AstroAg17 said:

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I googled it and Wikipedia says those diseases are recessive. So if the prevalence of the bad allele is low enough, that person's kid is unlikely to have the disease right?

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Yes, the kid will most likely be a carrier although there are a small number of dominant rare genetic disorders. Also there are things like Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which is x-linked. There is going to be a gene therapy cure for this soon (my money is on Pfizer, but I digress) . The cured boy couldn't give it to his son, but his daughter could pass it to his grandson...

I guess a wider point about the current state of the art gene therapies is that delivering a working copy of the gene still leaves the deleterious allele in the gene pool. That's something that gene editing in embryos wouldn't do.

I look at this like GMO food. We've been basically doing slow genetic engineering for millenia by selective breeding. Direct genetic modification is both faster and allows you to do things that would otherwise be extremely difficult or impossible, like Vit A rice.

Similarly, people have been gene selecting for generations as well. Men go for beauty and temperament, while women go for strength, brains, talent, or money. Genetic manipulation will just accelerate this. Of course it's not fair, but neither is the fact that billionaires marry supermodels and have rich, beautiful children.

It's hard for me to see a religious objection unless you think the soul is somehow tied to a specific DNA sequence. Assuming your not destroying embryos trying to make a single perfect one that is

I saw a special on Vice Channel about this topic!

Let China do what it wants. Maybe they can come up with a politically intelligent class of people to switch their country to democracy/republic/capitalist.

On another note, I saw they, China, dug up a woolly mammoth bone and were going to bring back the species via genetically altering an elephant fetus or something.

The US objects to this for military reasons I'm sure. They don't want other countries to get the upper hand.

Woody2006 said:

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It's gonna be like Gattaca.

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But it will be worse. There won't be "love babies". there will be rich babies and a poor babies.

Overtime designer babies will move farther and farther away from natural babies. The idea of being born poor and working your way up will be impossible as rich babies will be designed for higher intelligence, speed and longevity.

Or it could result in the same effects as inbreeding and be a repeat of the European royal families

A permanent upper/lower class division which will lead to another marxist class revolution on steroids with mass extinction of designer people.

The problem with Gattaca- that a man had to practically kill himself daily just to elevate his life because of discrimination, the kind that we had a civil rights movement against.

I think it would be a long time before we get to the point that engineered people would automatically be superior. First, the process will have bugs at first. Second, there's a lot of generic variation and we're a long way from cataloging the best combinations. Even a million engineered people would still have to compete again 7 billion naturally random gene combined people. That's a tall order for any level of technology. The average engineered person may be "superior" to the average person, but that's true of anyone who is able to have children with an above average partner

Why would God allow us to be smart enough to invent something to protect ourselves if he didn't want us to use it?


The class thing might exist for a decade or so, but technology gets cheaper and cheaper fast than ever nowadays. Eventually everyone would be doing it, like vaccines.


The real ethical argument is if we start modifying genes and learn how to edit them so that we can live to be 150, 200, whatever, what happens to our population and resources?

AstroAg17 said:

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Champ Bailey said:

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Why would God allow us to be smart enough to invent something to protect ourselves if he didn't want us to use it?

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God made us smart enough to do X, therefore he wants us to do X?

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If it helps us protect ourselves? Absolutely.

It's an absurd argument, it could be applied to nuclear, biological and chemical weapons also.

JJMt said:

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Why not create a class of really stupid worker drones?

If that's done, it wouldn't be hard to see society classifying them as something less than human.

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Why even use worker drones when robotics and computer will be taking all of these menials jobs anyway?

This is something that is coming whether we want it or not. At some point this century, parents will be forced to choose between modifying their potential children or having them be unable to compete in real life against people who are better looking, more intelligent, more athletic, more charismatic, more personable, etc. For anyone looking to have kids, there won't be any real choice since no one wants to see their kids fail because of things entirely out of their control.

CRISPR and gene editing will mean the end of the classic American Dream as we know it because the divide between the haves and have nots will get huge.

FTAggies said:

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A permanent upper/lower class division which will lead to another marxist class revolution on steroids with mass extinction of designer people.

The problem with Gattaca- that a man had to practically kill himself daily just to elevate his life because of discrimination, the kind that we had a civil rights movement against.

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That kind of revolution is already impossible. The military is too mechanized for a people to really revolt in this manner.

If you create a permanent upper class and a permanent lower class the end result will ultimately be a cyberpunk style dystopia where the rich are literally above the law. There won't be any way of fighting back in this scenario.

AstroAg17 said:

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When do you think the potential gene therapy cure for DMD will happen? Can you point me toward some info on it? It sounds interesting.

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I would guess that something will be approved by 2020. There are at least three companies in the game at this point.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=newssearch&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwivss_X0YLfAhUDVt8KHSGkDTYQzPwBegQIARAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.the-scientist.com%2Fnews-opinion%2Fpositive-trial-results-for-experimental-dmd-gene-therapy-64243&psig=AOvVaw0sDvfmlhyZk_fnaTQsgQv5&ust=1543891371907634

This is easy to do, and it will happen. The question is when, by whom, how much, and for what purposes.

I could easily see some madman making a race of people who are resistant to say, smallpox, and then releasing smallpox all over the place.

I see this as an inevitable future for us.

My main questions is how far do we go with it. When does the line of "fixing" morph into "enhancing"? Because it WILL come up. And "enhancing" has far fewer guidelines and boundaries.

The more I think about this the more disturbing the objections become.

Follow my thought process. We are very close to this being a relatively affordable, easy, and safe technology. I could use it to make my offpsring better, either by making them resistant to diseases, fixing genetic problems, or enhancing other physical or mental abilities. Aside from the risks of the process itself and possible unintended consequences to my offspring, there doesn't seem to be any downside.

Now the direct risks of this procedure relate 100% to my offspring. No one else is directly hurt or affected by decision to genetically improve my offspring. So why does anyone else have any say over this? It's not a public health threat. It's not a direct military or political threat. So why should I care if anyone objects, and why should this be illegal?

It's certainly not fair. But it's not fair to grow up rich, tall, attractive, athletic, or intelligent. We don't put binders on kids to keep them from growing taller than everyone else. We don't hobble fast kids to make things fair for everyone. But since when is my desire to give my offspring any possible advantage any of the general public's business?

Gattaca was an awesome movie, but I'm not sure I'm cool sending people with congenital heart conditions into years-long solo space missions. Pretty sure NASA would have flunked that dude if he applied last year

The Case Against CRISPR Babies
by Nicanor Austriaco, O.P. - First Things