone reminded of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegone, "where all of the children...are above average".
Funny notion -- perfection is a moving target. There will always come a day when our environment will throw a curve ball and only the most genetically diverse population will survive.
Mojotoad
Anyone else think this is where we're headed?
Think about it. Already the economic boundaries between the rich and poor are more than they've been in a long time. This directly effects education, opportunities, behavior, etc. etc.
Now, think about it. Do you think that the health insurance companies will cover this? It ain't going to be free, that's for sure. The rich and powerful could be (virtually) guaranteed to have smarter, more 'athletic', better looking kids...while everyone else has to make do with what they've got.
Fast forward a couple of centuries. The gene pool has basically split into two types of humans: the 'uber' humans, through a combination of social engineering and genetic engineering have kept to *them*selves and continued to produce more smart, rich, magazine-cover babies.... While the poor, not-so-bright, ugly folks have been relegated to mating with others of their 'class.'
On the other hand, this 'upper' class will probably (if current conditions have any relevance) be in much fewer numbers than the 'lower.' You'd think that eventually (by that I mean a few centuries) this gene pool will stagnate out...but not if we can artifically mix it up....
Maybe the eugenics wars aren't that far off?
Blech. Signatures.
I agree... Does this remind anyone else of the movie?
It's gonna happen, but it will creep in slowly. First, we genetics will be used to prevent some birth defects, Downs syndrome, dwarfism, Rett's syndrome, etc. What self-respecting parents would NOT take steps to see that their child was not born with Downs syndrome? What parents would be opposed to keeping their children free of birth defects.
And I argue that these are good and noble uses of genetics. This type of prevention could put an end to untold suffering. But after a while, we will see more imperfections that could be fixed up. Who would want their child to be diabetic? Or asthmatic? Or prone to breast cancer? Or prone to heart disease? Or deaf?
But then we start to make the jump from health problems to disorders that make life more difficult. Actually, it's not a jump at all. It's a very subtle grey area. What about dyslexia? Should we use genetics to prevent that? Sure, right? That's a learning disability. What about low-intelligence? That could be a learning disability too. What if we could keep a child from being weakly? He could be naturally athletic. That might help keep him healthy. Should we keep a child from having to be short? That could damage his self-image. It can be hard growing up as the shortest kid in class. Should we prevent children being ugly? That can certainly cause emotional problems. Or being flat-chested? That can be traumatic too.
And so we see that we don't go from birth defects straight to aesthetics, but we go through many shades in between. Where should we draw the line? What types of traits should be prevented, and what types of traits should be left to nature? The fact is that there is no clear line. I'm curious as to what will happen in the field of genetics in the next few years, but I know it'll be a bumpy ride.
Controlling genetics has nothing to do with it. My other half has long argued that intelligence isn't a survival trait. Intelligent people are having less children than stupid people. Is this just an example of Darwinism in action? Is intelligence beneficial for the survival of the human race? Up to a certain point, yes, but you could argue that high intelligence is unnecessary, and in fact undesirable, for the continued existence of the human race. The race will last longer without it, albeit in a slightly more primitive manner. The only point at which this argument breaks down is when space travel becomes necessary for survival. Will the intelligence to do it have been bred out by then? Only time will tell...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Is that what you feel?
Well, get real! We are already living in this scenario. It makes at least as much difference in what country on Earth you are born today than genetic engineering will make in the years to come.
The only difference is that this time it might happen to yourself and not some poor guy in a mosquito infested backyard of our planet.
"Optimists think that we live in the best of all possible worlds.
Pessimists are afraid that they're right."
s/genetic mutations/problems actually there is no mutation when relatives marry but normally recessive traits become dominant, these are often bad traits.
"Magic ticket my ass McBain"-Chief Quimby
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
"Brave New World". As much as this article implies a future similar to the one portrayed in the movie "Gattaca"; I think, with the increasing control that the governments of the world are exerting over the general populous, that a future more akin to Aldus Huxley's vision of factories churning out humans is more likely. How unlikely is it for governments to outlaw the natural process of procreation and create a society where they can control who and how many citizens are scientists and how many are garbagemen, with each perfectly suited to their "occupation". Move the (I apologize for the term) "indigenous" peoples again to reservations and let them have their "traditional" lifestyles and let the "first world" move ahead unencumbered. I think that Gattaca would be a utopian option. At least there people still have some degree of choice and the freedom to innovate and create. The "Brave New World" I think is much more likely and much more horrorfying.
Maybe you'll return to Minagua, You could go unnoticed in such a place. -FZ
Just a short comment on this particular movie. I thought it was oke, but that it was not real enough. In the movie the 'normal' guy makes it, at least as far as his goals are concered, this implies that there are quitte a lot of people who disagree with the 'system' and are willing to help him. In reality I don't think this is the case at all. People will never endanger a system that works for them. I though this was a mistake in the movie and an all to american mistake at that. Real live hardly has happy endings and Gattica would have been beter of as a film-noir without a happy ending (or at least on open one)
my 2c
brrrrrr it's cold
The only way to stop it that I can think of would be to institute a global death-penalty on anyone attempting this form of manipulation -- and that won't happen.
Really though, no "normal" penalty would be enough to stop people from engineering their children. You'd pretty much have to resort to summary executions of *everyone* involved in the procedure -- the doctors, the nurses, the parents, and any children.
Which leaves us the question: should we even bother trying to stop this, or should we just embrace it whole-heartedly?
I mean, the methods required to prevent the use of this technology might, in some ways, be worse than the technology itself. And if *some* people have access, shouldn't everyone have access?
Lastly, I'm disturbed by the continuous references to the "rights" of parents. Given that there are now six billion people on the planet, NOBODY should have the RIGHT to have children. It ought to be a privilege, randomly assigned. Like a global lottery (for the down side of this, see sci-fi).
To be blunt, people that have more than two children are selfish bastards. Maybe genetically-engineered children would obviate the "need" to have too many kids in the first place.
The thing that a lot of posters in threads like this forget (on purpose?) is that this technology, like any other, is not in the hands of the state here. It is in the hands of parents-to-be. People select their kids' genes all the time. They do it mostly by mate selection and a few by sperm/egg donor, but everyone does it nevertheless. All the gene manipulators will do is expand the pool of choices. The dystopian aspects of GATTACA are due to an entirely separate possibility, and that is genetic discrimination; it's distinct from the ability to engineer genes. If we can outlaw discrimination on the basis of skin color and go as far as we have towards eradicating it, we can almost certainly keep discrimination on the basis of genes from going very far.
So what are we achieving here with gene selection for our kids? I think that what we're buying is health and vigor, and happiness to the extent that healthy and vigorous people are happier than those who are not. How can this be a bad thing?
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Wasn't it GATTACA?
paranoid.android
Eugenics has been around for a very long time. Or at least various flavors of it.
;)
Natural selection comes to mind. The extent that I can see in genetically engineering children in a lab is to removing potential/known flaws. Of course, the "glow-in-the-dark" mouse that had a jellyfish gene introduced was pretty cool. But I digress...
Nature introduces mutations into the system in the hopes that if its a good mutation, it will be passed on and if its bad, that strain will eventually die out.
Earlier this century, a group of Germans believed that they could induce eugenics through a breeding program to spread blond hair and blue eyes. They combined this with the extermination of the carriers of what they considered 'bad genes'. Not a pretty picture. In 1936, their eugenics program as given a severe reality check by one man: Jesse Owens.
If people feel that they can improve the survival of their offspring by removing some of Nature's control within the genetics lab, so be it.
As long as people remain steadfast in the belief that "All people are created equal" whether in a science lab or the backseat of a Chevy things should not be a problem.
Many people don't realize that they are in fact utilizing basic (albeit crude) eugenics just by choosing that 'perfect' mate.
Personally, I don't think I'd take the route of creating my child in a science lab (unless the beautiful assistant didn't mind meeting me in the lab for some 'after hours work'
But I wouldn't view a child engineered this way in a superior or inferior way. The problem is, not everyone would see it this way...and there is the rub.
On another note, everyone is saying "Go see GATTACA!!" blah blah blah...Honestly, most countries seem scared to try and create a 'superior' being to control the planet. If genetic engineering was to occur, I tend to see the views more like in "Time Machine"...creating a group of people that are more 'inferior' intellectually to do all the dirty work that needs to get done.
ok, that is my $0.02.
-Vel
I doubt that anyone who isnt a parent could even begin to understand the feelings that go through me when I see another parent with a sick child.
Fear that it could have been my child, joy that it wasnt, shame for feeling that way in the first place.
Any parent who wouldnt take EVERY step possible to ensure that their own child is spared that type of pain and suffering doesnt deserve to have children.
If the opportunity came to me, Id take it. Id feel badly for the people who couldnt. But Id still take it.
Once it becomes about kids you cant base your decisions on the outcome of science fiction movies.
It is hard to describe the type o fear that I feel when I allow myself to think of the kinds of things that could have happened to my children as a result of the genetic lottery.
I started with nothing and I still have most of it.
You've got this Peter Singer creep from Princeton calling for the ability of parents to kill defective children and now we have parents giving their kids blonde hair and blue eyes!! Well as long as we're not gassing to many Branch Davidians^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H I mean Jews and we don't have full gun registration we aren't really Nazis yet are we?
This is NOT off-topic. It's just a little obscure. The stupid fascist moderators just moderate down anything they don't understand.
For those of you that DON'T understand, the "Eugenics Wars" were a group of conflicts in the mid to late 1990s on Earth in the Star Trek universe, caused by... I'm sure you can guess this, considering I've already said it's not off-topic... GENETIC ENGINEERING!
This is one of the places I would expect some objectivity about trying to beat genetic algorithms and geological time.
First of all, let me say that doing any tinkering with restriction endonucleases or reverse transcription on human DNA for any other reason than to shunt a renegade genocide- is utterly pathetic.
Second of all, humans have been trying to breed themselves as long as they have been putting plates in lips and notches on wood. With about as much success.
We hate to see it, but there are reasons for some of these adaptations that we cannot even fathom. They are outside of the realm of our inflated self importance. They have to do with the history of the earth and the evolution of all the life forms that convert chemical and solar energy into molecules that can self replicate.
To make an analogy- its like a windoze person recompiling a linux kernel so they can keep in touch with their AOL buddy list. Its disgusting. The worst part is that somewhere in the mess is a person with a degree who might even be aware of the paradox involved- and not care. Not have enough insight to say no! We might make your child worse off. We have absolutely no idea.
Which means the work will be done by DOCTORS, not scientists. They don't have any problem doing what they want for money as long as there is a wailing patient nearby to scare everyone's questions into thee and thou, and how is your mercedes now?
Genetic engineering- it sounds so cool. Such big words. How about Prophetic Profiteering? Patents on DNA? Fuck domain names- you only deserve a fucking number anyhow. Its about time people learned how to memorize a goddamn address. When an ip address blows a hole in your firewall- THATS when you'll learn how to remember numbers! OW!! Matches Hurt!
Relational reality:
Ten factors when combined with nine transforms give a value y with 30% accuracy. Oh, we don't like factor #7, lets squash it out. Squash squash squash, oh no what happened? Everything is going wrong!!!
Point:
You need the throw aways, you need the half breeds, you need the pale notekeepers and copyists, you NEED AQUALUNG. Its part of the equation. You can't destroy #7 any more than you can discard the equation or the interconnects.
If humans want to engineer life, do it on a dead planet and build it from scratch and show the perfection of your philosophy and synthesis.
Don't throw chemicals into your mother's womb.
I swear, first they engineered the soul- now they are after our bodies too.
Do yourself a favor and ignore this crap. And NEVER trust a doctor just because they said so.
Why would you pass up the opportunity to make your children better?
I know I would have LOVED to have had the genes so that I wouldn't have to wear glasses/contacts. I would also would like to be SMARTER.
So the real question is: Why WOULDN'T you want to make your offspring better?
This is a very complicated and scary topic...the potential benefit is only matched by the potential for tragedy. One thing I'm sure of: This is one new technology you *don't* want to jump on as soon as it's available. Wait until the first 'g-e' kids are grown, and see how they work out first, then consider your options.
-RN
People are going to be forced to live with their parents' choices for them. Today this is only true of names. There are lots of Generation X-ers (remember, that means anyone born from 1961 until 1981, not just anyone in college that owns a skateboard) with names like Mike and John and Dan and Adam. And there were big phases of naming girls Jennifer and boys Josh. Currently there's a rush to give kids odd names, like Griffin (boy) and Brady (girl) and Riley (boy) and Bergman (girl). Kids names can definitely be carbon-dated.
With full genetic engineering, this datedness will be more encompassing. Kids born in parts of the seventies and the post-grunge nineties will have very straight hair. There will be fad-driven bursts of waif-like girls and curvier girls. Remember, in just the last several hundred years it has been fashionable for women to be plump, men to wear high heels, and for high school kids to wear comically oversized jeans. If "looks and likes" are selectable by parents, then episode of Oprah is going to result in fifty thousand kids that are engineered to excel in the field of that day's guest.
At an estimated 8.9 billion in 50 years, they should start engineering babies that do not breath (pollution, etc.) or eat... because we will have a serious problem on our "little" earth...
Abortion allows us to perform genetic engineering at a crude level - it allows you to "accept" or "reject" a child. Genetic engineering merely gives us "finer-grained" control of the child's genetic makeup.
I'm not saying that this is a good or bad thing (I have my opinion, but I'm keeping it to myself). I'm just saying that the ethics of genetic engineering are pretty much equivalent to the ethics of abortion.
99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again...
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Think about it. This is done naturally as well. Why do men prefer women that look "healthy" (e.g. thin, young, nice teeth, good complexion)?
Its because we want to choose the best available mate. Its natural "genetic engineering".
You aren't "doing" anything. You are just making the process better.
The obvious answer, then, is to genetically breed-out the genes that correlate between insanity and intelligence.
IMHO I'm not sure that is even theoretically achievable. Intelligence is notoriously difficult to define, but I think that in this context (intelligence going hand in hand with insanity), we're talking creativity, whether in the realm of science or art. I personally believe that part of creativity comes from having a more inward than outward looking mind - being able to see things in more abstract rather than concrete terms, as happens when we're dreaming and not constrained with the the perceptual grounding of reality. Creative genius/intelligence may well be a result of not being so connected with reality, and therefore inseparable from it. Indeed, there are many cases - read some of Oliver Sachs books - where savantism has emerged as a direct result of mental illness!
Maybe this is the only chance for mankind to survive in the long run.
If computer technology continues to develop at the current speed, sooner or later there will be computers that are smarter than us. Those computers might be able to survive and evolve without any help from us.
If so, would they still need us?
To avoid this, we have to speed up evolution. And it won't be enough if everyone's Einstein. We must go on to a completely new level of intelligence.
Somebody else mentioned the movie Gattaca, but I just wanted to throw this in: there's a great episode of the Twilight Zone, season 5, called "Number 12 Looks Just Like You," which is really relevant to this conversation. It's about the effects of a society where nobody has any flaws. Anybody else seen this one?
Coo. :)
:)
If short-sightedness is something that's, at least in part, a conditioning / environmental thing, how does the effect of external circumstances change over time? (Ie, at what age is it "safe" to read?
ISTR when I first got a PC, deliberately with a 17" monitor, I was pulling 17hr working days doing nothing but look at it. It was actually slightly relaxing on the old optics. (By contrast, I found sitting in my *own* swivel-chair sea-sickening, despite having sat in assorted swivel-chairs long before....)
Now I have a 22" screen at work and a 15" thing at home, and I really don't mind running even up to 1280x1024 on the 15" and 1600x1200 on the 22" - the latter all day, although not necessarily all that close up.
Aged 24, is this going to be even remotely a problem?
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
The size of the eyeball is determined by a feedback mechanism that operates during a child's growth period; it grows to the size needed to focus naturally at the viewing distance a child uses most.
Therefore, heavy reading at a young age leads to larger eyeballs which leads to a preponderance of myopia.
[from memory of a long ago article, probably in Science News]
(Warning: spoiler for a crappy movie)
.45 to the temple (o.k. maybe nano-carbon rod reinforced bones....)
Gattaca wasn't all bad, just really cheesy and simplistic. And the acting sucked, but that's a staple of sci-fi. Anyway...
At the end of the movie, remember when they were swimming like when they were kids, and they perfect brother lost to the bad one? Why did that happen?
Ever hear a Nature vs. Nurture debate? IMHO, you can't have one without the other. What does it matter if the you have the best genes if you grow up in a box? Or if you're beaten from a young age? What about if you go the natural process and have a full, loving, supporting environment? Who will come out on top? What happens continually to people who think they are better than others and are lazy, when they meet someone "inferior" who works harder?
Genes are only a starting place. The best genes in the world won't save you from a Mack truck or a
Regardless, whatever you call it the human spirit, the soul, desire, will. There is and always will be an intangible part of a being that is as important as the physical part.
+&x
Actually, 'garbageman' isn't a bad position for intellectually advanced people. The job pays enough to maintain a middle class lifestyle (in most US cities) and it doesn't require that one use up one's intellectual energy for an employer, leaving one free consider philosophical matters while performing the job. Much of Einstein's best work in physics was done while he was a clerk in the patent office.
Actually, the name of the movie was Gattaca. The suitability of it as a variation of Pacino's "Attica! Attica!" chant cannot be denied, though.
...in her Hugo-award winning novella _Beggars in Spain_. The main character in that story is genetically engineered to not need sleep, and she was one of the very first Sleepless. Imagine not having to lose 1/3rd of your life to unconsciousness... imagine not dreaming. The novella, and the novel that came from it, were both exceedingly well thought-out.
...
Personally, I would give a great deal to have this technology available, to correct some of the defects in my hypothetical children; any child I choose to have will have even odds of inheriting some things I wouldn't want to inflict upon someone else (as I almost wish no one had inflicted upon me). But this does, as other posters have commented, bring up the question of overpopulation. Perhaps we shouldn't persue this matter until we have the first colony on the moon
Then again, the one thing that is certain is that once we let the genie out of the bag, it won't go back in. As soon as something like this can be done, there will be illegal 'black labs' doing it -- and charging an arm and a leg for it.
i seen an outer limits on this one time. Actually it was mostly about possible side effects. The show explained that one out of every so many geneticly (sp) engineered babies would have a bad reaction to it. And turn into a powerful "freak" who looked quite ugly and was quite strong, with no thought of consequences. The best part about the show though was the ethical dilema it implied. In order to do well, you almost had to engineer your child, otherwise he wouldn't be as smart, wouldn't get as good a job etc. And if he couldn't get a good enough job, he couldn't pay for his childs engineering. And if you did 1 in 1000 would get this defect... catch 22
...I would be killed trying to keep it from happening. It will be increasingly difficult to keep people from the truth and voicing their opinions. Any truly repressing thought-controlling type of society would be fought tooth and nail.
+&x
That's how I expect my kid to be. Just like I'd give him a measles shot or teach him how to read.
The scariest thing to me is that if there was an isolated gene for a predisposition for homosexuality or bisexuality, I'm sure it would be the first thing to be modified.
Even worse, in the near term future if such a gene was isolated, abortions of gay children would probably shoot through the roof if not stopped.
(a) What defines superior? (b) Have you ever known mankind to do anything 'superior' to what is already present in nature? I think I would leave well enough alone thank you!
Two examples:
"Absolutely, somewhere in the next millennium, making babies sexually will be rare," Caplan speculates.
Oh yeah, who would want to have sex to make babies, what a silly thought.
"In a competitive market society, people are going to want to give their kids an edge," says the bioethicist.
Bioethicist? Freak-a-zoid is more like it. Hmmm how many people want to roll dice with their children's psyche? How many of those however many million genes do you have to screw up to get a psychopath? Do we have any idea? All of this stuff is still a long way off.
and finally, if you thought the reporter had some sense..
Who knows? Maybe all this technology will make humans so smart they'll be able to predict the future.
That's just silly. We can already predict the future, for a day or two. Beyond that things get ridiculous. Read some Chaos theory or go outside and feel a breeze or count to 6,000,000,000 (the number of people currently co-creating the future)
Silly article, but it makes for good discussion.:-)
hmm, maybe there will be a use for journalists in the future....
+&x
I agree. In nature, we see the "selfish gene theory." Which basically means animals (including humans) reproduce to further their genes through children. This has been going on since the beginning of life. I see dangers in the social implications, such as superiority, but what about us messing with nature, which is something we absolutely do not understand. Can this lead to a demise in our species? Let me elaborate... Say we can engineer children, and parents have a favorite "gene combination" that they want their kids to have. This combination makes them smarter or stronger, or whatever. 20 years later, all these genetically engineered humans died from a blood disease. This is because we didn't know all there was to know about the human genome and we unknowingly messed up their resistance to a disease. I think we should leave it to nature. Does anyone else think this is a possibility? Should we even attempt something with such severe implications? What do you think?
I recall reading an interesting study which looked at the positive factors for economic success.
Being white was positively correlated to economic success. No surprise there.
Being male was positively correlated to economic success. No surprise there, either.
Going to a good college was positively correlated to economic success. Again, no surprise.
However, intelligence/academic success was only mildly correlated to economic success. What the study found was that the highest earning group was that the stupidest white males who went to top colleges were in fact the top earners.
Admittedly, we're looking at a complex system; very smart people in colleges, especially top colleges, are tempted by academe, which pays poorly. Still, I don't think that a race of genetically engineered super-men, who dominate positions at the head of industry and government, is in the offing.
That said, the expectation is probably much more powerful than the reality. If we expect super-men to be the best leaders, no doubt they'll be picked early as leaders, given the necessary background for leadership, and then moved up to positions of leadership. No doubt a disproportionate amount of the best leaders will come from this group.
It will hardly amount to proof of their superiority, however. It is merely proof of the natural credulity of the human animal.
--
--
There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
There's a cheap, easy and ethical method of genetic engineering that apparently not enough people are aware of.
Stop having sex with idiots.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Eventually, the numbers will shift even further, and we may wind up with either Elves and Trolls or with something out of H.G. Wells "The Time Machine".
Until, of course, some new disease comes along and wipes out half the population, including all of the designer babies, at which point we'll start over.
Gataca & Brave New World may have both dealt with the same basic theme (stratification of society through genetics) I wouldn't say that they're the same. BNW is far from an attack on genetic engineering & a class system. There's strong evidence for the idea that Huxley saw the class system he put forth, along with genetic engineering and drugs to keep people in line, as the ideal society.
Sure there's satire & critique in BNW, but it's more as if Huxley couldn't make up his mind which side of the fence to fall on.
For example it states that "many parents will leap at the chance to make their children smarter, fitter and prettier". Apart from the question how many superinteligent supermodels we really need and who will do the "real" work there is also the question if the majority of parents really wants a child more intelligent than them, asking them questions they aren't able to understand, let alone answer.
... now transfer the picture to genetics. Now for a CPU i could reclaim my money, or at least throw it away for another one.
We don't need the event of genetic engineering to find theese people, just look at schools where some parents are actually preventing their children getting the best possible education, forbidding them to work with computers or with the internet.
Also prenatal preventing of illnesses raises the question how a raised life expectancy will affect our economy. Following this line of thought leads to some very inhuman concepts indeed.
I don't even want to think what a "Mail Order Babies" company might produce in terms of screwup. Imagine the scandal of "Implemented Government Control" (the discission about censoring shows that there is ambition) maybe starting as an attempt to weed out criminals (for the best of society) then altering the definitions of "crime" (are undemocratic actions a crime? Undemocratic thoughts? What is 'undemocratic' anyway?).
Or maybe regard what happened when intel's newest generation of CPUs where found to have some minor flaws
Genetic engineering is being done, even with human genetic material. So the development to genetically engineered children is probably inevitable. But this will not only change the look of the genetically engineered, but also our view of morals and the value of life.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
And I like it that way! Humans are human because of their nature to make mistakes and to learn from them. The only genetic "enhancement" I would have done is maybe to cure genetic disease only if they can prove to me that it won't affect anything else!
So,
(warning to the humour impaired: Slashdot cliche ahead)
I'm a 26 year old male. If I someday decide to have kids with my honeybunny might the doctor potentially be able to say to her:
"Congratulations! The genetic engineering was a success. Instead of twins you're going to have a Beowulf cluster!"
(running quickly from mass of groaning people)
I'll be here all week, try the veal.
(Cymbal crash)
If you doubt that, then just consider how popular the Catholic Church is in various developing nations. And then try to remember what the Pope has to say about contraception . . .
People won't control their own fertility -- it's "wrong" in too many religions.
The only way we (as a species) will learn our lesson is by watching billions of our innocent relatives die horribly.
Would you apply the same argument to hiring university-educated people over those without a degree? You raise an important concern, but it's an argument for government support of genetic improvements (and other essentials like education) rather than a reason to resist engineering altogether.
First of all, the movie's hero was a "natural" child that showed he was superior to the "engineered" peers. And it never said that the engineered children were any *worse* than the natural ones. So, I'd say that the message isn't so much "Genetic engineering is bad practice", but "Assuming that genetic engineering solves all problems is bad practice."
Most arguments I've heard about this issue come down to two issues: fear and jealousy.
"People will get jealous because they didn't (get the opportunity to) take advantage of GE, and they'll revolt."
How is this any different than people being jealous that they didn't get higher education, or didn't have the wealth to get into a private school? Or, how is this different than countries being jealous that their histories didn't lead them to opulance and instead led them to poverty? This seems to me to be just like any other rich/poor scenario. And this is all perfectly natural. Agreed, it's best to structure things so that an action is persued in such a fashion to avoid conflict, but that doesn't mean that the action can't take place. This could be better phrased "There is danger that such technology could upset people, so care should be taken to avoid conflict, perhaps by offering it to everyone equally."
"A superhuman race will form, and the normals will be inferior."
Again, how is this bad? Those that have (or are perceived to have) better skills will get hired. Should it be any other way? Would you prefer that this "Superhuman" race would develop, and they wouldn't be treated any differently? Also, do you think that this "Superhuman" race hasn't already developed? If you believe in genetics, don't you believe that smart people usually reproduce with smart people, and that this race is already in existence? Likewise, we are already all judged by our ancestry in at least one area: health insurance. If people were truly as obsessed with genetics as Gattaca seemed to imply, people would request personal histories before hiring.
"From birth your destiny will be controlled by your genes."
The point is getting old, but this is already in effect. Your life is a direct result of how you were developed -- if your environment invested in your education, you became successful. If it didn't, you won't. Both your genes and your envirionment are mainly out of your control, and this will be the case with or without genetic engineering.
"This technology is so poorly understood, they could actually hurt themselves by doing it."
This is a good cautionary note, but again doesn't mean outright avoidance. If it does indeed turn out that GE actually weakens people (ie, causes degenerative damage, shortens lifespans, etc) then they took a risk that failed, so be it.
"This technology is so poorly understood, they could hurt me by doing it."
And this makes perfect sense. We don't know what kind of crap could happen. We could create some sort of bizarre virus that affects millions, or who knows. This is by far the best argument against it in my book, but sadly rarely comes up.
These are all interesting points, but most could be made about private schools, music tutors, and genetically engineered crops as well. Jealousy that you or your offspring won't be one of the "superior" race just doesn't to me seem a valid argument against something that could very well lead to stepping the net intelligence of humanity up a notch. Likewise fear that something Bad would happen with this technology can be offset by slow and cautious progress. Neither fear nor jealousy are objectively convincing arguments for why it shouldn't be done. And without objective arguments, it will be done. Perhaps not tomorrow, but a genetic superrace will develop in the near future. Perhaps it'll be called "genetic vaccinations" or "mental health augmentations" or whatever, but there will always be people that are exploiting risky and experimental medical treatments to attempt to better there lives. If you don't like it, figure out a way to eliminate the demand, and then the supply won't be an issue. If you can't figure out a way to convince people that they shouldn't want it, perhaps it is you that needs convincing.
This may seem really weird or odd, but I'm serious about this. Hear me out.
The problem with children is that what you get is a semi-random mix of you and your wife's genetic characteristics. While your child is a product of both, the result is so randomized that the child is a distinct individual - and further children are just as random. Almost anything can happen.
From a parenting standpoint, the fact that the baby you bring home from the hospital has some of your genes does not make that child any more predictable or easy to understand. You might as well have been issued a child at random.
But with a *clone of yourself*, you know *exactly* the genetic capabilities and genetic personality traits - 'cause that's you. What's more (for those inclined to argue that nature nuture) you know how various environments will affect the child - 'cause again, that's you.
Ever wonder "if only I had done foo when I was 6..." - well now you can. You raise your own clone, and when the clone reaches 6, then you indroduce foo to the clone.
What's more, if the child was told of it's clone nature early on, and it was properly explained, there's no reason why the "parent" to "child" relationship couldn't become more akin to a later version of yourself travelling back in time to teach the earlier self what it had learned. It's not *exactly* the same thing, but it's similar enough that I bet a smart enough clone could really benefit. That makes listening to a "parent" more tolerable - which in turn makes parenting more efficient. I'm a lot more willing to listen to an older "me" than my parents, which means more information can be transferred.
But wait! There's more!
I have a fantastic wife, a woman who really is my soul-mate in every way. Think of all that time wasted while looking for one's ideal mate. Well if I wait the appropriate time, and then clone my wife, and then raise my clone and my wife's clone not as brother and sister, but as husband and wife, then all that time is available to them. Another tremendous advantage!
Then mix a little engineering into the pot. Small changes only (we don't want too much genetic "movement" at once) to correct things like vision, metabolic rate, and so on.
What you wind up with is a "you" that isn't so much born, lives, and dies for good, but more of an iterative "you" that actually evolves through sucessive generations.
It's not true immortality (each clone is its own separate conciousness) but the next best thing - a contining process to do as much as possible with one's genetic resources.
I'd do this in a heartbeat. I WANT it.
I hoe it becomes possible in my lifetime
You people need to stop watching so many movies, and start reading more books.
Gattaca is simply a Brave New World ripoff.
The book also goes on to explore subconscious engineering (ala 1984), as well as genetic engineering.
Agreed - Bad vision is a large problem especially if its not caught at a young age. It can cause the child to be very behind in reading and other skills.
However other various genetic disorders are not that rare. Asthma and allergies which I got from my parents and will probably pass on to my kids (though I hope not). Diabities which my grandfather has and which I am always on the look out for in myself. susceptably to breast cancer and heart problems which my wife has to look out for.
I can't wait for genetic alterations. Though I doubt my Wife and I will be able to utilize it I hope our childen will be able for their children.
First I see the Washington Post saying that the earth's population is now 6G. Now this.
Human-level AI by 2010, anyone?
yea, my post was a bit on the gun-jumping side. I prefer my sarcasm biting and often miss the light-hearted type.
I still think, however, that it will be safer to continue as much as we can with natural selection. Humans tend to stray toward wanting perfection. Perfect doesn't work very well in nature. Long term thinking (beyond our own lives) is also a weak point of humans, but seems to be a stong point for natural processes. Are we ready to take on that responsibility?
+&x
Is genetic engineering going to far? How far will parents go to ensure the superiority of their offspring? Does anyone remember the woman in Texas who killed a girl because the girl may have won the beauty pageant instead of her daughter? What about the thousands of Chinese girls who are killed by their parents because they would rather have a male child?
I believe that when genetic engineering becomes available, every parent with the money to afford it will be lined up ready to make the best baby they can make. Look at the parents in GATTACA, after having one child the natural way and comparing him to his peers, they decided to have their second child engineered. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
-- Ryan
Every time I see this sort of article posted the same luddite, knee-jerk replies are written:
It is wrong to predestine your kids.
This will create a Brave New World style dystopia.
Well, I'm sorry but I just don't understand how people extrapolate to these problems from the advances being suggested.
For the people afraid of programming their children's future from birth, I have two things to say. 1) At least in the United States I seriously doubt that prenatal genetic therapy will ever be mandatory. 2) What makes you think it is such a bad thing? Have you ever worked with a person suffering from Down's syndrome? Moreover what about people who are obese or nearsighted, if you knew your child was going to suffer from some medical disorder later in life would you really condemn them to it rather than interfere with their "natural" fate?
For the people convinced that mass scale genetic engineering would bring on a horrible dystopia, I have several things to say. 1) The moderately free societies of the United States and western Europe do not support the sort of totalitarian regimes necessary to impose massive, coerced genetic engineering on the populace. 2) Where exactly do you come off making the assumption that efforts at genetic engineering would have fatal consequences? I.E. If we engineer people for genius we will create a society of insane people. People studying this stuff are very well aware of that specific genes can have undesirable interdependencies. Part of the whole effort of the Human Genome project is not only the complete sequencing of the human genome, but also understanding, fully, what each gene does. This is why even though the sequencing task will be completed in a few years; it is not expected that we will have full understanding of the genetic code for something like 50 years.
There seems to be some class of people who are always afraid of new technology. Who are convinced that any new technology will be a disaster for society and themselves. For them I suggest that instead of thinking of all the bad consequences of a possible technology they imagine all the good possibilities.
I myself think that the elimination of all congenital defects is worth the price of admission. Furthermore, as one who has suffered through life with a less than desirable body image, I certainly would not have objected if my parents had fixed my nearsightedness and obesity while I was still in the womb.
Excellent movie on just this issue. Society has taken it to such a level, that anyone not genetically pure is relegated to a meanial existance, labeled as in-valid's. It is of course illegal to select on the basis of this for jobs etc, but when genetic testing has reached the stages it had in the movie, where all imperfections might be obtained from a stray hair in a matter of seconds, it is sort of hard to say why you weren't offered the job. Very bad idea in my opinion.
Can you imagine the resentment of the people against the first few. People would kill them for being impure/inhuman. Until geneticly enhanced people could take complete power, it problably would not be a favour for the child. (This does not mean that I support enhancements, but I do genetic support cures.)
Couple of quick comments ...
Yes, the sheep will probably go for the genetic engineering. Anything they can get that means they can have better children without having to put any thought into it. Anything they can but to make their children better will go over big. It means the parents can produce better children without having to put any effort into being better parents. Most parents today are pretty sucky when it comes to raising kids (yeah its a generalisation, DWI). Adding genetic engineering of unborn children to the world will not make better people, just better DNA.
Probably the most disturbing thing about this, is how people don't stop to consider that nobody is perfect. The universe doesn't make perfect people, or perfect animals, or perfect viruses or perfect anythings. If we had genetic engineering 125 years ago, would we have had an Albert Einstein? How about Stephen Hawking? Granted, it might have been interesting to see what Hawking could do if he didn't have to live the way he does. But, would he still be the same man? If Einstein hadn't been told he was an idiot as a child, he might have gone on to a nice career as a engineer, or a doctor or lawyer, and might never have been working as a patent clerk.
I guess the point is this : If there are no obstacles to rise over, will anyone care to try harder, to do more?
Ok a couple of comments. When thinking about the ethics of genetic engineering we should first look at why we want to genetic engineer. There has already been cases of gene therapy given to cure disease. If we as a society don't have problems with curing disease, where does it stop?
Our society seems to have a problem with healthy people taking anything, genetic or whatever, to enhance themselves. There isn't, though, a clear cut line between what is a disorder and what is not. Should short people who make up less than 5% of the population be treated with growth enhancing genes at a young age? These questions, I believe should be left to the person or family that is dealing with that decision.
If a treatment doesn't directly harm society as a whole, I just don't think we have the right to make these sorts of decisions for them.
-- Moondog
Chaos Rules, and perfection is unattainable. These things we all know. Genetic engineering can maybe even out the playing field of life by helping people all have roughly the same starting chance. It can't change the fact that the world and all of its craziness is still here and will influence the genetically engineered babies as much as it influences "traditionally formulated" babies. Before anyone laments too long about the loss of society's laborers due to everyone's supreme genetic make-up, remember that things like work ethic, laziness, thoughtfulness, hatefulness, and all of the other qualities that make us what human are learned qualities. They can't be genetically engineered. They are born of what we are subjected to as we form our personalities. They are influenced by our parents, our grandparents, our teachers, etc., etc., etc.. The thing about this article that makes me shiver is the discussion of chip implants in the brain so that we can be programmed electronically as children (or later in life...). THAT could be ugly...and effect our freedom and humanity. Keep your implants...whatever kind they may be!!
IMHO, it would be great to get rid of hereditary diseases, as mentioned in the article, and other such things. Someone posted earlier that we are defined by our 'defects.' However, would someone with one such 'defect' be any less of a person if they did not have the problem? I don't think that would be the case. More likely that person had potential that they had extreme difficulty realizing because of a problem that hindered them.
;)
I have Crohn's Disease. I agree with the statement above. I hope that genetic research eventually does come up with a "cure" that can prevent the disease being passed on to my children (or my daughter's children). At the very least, more effective treatment for active disease.
I once thought that an effective way of keeping parents from tinkering with the genes of their children is to not allow genetic engineering to be performed on people less than X years of age. That way, if you want to be genetically superhuman, you can make the choice yourself. Makes sense, unless you realize that you could alter your sperm or egg production to create your super-kid.
Me, I'd just be happy to rid myself of this damn disease. And get me some tolomerase extenders when they come out (just before all the Baby Boomers turn 70) so that I can live to 150+ and not get cancer...
Transgenic and chimeric mice are nigh IMPOSSIBLE to make. It's going to be a long fucking time before this is something available and more importantly safe for humans. It's irrelevant for another century or two at least so why even ask the question? We may as well be speculating on flying cars and moving sidewalks in 1890. It's equally moronic to talk about.
It seems like I've read a million sci-fi books that consider genetic modification to be such a huge moral dilema, something that will have this huge impact on our society, and probably a negative one. Although this is a possibility, I don't see it as the certainty that most people now seem to (probably thanks to science fiction).
I mean - if 100 years ago someone had asked Jules Verne or JR Tolkien to write a story about what it would be like to live in a world where we could cure almost any disease, people lived in excess of 80 or 90 years, 99.999% of our children lived until adulthood, people could modify the way that they look at will (breast implants, advanced weight training equipment, facelifts, contact lenses, steroids, sex change surgery, skin hue lightening, hair dye, piercings, tattoos...), people could have sex whenever they chose without causing pregnancy, etc etc etc - don't you think they would have predicted many terrible moral problems and a degredadation of society as a whole? In some cases they would be right, but as a whole I think our society has improved a lot thanks to the benefits of technology and modern medicine. And I don't think that culling out genetic diseases or even choosing to make our children more attractive or taller or smarter is really any different.
Perhaps in the very long term we will get to the point where we can mold genetics any way we want, and crazy parents will sculpt monsters for themselves ("I want my kid to have five arms and tentacles for hair!"), but for a long time I suspect we will be limited to fixing specific problems (genetic defects) or vague changes (making them favor their mother more than their fater for looks, or be a certain gender). Honestly I fail to see how this stuff could cause the sorts of problems suggested by Gataca.
Can intelligence be 'bred' at all?
Even if intelligence has no genetic component at all, the parents still have a great influence on the formation of it. Don't forget that a child learns much from it's parents in addition to what it learns from it's peers and institutionalized teachers. Think of all those years spent outside of a school. I can imagine that highly intelligent parents would be more likely to provide their children with better guidance and encouragement for the learning process in general.
at what point did man decide he was god? i dont know about everyone else here..but i got enough trouble getting by looking like i do... in a society of tall blonde blue eye'd peeps..i aint got a chance... elimnating genetic dieases is one thing..but determining what you child looks like.? some people dont wanna know what sex they're children are before birth.? and how would this go.? would it jus be like buying a new car?.. give me the deluxe model...
By the way, there doesn't seem to be much genetics in that article. I was kind of disappointed.
Anyway, sorry, I know this may sound a bit contrived, but given a lot of you are programmers out there, I thought I'd throw out this silly little analogy:
Think of the human genome as the binary code of a program. The human genome project is only going to give us a memory map, not the actual source code. Can you imagine trying to modify code without having the source? Maybe if you were a hard core machine language programmer--but what's worse is that we don't even know entirely how the CPU works (which in this analogy would be the laws of physics.) Add to this the fact that the extreme fragmentation of the code base--everyone of us is running an almost entirely unique version--and the idea that we can just go off and start modifying things easily seems really ludicrous.
Take, for example, the case of cystic fibrosis. On first glance, it may seem that we've figured out where the problem is: a gene in 7q31 that codes for what appears to be a chloride channel. Everyone who has CF has a problem with this gene. But guess what, we don't know what this gene does. We have ideas, after years and years of research, but we're not even sure if the gene product itself is what causes the disease, or if it's something else entirely. Notwithstanding the fact that we have the entire nucleotide sequence of this gene and most of its common polymorphisms. Replacing the gene in some people does work, but not for everyone. And we have no idea what it does to the stability of the genome if it were inserted into germ cells.
Or take Down's syndrome. The problem is very obvious--you have three copies of chromosome 21 instead of two. We don't need to know any sequence information to figure this out. But the thing is, even if you were to detect this in a fetus or even in a zygote, how are you going to get that extra copy out without destroying the zygote? It's not like we can tell which chromosome is which in vivo. I guess you'd have the option to abort--but that's nothing new.
Then there's the problem of passing these modified traits on. Even in really simple cells like yeast, although we can insert all sorts of DNA into it and get the cell to use it, we still can't get it to reliably pass it on to the next generation. While this is OK when you're just interested in making a protein, and a success rate of 1 for every million is actually pretty good, this would be insane in human beings. Sure, you've got a pretty smart and physically fit kid, but hey, you know what, he can't have any kids himself. Except you probably won't even get that far most of the time, since the zygote will probably fail to divide into viable progeny. I guess we'll have to try the next test tube. Genetic engineering in the fetus has the possibility of sterilizing us all. Even cloning is inexact--look at Dolly the Sheep.
While bacteria, plants, and fungi can stand all sorts of mangling of their DNA, that isn't the case for human beings. Even one slight change to the genome is likely to cause a miscarriage, often for reasons we don't understand--in a lot of them, there are no gross problems with the genome. Add to this the fact that most of the major conditions we'd be interested in are polygenic and multifactorial (meaning the environment has a big part in what happens)--like cancer and heart disease--and it's easy to see that the utility of genetic engineering is likely to be limited. I'm not saying it's useless-far from it, but it is hardly the paradigm shift that the article makes it out to be.
Not to pick on you specifically - this is a general rant.
Basically we've already decided that it's okay to modify ourselves and our children. How far it goes will be the question...
Who's we?
I don't have kids, but if I did, there's no way in hell I would let my daughter get breast implants or my son get a nose job. It all comes down to vanity. Now when you start playing with genes, saying, 'I want my kid to be good at math' that bothers me, too, because I believe that we are who we are for a reason. Whatever hardships we have change us, make us stronger...and if they kill us, well, that's Nature's Way of thinning the herd. People who spend thousands of dollars trying to have kids piss me off. You don't have such special 'genes' that you can't adopt some kid who needs a home and give them your precious family name.
Sheesh, I got a little hot under the collar there. I guess I just feel that humans are so presumptuous, we think we know best in all situations...we don't.
I'll end with a quote from the Animaniacs:
"It's a great big Universe, and we're all really puny -
just a tiny little speck about the size of Mickey Rooney..."
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
It's my understanding that right now humans are "optimized" (with regard to diseases/abilities)for our reproductive life (up to what... 35? 40?). And most of our bad problems (cancer,heat disease, etc) occur after reproductive years where there hasn't been a selection pressure in nature. (i.e. Subject A has cancer genes, Subject B doesn't... if the cancer doesn't affect Subject A until after he reproduces then there's no selection pressure to eliminate the cancer gene).
How does this type of genetic engineering affect this "optimization"?
1. There will be a greater selection pressure for "socially acceptable", whether that be eye color, intelligence, etc. There already exists this pressure in terms of "being attractive enough to find a mate".
2. There will be much less selection pressure for reproductive success. This is already starting today with infertile couples choosing complex medical procedures to get pregnant. The genetic engineering will merely accelerate the process, because the reproductively weak will be among the most emotionally needed for this new procedure.
I wouldn't think it farfetched to see these "genetically elite" in a couple of generations being unable to reproduce without technological assistance. (You want your little girl to be thin, and not such a fatty... don't you? Nevermind that low body fat will complicate her reproductive system. You don't want a rebellous teenage son... do you? We can keep his testosterone levels in check.)
--Rob
While you are correct in your assessment that this will widen the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots", you have made the most common error regarding class struggle.
It is about economic power, not color.
The best two things you can do for your children are a)work hard to provide for them and give them a good example, and b)stop teaching them they are worthless because they are not white.
Comments like, "Replace "poor inner-city" with "black", and "rich suburban" with "white", and you'll get a pretty accurate picture of the situation." perpetuate this myth, and teach your children that they cannot change, so why even bother.
The only color that really matters is the color of your currency.
I think it would greatly help my identification of you if you didn't post that as an AC... hehe.
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__
Comment submitted. There will be a delay before you understand what you posted.
I'm a 12 stepping AC /. addict ;)
Yet, for all that, the "hero" still wins through.
Someone with a bad heart wouldn't just be screened out of an ubermensch future space program.
NASA would screen someone who couldn't pass fitness tests either.
I was outraged when the "hero" fakes his running exam to hide a weak valve.
When the movie ended with the rocket lifting off, my mind filled in a final sequence where the weight of many gravities crushes him to the ground in a massive cardia arrest.
Even more so if the program assumed a healthier then average astronaut population. God knows what trajectory it was using.
The film could have made it's argument better.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
The modern human is no longer evolving. We care for our sick and less than suitable members so that they can grow up and reproduce (I know it sounds harsh, but if we were like other creatures on this planet, there definitely would not be 6 billion of us). The weak are surviving and passing on their less than desirable genes. We are all a product of this. We have no survival of the fittest anymore. Everyone survives.
I see the possibility of new genetic enhancement as the new way that we, the human race, can evolve. We have reached the stage where we are no longer evolving "naturually", so we might as well find some other way.
As for ethics, if it isn't hurting anybody, what's wrong with it?
Would I try to cheat a bit and give her perfect vision instead of my astigmatism? Should she have the heart problems that plague my side of the family? How about her mother's risk of breast or ovarian cancer? Should we fix all that, not only for her, but for her children as well, since they now get the enhanced genes, too?
I don't think there is a threat of Gattaca style uber-people roaming the earth real soon. But there is a real opportunity to correct a lot of the inherent genetic problems that we all have.
I'd do it in a minute.
-137
Free Range children have alot more white meat than standard children and you can export them to Europe and other countries that ban genetically altered children.
We've defeated almost every Naturally Selective process that has a chance to improve our genome
This is exactly correct.
A thousand years ago, any mutation that caused our bodies to be weak, unhealthy or unsightly would result in death or a lack of reproductive ability. The trait would disappear. The mutant would be "naturally selected" out of the gene pool. At the same time, any mutation that enhanced someone's strength or endurance would allow that person to be fit and strong. He would survive fights and be able to protect his mate and children. His genetic traits would be more likely to be passed on to future generations. Today, we have modern medicine. Nearly any biological deformity or other genetic problems can either be corrected or ignored via drugs and treatments. The person afflicted with these conditions can now lead relatively normal lives and REPRODUCE. Remember, all we can do is TREAT these genetic problems. The traits are STILL THERE and have a much greater chance of surviving to the next generation.
The result is that any mutation at all -- positive or negative -- that can be treated will survive in future generations. There is no longer any naturally selective push to keep positive traits and weed out negative ones. Without this push, our gene pool will become unviable.
The only solution is to somehow re-introduce this naturally selective push. The only way to ethically do this is to utilize genetic engineering and our knowledge of the human genome to detect and remove faulty genetic sequences that will cause problems later in life.
At that point, we have the means to control our evolution completely. People *will* be engineered to be stronger, faster and smarter, whether we want to or not. The people that refuse to acknowledge this or stubbornly refuse to adopt this practice will quickly find THEMSELVES as the lesser underclass.
>>>
Where would I be if my parents had followed a course of genetically engineering their children? I would NOT be around because I am predisposed to being overweight, under-athletic, and have less-than-perfect vision despite having an excellent mind and capacity for learning and thought.
>>>
Yes, that embryo that became you would not exist. But in its place would be an individual without those physical imperfections but all the mental abilities, and guess what? That individual would be YOU!
I'm not advocating genetic engineering here. I just get tired of hearing that silly argument of if such-and-such never happened, I WOULDN'T BE HERE as if that would be a terrible tragedy.
Gee, if my father hadn't taken that trip to Boston in his twenties, he never would have met my mother, and I WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN BORN, thus I never would have had the social connections to get into Harvard, and I wouldn't be on this great promising political career with eventual presidential hopes, and... but wait, none of that happened! Instead, my father actually went to Asia, and met my mother, and I was born overseas, and thus I will never be the president, but I'm blessed with having two cultures, which never would have happened in the first scenario. So which is the greater tragedy/lost opportunity? There are an infinite number of potential scenarios, each centering on an individual who would be just as much YOU, some much better off, some much worse off.
Thinking like this is just silly and pointless. Arguing a point based on it is futile and proves nothing. And most of the time it's used to justify a series of completely random events and circumstances in the past as a preordained reason for one's existence, or something to be thankful for because you really wish things were better and need to rationalize it.
>>>
Where would YOU be under such a system? Probably non-existant
>>>
Just try telling that to the poor genetically superior individual whose chance to exist was usurped by the imperfect person who was born instead!
(brain.active = true;) :-)
:-)
Aha, you where refering to my sig. Hehe. Took me a while.
(brain.active = false;)
dufke, posting as AC to let the rest of you filter this crap out
Genetics only affect the biological system and how it's built. This likely affects mental things like learning capacity, retention, probability of developing a mental deficiency, etc., but doesn't have nearly the effect on behavior as you seem to think.
In many ways, it's almost perfectly analogous to a computer hardware/software. The hardware is built from the same sets of instructions and is essentially identical from one PC in a batch to the next. Each PC has a nearly identical processor. If that processor has a bug in one of its instructions, all of the processors in the line have the same bug. Now, take one PC and install Windows on it. Take the other and install, say, Linux on it. Or BeOS. Or hell, install Windows on both and use different applications with each (or different versions of the same applications).
The only way you would get behavior out of your clone even *approximating* behavior of the original would be to raise the clone in *exactly* the same environment (OS), with the same people (applications), in the same place and time (versions of applications and updates). A person's behavior is directly related to the lessons they've learned and the things they've experienced. The only thing genetics affects at this point is perhaps how well the lesson is learned.
Even identical twins often times are completely different, regardless of whether they've been raised together or adopted into different families.
..children is very simple and I'm surprised no one has mentioned it (or perhaps I missed it?). The sole purpose of all living beings (again from a biological -- not philosphical) is to procreate and continue the spread of their genes. Genetically engineered children would not spread teh parent's alleles, and in a sense would basically severe the already damaged connection we have with nature. We already are out of equilibrium with the environment, now we woudl basically destroy our last real remaining connection. I would ahve to imagine their is some sort of fail-safe gene somewhere there to tell people this is a bad idea.
I suspect that it will happen soon. If I have the choice, I would like my children to have very high IQs, very fast reactions, limited empathy, excellent reasoning skills, excellent physical strength and endurance, spooky hearing, amazing vision, and so on. I am more than willing to pay for it. I want the girls to have excellent reproductive systems (I have too many female plumbing horror stories to wish that on any girl child if I can help it). I want them all to have the ability to control their fear. I cannot see where the effort to breed supermen is bad, at all, even a little.
In the first episode of the TV show Futurama, it's said that all people in the future have their genes scanned and it is determined what they are best suited for... then they imprint this into you and you're stuck with it for life.
The debate and fantasy on the subject has been going on for a very, very long time, since about 5 minutes after someone realized that there was some scientific backing to genes and DNA. It's been looked at from a moral/ethical/religious point of view, and from a technological/scientific point of view.
I'm a very religious person, but I'm also very technical by trade, and scientific by nature. I recognize the fact that there is little to no difference between engineering a chemical to apply to your hair to make it red, and engineering a chemical to apply to your future children to make their hair red.
In the end, as a species we've always done everything we could do. We've built everything that we could conceive, we've used everything we've created, and we pour money into inventing new things to build and use. There's no indication that when the time comes due, when the opportunity is presented to engineer a better person, that we're going to say no.
Aren't our kids screwed up enough as it is? With all the gangsters out there killing because they have nothing else to do? Don't you simple minded people realize that they'll eventually want to make a better killer? IF they haven't already. I think that if was an option, I think I'd volunteer for the better killer and start taking out the trash.
We're all already dead, we're just waiting for the Government to tell us it's okay to be buried.
Eugenics Wars, anyone?
...AND GENETICS IS NOT THE ONLY PREDETERMINING FACTOR FOR INTELLIGENCE!!! We don't even have any idea what intelligence is, biologically speaking, and the idea of reifying such a vague concept into a number has got to be just a little silly. Sure, those ridiculous tests have some correlation to mental performance (BUT CORRELATIONS DO NOT IMPLY CAUSAL RELATIONSHIPS!) but only on a very broad level. The difference between someone with an IQ of 40 and 140 is obvious. The difference between someone with an IQ of 140 and 160 is not--there might not even be one!! In fact, what intelligence has done for the human race is free us from the tyranny of our genes and natural selection.
Yes, that embryo that became you would not exist. But in its place would be an individual without those physical imperfections but all the mental abilities, and guess what? That individual would be YOU!
There would be another individual, yes, but it would not be me. It would be the child of my parents, yes, but it would not be me.
I'm not advocating genetic engineering here. I just get tired of hearing that silly argument of if such-and-such never happened, I WOULDN'T BE HERE as if that would be a terrible tragedy.
Me not being here would most definitely alter the course of events that are intertwined with my particular life. I cannot say the world would be a better place, nor can I say it would be a worse place, should a more genetically perfect being have taken my place. That is not the point.
By using such an example, I was trying to drive home to the other readers how quickly they too could become obsolete. How they too, despite being important in many people's lives and quite possibly having made important tangible and intangible contributions to society, could have been ineligible for being born under situations such as those possible with genetic engineering.
I am not saying we are perfect. I am saying that the imperfection and struggle are more important than perfection that has that much less struggle.
Thinking like this is just silly and pointless. Arguing a point based on it is futile and proves nothing. And most of the time it's used to justify a series of completely random events and circumstances in the past as a preordained reason for one's existence, or something to be thankful for because you really wish things were better and need to rationalize it.
Not as a reason for my existence, but as evidence of my existence. As evidence that imperfection often drives development, and that perfection does not.
Just try telling that to the poor genetically superior individual whose chance to exist was usurped by the imperfect person who was born instead!
There is no reason that person could not be born normally. There is no reason that person could not have already usurped the "me" that exists right now. It is just that the "superior" being is nearly statistically impossible given the current course of nature. Why is the statistically remote viewed as better?
It is not a person's raw intellectual ability that determines what they think. It is not a person's raw emotional predispositions that determines how they feel.
Will the eradication of "imperfections" such as very-low intelligence, bad-eyesight, strength, being over or under-weight, bi-polar disorder, et cetera, lead to a better society?
Will it lead to people who are less predisposed to racism, violence, genocide, intolerance, or any of the more uglier sides of human society?
And at what cost?
These are all important questions that are oftentimes ignored by the technology-hungry. Already we turn a blind eye to the problems of social homogenization. Do we really want to carry such a phenomenon to a planetary level?
Just as we cannot fully dismiss the technology blindly, we cannot fully embrace it blindly. This is something that could easily threaten our very existence, for various reasons already discussed in other threads on this forum.
I urge caution, and a realization that we cannot see patterns in the future, yet there are patterns for us to find in the past. By eleminating epilepsy, we save people hardship, but do we also eleminate future Van Gogh's? By eradicating the possibility of organ failure, do we remove what may be someone's only chance at fully realizing their mortality? By removing aggressive tendencies, do we really solve the issues of domestic violence?
How are we as a people fundamentally better for this technology?
That is what I'd like to see people discuss.
Loving the discourse,
Jason
# Jason A. Dour
# Jason A. Dour
# Founder / Executive Producer - PJ Harvey Online (pjh.org)
I must have Mike the Headless Chicken on the brain...
It's called "being selective."
There are reasons we find people attractive. It's about damn time people stopped buying into that "it's the personality that counts" crap and started following their instincts. The people that disregard these biological signals are doing themselves and their offspring a disservice.
This sounds suspiciously like the 1930's and a guy named Adolf!
HOORAY!
Gattaca is not a movie about genetic engineering, any more than it was a movie about solar power, space travel or music appreciation. Gattaca is a classic romantic fiction; Andrew Niccol takes a simple theme, the idea of a society stratified by poor genetic engineering practices, and uses it as a tool to highlight the fundamental truth that the human spirit is far more important than the combination of amino acids in your bones. Genetic engineering itself is just a prop, like the impeccably tailored suits and the spiral staircase. The fact that the director could not accomplish his goal of showing its lack of importance without it does not make it the central idea in the movie.
Niccol wanted to show that a human being can accomplish nothing in life without a dream, without a goal. Jude Law's perfect character demonstrates this remarkably well: an incredibly refined thoroughbred, born with every advantage, incinerates himself at the very instant of the in-valid's greatest achievement. He had no goal but to be better than his fellow men, and he was psychologically destroyed because he was beaten. How well this contrasts to the unhealthy, disadvantaged boy who dreams of conquering space!
"What level of imperfection can be tolerated in a Gattaca employee?" the genetically engineered brother asks the Mission Director. "Nothing that would have kept you out". Tremendous! The bully, the antagonist who was born strong and made bold by his proud parents, told that his weak and frail brother had dared to achieve greatness while he himself had settled for a menial job as an enforcer. How about the girl who was born nearly perfect, an inch from achieving her dream, but held down because she believes that the Fates are alive in her genes? Her punishment for mysticism was that she would never step inside a spacecraft, never see the rings of Saturn or the sands of Mars. But the broken, miserable, snot-nosed boy would, because he believed in himself and was willing to pay the full price for life.
What Niccol unfortunately did not show well in Gattaca is what an engineered human with his own supply of veriditas would be capable of. Because the points that made Ethan Hawke such a magnificent character could easily be possessed by anyone. Imagine a high school football team with a front line averaging 240 lbs of solid muscle and a minimum I.Q. of 155. The genetically engineered star linebacker goes to Berkeley and studies Aeronautical Engineering, graduates with honors and goes on to start his own private space company. In the other world, the one we live in today, he is a fat idiot who gets an athletic scholarship to UT Knoxville, spends his college football career date-raping sorority girls, graduates with a PE degrees and spends the rest of his life drinking beer and belching. Selling used cars, maybe.
Which race of humans would you rather belong to?
Scudder
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
Although I thought the movie had significant flaws, the point about discrimination according to medical condition is valid. It already happens.
Health insurance companies will look for any reason for disqualifying you for coverage. Have diabetes? Sure, we'll cover you, except for anything that has to do with diabetes. It is, after all, "a pre-existing condition." You've got neuropathy now? Well, that's related to your diabetes, so we can't cover that either.
The sick thing is, diabetes can be controlled--we have the technology and the resources to keep people from dying from this--but we can't cure it. So do we exert effort to help them, even though in a way, it's futile? Some will see it's a waste. Let them die. Let the gene die out. Ain't "scientific civilization" wonderful? But does diabetes have any affect on your performance at, let's say a job? Maybe you aren't going to be a world-class athelete, but what's to stop you from being a genius at physics, so long as you've got insulin injections?
Eugenics is a stupid idea just on scientific principles because we simply don't have enough information about the ramifications of screwing with our genes. For all we know, pruning out "bad" genes will doom life in the future, because we've just cut off an evolutionary escape route. I still say Chuckie Darwin had it right. "Variety is the keystone to man's success." Or our "fix" may introduce all sorts of anomalies that were unforeseen--and there are no take-backs if you stick these things into germ cells.
That's facile, bordering on cretinous. The desire to gengineer offspring is societal, not gene-derived. In fact, it's a direct expression of the desire to have genetically strong offspring, which is core a survival/procreation drive.
There's nothing to worry about vis-a-vis gengineered offspring because it's fundamentally Not A Big Deal. I'm really amused at all the neo-Luddites going on about the horrible lack of diversity in such a future and how we'll all be raising blond, blue-eyed six-footers. Oh, yeah. That's what every black, latino, and asian couple wants to raise, not to mention the interracials (which latinos are, by definition almost -- biracial before it was trendy, we were). Genetic diversity is safe because people want different things in offspring. And people still like surprises -- look at how many couples deliberately choose not to know their child's gender until it's born.
And, personally, I'd much rather gengineer a subhuman servitor race to take out the trash and keep the sewers clean than condemn intelligent humans to demeaning, soul-crushing work.
Yeesh, people, give it a rest. Nano is a *lot* scarier, but because it doesn't tap into bizarre procreative prejudices, it gets a hell of a lot more support than gengineering, which is significantly more interesting in terms of quality-of-life.
gomi
People can be "perfect" in different ways. Even strengths can be weaknesses. Take, for instance, sickle-cell anemia. This genetic "disease" evolved to fight viruses (malaria, IIRC) and actually gave a benefit to the "victim". If everyone had perfect teeth, the physical potential for Michael Jordan's prowess, the mental potential for Edison's inventiveness, et cetera...there would still be differences. Some would become sports stars, some would become celebs, et cetera with little difference from the way things are now. One of the main differences that would exist would be that no one would be born missing arms or legs, and thus society would have to spend less resources bringing such people up to what society considers a minimum functionality standard. As for diseases threatening via genetic diversity...ok, boost the immune system while you're designing everything else. Don't give me a piecemeal job; if my kids will be redesigned, I'm not going to ignore ANY benefits just because I'm lazy. And corporate ownership of people won't happen because it'd be utterly unenforceable today. Un-engineered child's genetic code infringing on IP rights? What are you going to do, rip out the kid's genes? There's a limit to what people will stand for, and any corp that seriously tries to do that will find the public rebelling against it. Genes thought to bring success may be bought and sold, but that's no worse than sperm and eggs of successful people being bought and sold today - and you don't see the world collapsing right now because of it, do you? Kids can sue their parents for any reason today...but that affects only a tiny minority of families apart, and those families tend to be dysfunctional to the point that they were just looking for an excuse to fly apart anyway. Third world children mostly won't be genetically engineered until the procedure's cheap - and then, well, what do you do today about children born into lives of slavery and prostitution even if they're not engineered for it? Please, people. When a new technology comes along, there's many types of fears that people predict but ultimately have little to do with the tech. Whether it's projection of current reality ugliness with the new tech slapped on (engineering for prostitution, as opposed to just turning normal kids over to prostitution), applications that only have the bad aspects without the good (genetic diversity loss without compensating boosts to thwart the ill effects thereof), or just are not based in reality (genes making exact clones, ignoring different environmental contributions), worrying about these things does nobody any good whatsoever. These fears will fail to actually stop the tech (whether because they were already present without the tech or because they can not actually appear), only slow down applications that would bring its benefits to those who need it. This applies to genetic engineering, cybernetics, the Internet, and in fact probably most new technologies that get discussed on Slashdot.
Watching this argument is sort of like looking into the mind of a toddler who has come to the sudden realization; My GOD! It's TRUE! I WILL have to eventually stop pissing in my diapers and going on the toilet! There's no stopping it, even though I'm totally frightened by the prospect! The horror! Where's my privacy? How am I going to deal with that cold seat? The horror!
The "adult" that the human race is going to become, probably will not remember this debate, or the reasons why it was so scary.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
All this commentary is moot until we overcome significant technical barriers. The human genome project will be a small first step in this long process. I don't think we will be able to effectively remove single defective genes from the genetic pool in less than fifty years, much less erasing polygenic diseases like cancer and heart disease, not withstanding the fact that these will probably never go away because they have significant environmental components. And even this is a large step from trying to control vague factors like intelligence--things that don't have clear cut genetic components and may very well be only artificial constructs that have no bearing on biology.
Among the challenges for genetic engineers:
First of all, we have to figure out what makes a chromosome stable, and how to ensure anything we make changes in will survive in a germ cell and reliably propagate it to progeny. A lot of the diseases we want to treat will involve large scale changes to the human genome, and interactions between genes and non-coding regions will be important. More importantly, we'll have to understand crossing over in meiosis a lot better. Just the map given by human genome project will not be enough to figure these things out. If our changes are not stable, we will likely introduce random, lethal mutations into the gene pool, which may work for a couple of generations, but die out immediately afterwards. What's worse is that we can't possibly foresee how mutations of our modifications will turn out (because unless we all decide to live in lead houses and cease using light and electricity, there's no way we can avoid mutation--and even then, DNA spontaneously degrades chemically)
The other thing we need to work on is DNA delivery systems. It's not like you can just inject this stuff into a zygote and expect it to accept it. And even if it does accept it, it's likely to be degraded within a few months at most--and even if it does survive, it will probably result in mosaicism.
We also don't have the tools to molecularly manipulate DNA in vivo. It's not like we can extract a chromosome, chop it up, insert what we want, then stick it back into the nucleus.
The thing is, the more useful role of genetic engineering is probably in treating pre-existing conditions and just modifying somatic cells, so these changes don't get propagated. You don't need to address a lot of the challenges that I mentioned to do this. We already have the technology to do this, except for the delivery systems, but that's being worked on. Treatment of CF looks promising using these methods.
How much better would it be to control all cases of cystic fibrosis and diabetes, not just the ones you catch prenatally? There's absolutely no reason why genetic engineering has to be monopolized by the elite.
WOW! imagine a bitchin Beowulf cluster of these!!
Natural selection doesn't work that way--there'd have to be a selective factor AGAINST pinky toes for it to disappear. Unless someone's figured out that pinky toes decrease your chance to reproduce? Well, that's why a lot of diseases won't disappear--because they don't necessarily reduce your chances of reproducing. Stuff like Alzheimers, Parkinsons, Huntingtons--things that happen to you in your old age, when you've already propagated your "bad" genes.
you bet scientific research is carefully examined before alotting millions of dollars for it, but by whom? who invests in scientific research the most in the usa? the military of course; a part of the system that is not controlled by the majority's interests anyway; also, although at some point it boils down to the parents' decision, at first these will only be the rich parents. seems like we cannot really escape ourselves. alex
Thank you Mister Hitler. Get back to your bunker please. I'm sorry I can't phase this in a more non-flamebait manner but people who use natural selection to justify their greed and personal prejudice should be labled for what they are.
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
Imagine somebody saying "Too bad Sally ran M$ Brainware 3k, our sex drives we incompatible.
Don't you see? The people here are supposed to be smarter than average and still most of the opinions here are downright stupid and shortsighted. Yes, the mankind could use some improvement.
Whether you admit it or not, the rich run the worl d already. Wouldn't it be better if those running the world were smarter? Seems to be a correlation between intelligence and compasion and other good things....
Tommy, you say you don't *like* soccer? How can you not like soccer? You're MEANT to play soccer. You were BORN to play soccer. It's in your BLOOD for god's sake. Do you have any idea how disappointed in you your parents (Ronaldo and Mia Hamm, naturally) will be if you give up soccer? Now I want to see you do 500 more penalty kicks this *INSTANT* and then you can eat...
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Unfortunately (or perhap not so unfortunately - hmm) applying a filter for the spelling gene on /. would eliminate probably something over half the posts!
/. greatly for those of us blessed with an easy time spelling, but would still leave vulnerable those of us who need the accurate typoing gens. :-)
/dev/null any post that uses "architect" or "dialog" as a verb.
That might improve
Rob, how about a spelling filter? You can then follow that up with one that redirects to
none
Not everyone likes the way Cindy Crawford or Richard Gere looks like. What if we eliminate some things such as shortness or depression - who will be the jockeys or blues musicians? Eliminate a gene for laziness and who will invent the next washing machine or remote control?
I personally have a deaf/retarded aunt and I know that much of my compassion, patience and caring have come from her influence. It will be a difficult societal choice to say yes it's okay to correct this gene for dwarfism but not for pimples. At what point do we stop and let nature take its course - nature and evolution has done a fine job of making us who we are.
..........FULL STOP.
... if your parents had genetically engineered the bad spelling gene out of you, I wouldn't be writing this.
"We need a worker class"
In the short term (next two generations?) yes, but so what? We have it right now, and by the time that class grows old and dies, we won't need it. I seriously believe if technology is allowed to progress naturally it is possible for everyone to be working voluntarily and only in service and maintenance positions. People will be entertainers, fixers, thinkers, teachers, or just dead weight. I exagerate to make my point clear.
"Smarter is often crazier"
I believe this is entirely society driven. People fear the other people who are smarter because they have freedoms the less smart people can't even understand. The smart people feel alone because they see a bigger picture that so few others can see. The less smart people ridicule the more smart people in defense of themselves. If we can just grow up as a whole I think we can shed this idea that math or any other intellectual persuit has to be hard. So yes, right now smart people are less stable. Right now ignorance is bliss. This isn't natural, any more than racism is natural. Let's move on.
Finally, I agree that fixing things that scare us because we don't understand them is just as dangerous as not fixing them. If we don't understand things how can we know if/how they are wrong? I say, let's take our time, but move forward carefully, thoughtfully, and with love and respect for the world we are in and the entities we share it with.
I really want to work in this field in a couple years once i get out of high school/college. The thing about this is that when people talk about splicing genes they mean like hair color, eye color, etc. But i really think that this is wrong. The way this should work is by using the parents genes and combining them, then implanting them. I mean use the dyhybrid cross with large X's being dominant and little x's being recessive. Come on slashdotters you know what i'm talking about its basic biology! Just pick your child from a huge graph of what your genes and your spouses would be. This way its still your own "blood" Think about being able to pick them having 2 dominant or 2 recessive genes to pass on to your child, this is really exciting! The only limiting factor would be if both had either dominant or recessive genes for a specific trait. This field is going to have the next "boom" in jobs i plan on being in on it
This whole article is very disturbing in my opinion
Personally, I think your arguement is full of crap. Maybe you wouldn't want kids smarter than you, maybe your parents didn't want you to be smarter, but I doubt that's the case. Yes parents often live vicariously through their children, but that's because they want them to be BETTER than they themselves were. Personally, I'm smarter than my parents (in some things) and I know they're glad of that. I sure hope my kids are a hell of a lot smarter than me as well. Wouldn't it be cool to say you were the dad of Einstein? Next to being Einstein, that's about the coolest thing. You've created the ultimate genius. Only sick twisted parents would want dumb children so that they could control them. This sounds like the moanings of a 15 year old who feels his parents and teachers want him to be stupid so he won't rebel against them. Mordred
If this were inevitable, maybe it would be a good idea, as soon as we get the ability, to sample and record genetic information for a bunch of randomly chosen people, imperfections and all.
If in the further distant future, our children realise the mistake (if the were) made via genetic engineering, they could at least attempt to restore some the lost diversity?
Puh-leeze. I guess I was lulled into a false sense of security here on /. Even people who would likely be comfortable with cranial cyberjack implants get all frightened by anything with the word "genetic". How disappointing.
So of course, the thread starts with the worst case scenario: "what if rich people engineered their kids to be 7 foot tall, buff, beautiful Aryan supermen who scorn and subjugate all lower forms of life..." Gee, is anyone going to say that's a good idea? Duh. The only response is "no, that's not how it will happen", which is sheer speculation. Just like the premise.
Now let's try some facts on for size. My wife is a medical doctor, and at dinner we trade tech talk -- computation for biomed. Here's a real-life scenario: "what if doctors engineered an embryo in utero to counteract the gene for Cystic Fibrosis, so that as the child grows older she isn't slowly suffocating to death on her own defective DNA..." So what do you think, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Because this project is already underway.
And there are quite a few other congenital diseases now being studied to varying degrees -- here's the American Society for Gene Therapy. Should we condemn children to CF, Muscular Dystrophy, Down's Syndrome, etc, just because you got scared by a mediocre movie?
Yes, there's the slippery slope problem. Things like nearsightedness, intelligence, or height are partly genetic. Don't forget the effects of nutrition, education, exercise, etc. But those genes are being studied too, and they will be found eventually. Do we draw a line on what should be treated/altered? If so, where? Who decides?
And how to enforce it? Once it becomes safe and effective (let's say 50 years from now), can you stop a billionaire from giving his children all the best genes? Can you even stop a middle class professional couple? Some people are already smuggling Pituitary Growth Hormone injections so their kids will be taller. The world you are afraid of is neither Brave nor New.
Humans seem to have an overwhelming desire to control their own evolution. This is another 'carrot' that will see us all happily trotting down the path to our own extinction. Creating a super race overlooks the importance of diversity and the randomness it uses to seek the best options. It's funny that some people want super children. Some people just want children and other people have children and don't seem to want them at all.
I believe Gattaca is self-referential to the respective DNA base pairs contained therein.
G = guanine
A = adenosine
T = thymine
C = cytosine
So not a variation on someone else's chant, unless you count Nature's as named by man.
It would be nice if ALL congenital diseases could be taken care of before we start adding qualities.
"Contraception may be perfected to the point that we'll eliminate the need for abortions."
Was there ever a need? I find that sentance disturbing.
Just for the record, I a solid trans-humanist, and I don't see much problem with lack of genetic variation in these children. They aren't all clones! If no one is retarded any more, we're not at any more risk of extinction. The genes are as varied as they'd ever be (minus a flaw or two) and all's as good as ever.
I guess I can start looking forward to the future Life: 2020
Select your characteristics:
Intelligence 20/20
Dexterity 20/20
Strength 20/20
Wisdom 20/20
Magic 20/20
25% random roll.
Choose your weapon:
Nuke
Automatic cluster
Anonymous Cowards
Hyrdo bomb
Choose race:
Cyborg
CompleteAI
Human
TechnoIlliterate
We'll, it's never too early to start training! Back to more Angband...
Linux: Long live the source code.
Where in the world do you get the impression that I'm in any way advocating greed or prejudice? I'm totally lost as to how you made that leap.
All I'm saying is that people should put some faith into the things that draws one person to another. If you find somebody physically and emotionally attractive, there's a reason you find them that way: You have evolved to detect signs of health, fertility and stability in your mate. Today it's very "PC" to ignore these signs and settle for mates that are weak in many of these respects yet strong in other, less important respects.
I don't know how the hell you picked up anything sounding like Hitler from that. Please explain.
While skin color and speech are patently obvious to anyone who can see and hear, how do you find out about someone's genes without taking a sample and doing a test? And without the knowledge of a person's genes, how can you use that to discriminate against them? If it is unlawful to perform the test, it's awfully hard to discriminate and not risk the penalties.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Folks who adopt kids may keep inside, a desire to have perpetuated their genes, even if they were unable to reproduce because of defects in those genes, but they still love their adopted kids, and still protect them, and do everything they can to insure that the adopted kid's genes get passed on.
Perhaps this genetic perpetuity is the REASONING behind the phenomenon of parental love for their children, but there is no logical connection in practice. All the parent knows is that the parent loves that little person, and wants to care for it. All that Darwinian stuff doesn't enter into most peoples' minds most of the time.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I think genetic engineering should be used, but to an extent. I.E. Getting rid of a genetic disease, growing new organs, and choosing sex of babies. Things like this could be done successfully as long as their is a system of "checks and balances." It should pretty much just be used to make sure the child is healthy, nothing more. Also I see no problem in growing a new organ for someone that needs it. Like I said their needs to be the proper laws, restrictions, and supervision for it to be done sucessfully. My two $.02, earther
Indeed, imagine the RC5 keyrate you'd get from such a processor. I should start the new team now (Team infant brain suspended in tube of fluid with wires). Any governments that want to protest can feel our wrath as we distrubute the contents of all their encrypted communication!
which one of these would have been seen as 'inferior' at birth, when the magic doctors see years into the future to their blindness, deafness, homosexuality, or whatnot. oh well. i got my designer car, my gap jeans, and i can have designer kids and beat them into perfection.
Well guess what, I'm sure any of you who argue now that you wouldn't want to be genengineered would love to have had a little gene therapy when you're crippled from Alzheimers. And anyone knows that environment is a much larger part of how a child develops than gene therapy to make perfect children is. It doesn't matter if everyone looks exactly alike, the brain itself in that skull will still have individual thoughts, because that kid's parents raised him differently than the guys across the street
If i could have the ability to do math faster than a computer with just a couple hundred bucks of gene therapy then hell i'd take it
-JimmyJ
I'll take millions of years evolution over procedurally hacking individual genes based on a vague understanding of what's going on. Our genes are robust, dynamic systems of data. A deterministic approach of manipulating genes to enact specific results is doomed to monstrous failure.
"Sensitive dependence on initial condidtions" should be our phrase for the day. We're not dealing with an "if a, then b" situation. More like "if a, then 1/infinity variations" We just don't know what'll happen when we change a gene. They interact and influence each other so much that the results we get from one subject won't necessarialy be the same for another person. Or 10, 100, etc. In Baboons, the gene that dictates tooth size effects snout size, because the bone support needed by the tooth varies based on tooth size. Chimp DNA is >95% similar to human, but they look different. If we manipulated DNA to give people more muscle, then the cardiovascular and pulminary systems would have to adjust to support the additional tissue. I for one don't want to increase my child's risk of congential heart failure.
I'll be giving my children the benefit of millions of years or trial and error. There is just so much that we can never know, and I'm not going to bet anybody's life on re-sequencig DNA or starting from scratch.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Instead of hand hacking the genes alone, also take away the selection-blocking things (which basically amount to weighting the scales so the weaklings can win).
Ban all guns, make "a duel or a fair fight" legal regardless of outcome, remove all restrictions that force people to be safe (if they wanna remove themselves from the gene pool good for em, if they survive they are at least lucky if not strong and good genetically). Ban medical intervention to gorrect genetic defects unless it is combined with a gene hack to fix it at the germ-line level, or sterilisation. And ban any type of "affirmative action" (for race, sex, disability, anything)
Actually, I thought that was one of the more ridiculous things in Gattaca, and hardly "sharp." Why? Because it would be inconsistent for a society to outlaw gene testing and yet legalize drug testing. You have to go all the way one way or the other, or else nothing makes sense.
On the pro-testing side, you have this argument: employer has the right to determine if the applicant is suited for the job or not. If applicant doesn't like this, he can apply elsewhere. This argument works just as well for genes as for drugs, and vice-versa.
On the anti-testing side, you have this argument: applicant says, "Judge me be how well I do, not your ridiculous and superficial tests." This argument also works just as well for genes as for drugs, and vice-versa.
It just doesn't make sense to outlaw one and not the other. It doesn't make sense to legalize one and not the other.
All this is precisely why we need to work toward more automation, imho.
I mean, every time we automate something, people complain about losing jobs. But the thing is, if we somehow manage to keep population growth under control (WAY easier said than done, I know), in general automation lead people no longer being forced to do menial labor.
TheGeek
http://www.geekrights.org
TheGeek
http://www.geekrights.org
Kill the monkey
Anyone see Gatica??? (sp?) At any rate, just b/c we can do something doesn't always mean we should.
If there's so much evidence, why the heck didn't you cite one source in that entire piece of conjecture? Am I to believe that you did the research yourself that determined "IQ seems to be 80% genetic in most populations"? Come on, take a few seconds and back up your statements by using Google or an encyclopedia or something.
Do not forget that BNW was also about the use of drugs to control people's moods (Like antidepressants.), a powerful media helping to keep people ignorant and happy (Ala any TLA you cna think of.), and wild orgys (I wish.).
Those without the genetic mods will go cyber. ha!
While I'm sure it's ruined quite a few peoples lives, it no longer poses a significant threat to most of the population. I don't see why geneticaly enginering out genetic diseases would cause problems.
Believe me when I say if genetic engineering of humans become commonplace nature will find its way to deal with it.
I don't see why, is there some sort of intrinsic requirement to keep the human race 'in it's place'? if there is, it's failed miserably...
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
no
yes
no
yes
NO.....WRONG
um, YES.....RIGHT!!!
I think it can safely be said that there is nothing in the above post that is correct. moderate it down, all of it, and keep on moderating them all down. keep slashdot topical
unless of course, we are exspecting everyone to take Star Trek as some sort of universaly know constant, and infailable...
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
You're absolutely right, it's been much too long =) So much so, I think I'm going to try and find a copy to reread... I was fairly young when I first read it. Chorizo
That dosn't really that make much sense, how does engenering one person make a 'super race'? All were doing is make a few 'super people', not a new race. BTW, arian's are almost entirely recissive, therfore 'broken' hitler was a dumbass.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Does this mean we will be taking bill gates to court when he integrates I.E. into our children?
OK I agree with you on cosmetic surgery and I'll add non-essential surgury (heathy tonsels, circumsision etc) but two points I can't ignore (sorry if this gets a bit off topic):
Nature's Way of thinning the herd
The whole point of this is to improve the over all genetic base of the species the genetic engineering is just (see below) jumping the gun with nature.
People who spend thousands of dollars trying to have kids piss me off. You don't have such special 'genes' that you can't adopt some kid who needs a home and give them your precious family name.
First off I am one of these people, I have 21 month old IVF twins, so I'll address that part first. Deciding to have a child is saying that you think your genes are special enough to pass on (also based on your own idea of your parenting skills), at least it should be. Yes this is selfish I'll admit it, but who has the right to tell me my genes aren't special enough to pass on (now that is eugenics)
Secondly do you have any idea how hard it is to adopt? When my wife and I found out about our fertility problems we looked into it. The result: not likely. Very few children and many potential parents. The kids get the pick of the bunch (as they should) and there are plenty of good homes. There is more stress and heart ache involved than we thought we could stand. it realy pisses me off when some one throws in adoption so casually with so little knowledge. (sorry but you realy touched a nerve there)
More on genetic engineerng I'm not saying it's a good idea, I think it's a fair way off, or alteast it should be messing with the gene pool could dangerous at least until we know a bit more. But once our knowledge is up it'd be almost irisopnsible not to.
(still take a look at Greg Egan's short story "Euginie" in Axiomatic) Well I've ranted enough.
I would be willing to leave it to the order of the universe. Something chose that person to be that way, whether you believe in a higher power or the higher order of the chaos of existence. I personally think the trials and tribulations presented by such a something have far greater benefit than if they were erased from existence by our collective arrogance
Chaos dosn't 'decide', if you belive in god, that's one thing. Esoteric theorys are great, but I would rather see sufering removed from the world...
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I am fairly certain that Pneunomic (sp?) Plague was a common instrument of war in the Middle Ages. The British also were not adverse to the use of smallpox on indigenous tribes. Ever wondered why there are no Aboriginiges in Tasmania ? And....Let's not be naive, Darwin tells us that any and all strategies will be used. TTFN
Never confuse ethics with economics. They have nothing in common. Economics = Darwinism...This tech WILL BE USED. However, the practical application of anything other than the most rudimentary of changes is decades away. Conversely, that ain't so very long !
So, are you saying that people born naturaly with a High IQ are all snobish pains in the ass? I guess you are. we should KILL THEM ALL!!!
btw, people with High IQs don't know anything to start with, they just learn quickly. as for them being 'pains in the ass' Its posible that they just can't stand you're unintelegence? Most of the smart people I know are pretty nice, and not snobish at all.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
In any case, while genotype can predict IQ in these special cases, in most cases it can't, and IQ can't be used to predict genotype. I would wager that there is no significant genetic difference between someone with an IQ of 165 and someone with an IQ of 140. Probably not even between someone with an IQ of 120 and an IQ of 195.
/* While I'm sure it's ruined quite a few peoples lives, it no longer poses a significant threat to most of the population. I don't see why geneticaly enginering out genetic diseases would cause problems.
:(
*/
People with Sickle Cell Anemia are immune to Malaria.
On the surface it seams like a strange coincidence but in fact it's natures way of protecting us. Every now and then a new disease comes along and only some of us are prepared for it.
If it were simply a case where new diseases killed the weak and the stupid then fine. However sometimes it's the "weak" who survive.
Fully 1/3 of europe fell to the black plague. There is now evidence to suggest that the descendants of those who were infected and survived are now immune to aids. ( some people are. just the reason is cloudy. )
I consider it pure arrogance to think we can engineer into all humans immunity to all diseases. Unless we can do just that wide scale genetic engineering would lead to a planet of 3 Billion Shaquel Oneals with 210 IQs. All of whom would die of the next "new" virus to hit, thus leaving the 3 Billion Wendy Fitz-Williamses to clone new boyfriends/Husbands/Sons.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Well, I generally agree with doing genetic engineering to weed out future medical problems, I think that that ought to be the limit. A world where everyone (who wasn't older then say, 20) looked like a supermodel would be boring.[1]
Perhaps I'm just picturing myself as an old man with telling a circle of genetically perfect grandchildren[2]: "You think I'm stupid-looking? In my day, *everyone* was ugly, and we liked it just fine!"
[1] Note: If this happens, we will undoubtedly see weirder and weirder fashion statements, as people try to make themselves look more individual in a world where everyone's genes were picked from a 20 page catalog...
[2] And, yes, I know it probably won't happen in my lifetime or yours, but it wasn't that long ago that I thought cloning was 100 or two years away...
--Arcum
Admittedly, it's intriguing. And it does have some very good uses; engineering certain birth defects out of the population is one example.
But sometimes it's not worth the price. The effects will be far worse than could justify any good that comes out of it. Consider:
1) First, the technique has to be perfected in humans. How many thousands, perhaps even millions, will suffer while that's going on?
2) The movie Gattaca shows a society rife with what it calls "genoism"; the belief that engineered people are superior to those who are non-engineered.
3) Is forcing a kid into what may very well be the wrong kind of body for that child, for no other reason than the parents' interests, really a Good Thing? I've never met anyone who could predict the future; you can't know what your child will be like. Parents who would "sculpt" their children into their own image are, quite frankly, among the most selfish bastards I know of.
4) Consider the problem of hate groups. Talk about adding more fuel to the flames. The most extreme are quite likely to engineer their children to be better "warriors for the race" or whatever. Worse, get these people into power and you really have trouble as engineering becomes mandated.
5) Speaking of warriors, I don't even want to know what sort of things governments are going to mandate. But very likely it won't be a pretty sight.
Genetically engineering children could have some truly remarkable benefits. But it may well not be worth the price. As I said, genetically engineering out birth defects is one thing, but it must be very strictly controlled if things aren't to get totally out of hand.
So... let me get this straight. They want to *improve* _Homo sapiens_ to the point where essentially everyone is perfect.
At the risk of "me-tooing" someone, or treading on toes, haven't we got enough people on this planet already? Don't we already have problems because the birth rate is MUCH higher than the death rate? I'm not suggesting that we should all go out and kill someone or anything like that, but what we want is birth *control* not birth *enhancement* - and we don't need a fitter, more able-to-survive human race; we have that already.
It's a nice concept, but humans don't need that technology. Sure, some rare/endangered species might, but not us. If I live 70 years then fine - with or without my defects.
Can anyone see problems later?
Prejudice against any kind of genetic anomaly... I'd feel pretty bad if I had to be a sh*t-mopper instead of a coder just because I had poor fine-motor skills and a stutter.
(Which I do)
What about after perfect offspring becomes the norm?
Imagine a couple whos unborn child stands a chance of being born with some sort of handicap. Would society consider this couple evil and immoral for declining genetic intervention and "taking their chances" the old-fashoned way?
In other words, society would be saying "you are horrible people for damning this child to a possibly "horrible" future when genetics would definitely 'save' him/her!"
Let's face it, humans are, as a whole, are the most inefficent beings ever created. It's the natural progression of technology. We will always want to be better, don't think of this as degrading the human race, but improving it.
Also, remember what happened to people after machines started doing farm work and factory work? People thought that this was bad and somehow going to be the downfall of humanity. Same thing with nuclear weapons. Oh my god, we have harnessed the power of the atom, were all going to die. Well, I'm here.
I think it will be the same with this, people will get all scared (mostly beacuse of ignorance, religon or the `herd' instinct) and try to stop this. This woln't harm socity, it will just make it better. We woln't lose our individuality, just enhance it. We will become a better race beacuse of this.
It will happen, there's no use in fighting it, technology has NEVER been stopped before, and it ain't about to start now.
That's my $(2^4*3+1/7%3*2/100)
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
Let me cite an anecdotal story (yeah, I'm a linux user, so I have to use anecdotes, right? ;) ). I know 2 identical twins. Brian cross dresses, listens to techno-dance, generally gets C's and D's in school, and works hard ad summer jobs. Jason slacks off in work, makes A's and B's, and hates Brian's music. I knew them as they grew up; as they steadily got older, they began to diverge.
MORAL OF THE STORY:
A society with everyone having identical genes will be an incredibly diverse society nonetheless
Only 29% of people said they'd even consider genetic engineering at all.
I bet most of them would only consider it for severe genetic diseases.
There will always be people (and probably, always at least almost half of people, due to religion and paranoia inherent in humans) who will refuse genetic engineering.
No government, especially the US, would EVER mandate something that many people are opposed to, and ESPECIALLY an entire genome.
And may I add, the concept that people will want to concieve via test tubes and have the baby raised in an artificial womb is stupid that even a minority of the population would want it, let alone all of it.
My point?
The human genome will always be diverse.
Some people will always refuse genetic engineering.
Those who do use genetic engineering will most likely only engineer a tiny fraction of their genes.
Those who do get engineered will have higher qualities of life, overall.
The government, unless they want to commit political suicide, will NOT get involved.
- Rei
P.S. - I wish that I, for one, didn't have genetics that carry parkinson's disease, or a likelyhood of cancer late in life, or bad knees. And another major genetic "defect" I won't discuss here.
I just took one of my remote controls into my room, turned off all of the lights, and pushed some buttons, and I *could* see it. It was very faint and distinctly red. My roommate can't see it, but I don't think he was looking hard enough.
I think you're pretty much correct with respects to the cause. The peak wavelength (as bright as your typical superbright LED) is probably in the correct 850-900nm spectrum with low-intensity light escaping at much lower (800nm and probably less) wavelengths, which we can see. It seems logical. Kinda nifty, regardless.
If I could choose to remove the genetic component of clinical depression (unipolar disorder) from my childrens' DNA someday (when I have kids), you can be damn sure I will. I'm not going to inflict painful genetically related disorders on my own children just because some uneducated zealot somewhere thinks it is more ethical that way. There is anyway a fuzzy line between genetic and symptomatic treatment (pills) of such disorders. You either don't treat a disorder at all, or you treat it with every available technology you have.
I would say the same for more minor ailments, such as ecsema and allergies - such ailments ("imperfections") do NOT "make the man or woman", not by a long shot. They aren't remotely related to what I'm like as a person.
Genetic engineering falls into two areas - Window dressing and Contents. Window dressing is the colour of our eyes - colour doesn't affect how we see things. Contents is the shape and construction of the eye, which does affect how we see things.
Window dressing engineering would actually benefit our race enourmously, both socially and physically. Racism would die out - if you could have black or white skin for 19.95, what is the point of running around with sheets on your heads when the people you're campainging against change colour two times a week. And down under, here in australia, sun cancer country of the world, there would be a lot of people who would welcome becoming darker skinned if it meant a lower chance of dying - this would reduce medical costs enourmously.
Content is basically the way in which the structure of the body, and the materials used to make the body. Genneering a heart to make it more efficient means less chance of heart attack. Making hemaglobin more efficient means that if someone looses alot of blood, they are less likely to die.
Of course, running around and doing exercises helps, but if your dad, your grandfather, all your brothers and all your uncles start dying because they have genetic heart problems, wouldn't you rather that you didn't have to worry about it.
Which leads to the fact that it costs lots of money and you need lots of patents to get into the genetics industry. There's a solution, though - open source it. Force the companies to open up their patents through a large scale public research project. Pay the companies for doing the research so that their results will go out onto the web, so that any problems can be scanned by a hundred thousand interested people. Having a problem fixing the gene for cystic fibrosis? - Put out a press release on Genedot:News for Genetic Engineers, so that a thousand anonymous cowards can have a look to see if they can fix it for you.
Chief Prosecutor
Advocacy Department
Goedel's Theorem shows that you can never completely understand a system from within it.
That means that eventually we may understand what caused all of our problems in the 20th century, but we'll probably be just as clueless about the new problems.
For example: What is insanity? Excessive deviance from normal thinking patterns. What may be perfectly sane today may not tomorrow. "Normal" may become more stringent due to our ability to engineer defects away. And so the next iteration approaches normal, standards are cropped in, and the process continues.. Sort of like a 1/n curve: approaching but never reaching.
Look at all the new mental "illnesses" we have recognized: OCD, ADD, Ausperger's Syndrome, etc. Despite that there are very serious cases warranting interference, once the general public heard of these new diseases, hypochondria set in.. people imagined the disease in themselves and their children.
We'll never be "perfect" enough.
..
Excellent idea. I want to see the next generation healthier, longer-lived and more intelligent than us. In the end it's a choice. We can't leave it up to Darwin to improve us, as higher intelligence is likely to correlate to smaller families, so fewer offspring, so the 'idiot' genes are likely to become more prevalent over time. So we have to do it ourselves. Enhance ourselves through nanotechnology, cybernetics and genetic engineering, and go out and take on the Galaxy - or sit here on our little rock debating ethical issues and whether it's OK to play God until the next big rock hits, or an ice age, or something, and we go the way of the stegosaurus.
Sorry if I got your dander up.... is it really that difficult to adopt? Wow, I was under the (false, I gather) impression that there were orphanages overflowing with crack babies and such. You read all this stuff about teen pregnancy, etc., I guess I wandered into unfamiliar territory without thinking.
:-)
And for the other questions, no, no circumcision and yes, appendix out IF they had appendicitis, which is obviously serious. But I still have mine.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
They are being killed by our overpopulation of their ecosystems and us running them over with boats. Almost all species are fine until we approach.
Our ancestors did not do anything genetic. They simply survived. They did not breed for stamina or beauty, they simply breeded. Nothing fancy. Its called evolution. Those who survived, bred. And their genetic material was passed on. THose who lived the longest passed on more material than others. This is natural selection.
Gattaca-ism will be the beginning of the end for us. I expect we will loose the genie before we know how to keep it in the bottle. And then, all of our creations will be against us.
Genetic engineering will let us cure faults. But those that remain will take up the slack. Those flaws shall be glaring. Frankly a society filled with I-am-right-you-aren't, arrogant, self-important, holier-than-thou people sickens me (think being stuck in a room filled with politicians). But thats what humans are. And thats what they will be. I leave it to their hand.
Interesting, now maybe the government will get what they want...
for us all to be robots that are all alike and totally predictable.
Genetically engineered babies. Yes, it will happen - unfortunately. How good looking? To what standard of beauty? How talented? How althletic? If every great looking, talented, althletic, rich individual in the world led a productive, happy, fulfilled life, contributing to the care of others and the stwardship of the earth - maybe yes. But look around you, folks -these "obvious" attributes do not nesesarily a good human being make. How about looking beyond the exterior are we all so shallow? Yeah, I guess we are! Then we deserve what we get!
1st off let me say that I'm new and glad I rediscovered this site. When I mean race I refer to all of humanity. Anyone here played Starcraft? Remember the Zergs? Or how about their creators? I would alter myself/children/grand kids etc. only to the point wher they would be immune to various syndroms or fatal/harmful diseases. But not to the point of making my kids "perfect" can we say Nazi Germanys attemps at the "perfect" Human... blonde hair, blue eyes 6' tall.
Show me one Microsoft innovation and I'll eat my Red Hat.