First, Cathal, I don't think designer babies are mutually exclusive with a social program to alleviate poverty and provide an enriched childhood for everyone. Alas, I am a biologist and not a politician.
We don't mention anything about intelligence in the article, because at the moment I don't think there are modifications we can make that would strongly influence it upward. Obviously the lay public thinks designer babies = super-intelligence but, for now, I am hesitant to mess around with brain chemistry. It remains to be seen whether companies like Genomic Prediction provide a worthwhile service.
The "rich" (as we both mean, middle class or above in the developed world) already provide for their children as much as they can, and always have; it's a fact of society. I would prefer not to reject technology simply because it gives their children an additional advantage, when they already have a staggering advantage vs. someone born in a developing country. Encouraging research is the only possibility we have for providing it to everyone.
If something goes wrong...the natural birth defect rate is ~3% and society already provides for those children as best it can. Some people seem to assume that even the most banal genetic modification will cause a child to sprout an extra head. We are sticking with modifications that are either already present in a human sub-population, or have been studied extensively enough that we think they're defensible in an actual, reasonable debate.
Regarding the accusation that we are naive and/or delusional...yeah we probably are, at least in our optimism that society and regulators will embrace the technology. If the argument is that we simply don't know what will happen when we try it in humans, that's true for most every medicine in history and yet, somehow, we progress.
The idea that we should instead be curing diseases like hemophilia or muscular dystrophy...that's what PGD is for, which should be obvious to anyone who understands biology. Any case where PGD wouldn't work, gene editing wouldn't work either, outside of some extreme (and often theoretical) edge cases. We aren't starting with SNPs because that's a.) that's mostly embryo selection and b.) I can't think of a singular SNP that provides such an amazing advantage to justify undergoing a procedure like this.
Our estimated funding numbers seem low because, as Nathan pointed out, seed stage investment is usually up to ~2m, Series A up to ~10m, and that was a slide deck for VCs. I can't guarantee it'll be up to FDA standards at that point, not that the FDA can even look at such a project legally. We will do as much as we can with what we have.
I'm rather tired of people saying 'oh, once it's safe I have no problem with it'. We don't get there by hoping on a dream. I think the current technologies for gene insertion, sequencing, micromanipulation etc are already sufficient.
On Wednesday, February 13, 2019 at 12:13:21 PM UTC-8, Nathan McCorkle wrote:
Has anyone here seen this article?
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612838/the- transhumanist-diy-designer- baby-funded-with-bitcoin/
It seems most of the ethicists rejecting this are working under a
government-funding framework, and since the government has a funding
ban on this sort of work, their guidelines waterfall from there.
I haven't found any good rebuttals that are specifically from a
private/industrial standpoint, at least in terms of technicalities.
Perosnally, at this point, I'm pro-choice on utilizing such a
technique... And I wonder if these ethicists/scientists who are
rejecting such ideas are simply worried about harassment ala abortion
clinic personnel, and losing their government welfare funding stream.
--
-Nathan
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