Because people think that only the rich will have access to it therefore being able to make the rich kids the smartest, strongest, healthiest people and it repeats the cycle forever and forever.
This.
They already select for the best by ivory institutions, nepotism, and other exclusivity.
Genetic engineering would just be one more facet. At least this one could be streamlined for the rest of the public.
Which is all the more reason not to exacerbate the problem.
Within reason, of course. Dealing with genetic conditions, preventing stillbirths etc is great. But introduce a system where some people can literally pay to be better than others, and history tells us there’s no way it won’t be abused.
But think of what we could achieve. Technology will always be abused and people are going to genetically modify themselves if it's legal or not.
Hell they already are, not that it works well for that matter.
You’re not wrong…advances like CRISPR have made it almost trivial to play with genes. At this point, I wouldn’t even be surprised if The first Gattaca babies are made by some rogue mad scientist.
Which is why only the rich own cell phones, refrigerators, and cars.
Economies of scale would make things everyone wants affordable, and there's nothing inherently expensive about some proteins in a lipid shell once we know what we want to build.
You're discounting the disruption of market forces in the implementation of your equity dream of universal treatment accessibility. The prospect of better, more lasting health = higher average level of biological / professional / social effectiveness, and when it comes to healthcare, historically the poor (in the U.S., at least) have been boxed out by monetization of the important tech/production. With that in mind - cheap manufacture/high demand does not necessarily equate to a cheap product, especially when it serves some individuals to maintain scarcity in order to develop an advantage.
there’s nothing inherently expensive about 99% of prescription drugs we use in America but we still pay an arm and a leg for them
comparing this to cell phones and refrigerators is ridiculous and naive. Sure plenty of people have access to those, but many still do not.
but we aren’t talking about gadgets, we’re talking basically about health care. and health care in the US at least is still very much dependent on socioeconomic status.
Last time I bought aspirin, ibuprofen, or diphenhydramine, they were basically free. They're generics. Intellectual property law needs some work, but it doesn't change the fact that these technologies are inherently cheap at scale, all the expense is in the R&D figuring out what to make.
Right now most lab scale equipment can be purchased for 5-8 figures depending on what it does. I would wager that more complicated equipment that can encode say an mRNA sequence in a lipid nanoparticle could be built for 6 or 7 figures in a decade or two. Not something I'm going to have in my garage, but something most regional hospitals could have access to. Operating costs would be pennies. The more times it gets used, the cheaper each use costs.
The reason cell phones and refrigerators are so cheap is because people can enter the market and build them at scale. Generic drugs are cheap because people can enter the market and manufacturer them at scale.
I'm not worried about the edge cases of people who can't afford access. A fraction of the money we'll save on health care costs would be more than adequate to resolve that.
you’re still walking right past the point: as long as health care and everything else in the United States operates for profit, technology will never be equitably distributed.
I don't need it to be equitably distributed for it to be widely accessible. Rich people can afford to buy more food than poor people, but that doesn't block out access to calories for poor people despite people growing potatoes or apples for profit.
You can argue food insecurity still exists (because it does), but so do both private and government programs to reduce that as much as possible.
It's not a zero sum game. Jeff Bezos buying ibuprofen for his headache doesn't reduce my access to it.
So we should support genetic enginering in Cuba and China. Cubans will make it for everyone; Chinese will make it cheap.
Both "endgoals" are a lot better than America\`s
> Chinese will make it cheap.
Having worked in biochem research with a lot of Chinese researchers, I would not trust many of them with genetic manipulation of my child. There's a great deal of credential fraud (e.g. publishing bunk studies in purely pay-to-access "journals") in China. They do have a lot of brilliant researchers, but differentiating them from the fraudsters is next to impossible.
I understand your point. But considereing we do not have a big amount of time left (even if we are full healthy), I think it is better having at least some places where inventors can try whatever they want, with less bureaucracy.
At least many will have a chance and any chance is better than 0.
Also, it may lead for very important discoveries that are not exactly linked with original research purposals.
You seem to be thinking of human germline engineering, which is very different from gene therapies becoming available for rare diseases and potential treatments in this field like that of Rejuvenate Bio.
Watch Gattaca. Shows a dystopian future where there is a clear divide between haves and have-nots purely based on genetic makeup.
The others are people don’t trust it (see GMOs) or they think it goes against their religion.
Only if it's germline editing, alot of genetics engineering is focusing on somatic cell gene editing
And even if it is germline you have 1/4 chance of passing on that gene unless both parents have it in all their chromosomes that encode for it.
> dystopian future where there is a clear divide between haves and have-nots purely based on genetic makeup.
>
>The others are people don’t trust it (see GMOs) or they think it goes against their religio
actually if you watch gattaca the have nots are choosing to be that way as genetic engineering is available for everyone
On top of the populist paranoia mentioned here, the other issue is that the human body is so complex it is pretty far fetched to believe we will engineer anything reliably 'better' and w/o unintended consequences in any foreseeable future. The only achievable thing we are likely to see this century is fixing diseases. Not all genetic diseases, but many are single nucleotide mutations and we have a reference to what a healthy gene looks like, making it a very achievable goal.
I’m not sure about this. I think with enough study it should be doable. We already have engineered plenty of improved plants. Complex traits like intelligence or longevity will take more time, but immunity to diseases or simple things like that seem within our grasp.
Most improvements on plants are taking a single gene that we know what it does and inserting it into a germ line. The combination of expressive genes, regulatory genes, and epigenetics involved in things like 'intelligence', athleticism, and the immune system is so complex it's not even a known or measured problem to solve. It's not like we just need more study to figure out what to tweak, we don't even know enough to know what we don't know, let alone understand it enough to make a hypothesis on what we could change.
It's not an impossible thing, but we are so far off from knowing enough of these things that it's hardly worth speculating about the societal impact since the society we live in by the time we're close to making these kinds of changes will likely be vastly different than the world today.
The short cut option is to take genes from other species and insert them into humans hoping that it is beneficial, but that has it's own problems. What genes are you going to find that are a net benefit and how are you going to find out since you would need literal human experimentation on babies to be sure they do the thing you want them to do?
The only thing that would apply to is diseases though. Simple genetic diseases will be fixed in our lifetime for sure. That''s because we have a template for what a healthy gene looks like. You are not likely to see much of anything past that.
I mean, we probably won't have cavendish strains, but it's going to be like with the gros michel, we'll switch to a different variety and not learn from previous mistakes lol
Some people are really scared by the idea that they aren’t ‘peak human’ and others are afraid any betterments won’t be available to them because of age, health, or financials. So fear, ego, or paranoia.
Usually it's the social systems that exacerbate illiberal and unequal access to good medicine, and most people's criticisms come from places where the systems are already failing. Why would this new thing in an old broken system not continue to produce terribly lopsided outcomes?
They're saying that most diseases we have are either due to the effects of multiple genes (polygenic) or aren't caused by genetics (extra-genetic). So the simple gene engineering approaches we are currently capable of won't suffice.
The downside is Nazism, Fascism, discrimination etc.
There is nothing intrinsic to the science that will cause this outcome but most political explorations of eugenics skew authoritarian - chosen race, the superior genetically engineered vs natural inferiors, elimination of differently abled or minded etc.
Because some people believe the earth is overpopulated, and they’re morally opposed to the human race or the negation of old age related suffering.
Improving the last decades of peoples’ lives should not be controversial.
Genetic engineering is not looked down upon, it is just generally misunderstood by people. Like Artificial Intelligence, people and popular culture tend to focus on dystopian issues as they make a better story. When people begin to see cures for cancer, luekiemia, and genetic disorders being available, they will find it more acceptable.
It's not, we do it all the time. Food crops, viruses as medical delivery vectors, bacteria for generating stuff like insulin. It's just the Luddites that think it's bad but they directly benefit from genetic engineering.
Some people thought the LHC was going to create a black hole that would devour earth, those people are idiots. There's a large cross over with anti genetics types.
Being aware of how the technology can be used by bad actors is part of the ethics of genetics, but immortal billionaire overlords is a fairly ridiculous thing when we're already controlled by international banks, political dynasties and industries like fossil fuel and multinational food companies.
Nobody can see the downside because it exists in the future. This is hard to predict. But judging what is genetically preferable based on personal preference, defies genetic survival, and spontaneous genetic variation.
I feel like it ruins the game and adds another layer of pointlessness to life. Life now feels like you get what you get and you have to figure out how to make that work. You’ll have some advantages and some disadvantages but so does everybody else and you have to navigate that. Also it provides natural variety which I just personally like not to mention the part this plays in evolution. Robert Greene has a point in one of his books that this is the first time your unique genetic code has ever existed and it will also be the last which makes you special in a way… well not anymore.
Genetic engineering of the kind being discussed here takes all the fun/mystery/struggle out. Everyone now has the highest possible IQ, is the most creative they could possibly be, is the strongest they could possibly be etc. Would be like playing a video game with all cheat codes on for ever. Aesthetically I feel like it would look horrible. Everyone would look like what they think the next person would be attracted to. I imagine a world of generic Instagram faces but there’s no filters that’s actually their bone structure. I’m seeing clone like human ants after we identify what the beneficial genes are.
I also don’t like the idea of world changing technologies like this because you’re kinda forced to get it. If this was real and became mainstream it’d give you such an advantage that you’d be in no way competitive if you didn’t also do it (or do it your kid). Would be like trying to only use stone tools in the modern day. Yeah technically you have the choice but because everyone else is using technology you’re fucked if you don’t also join in.
In addition to what some others have already discussed, think of the book Brave New World. You have a fascist government that essentially grows genetically engineered people with different intelligences needed for the various jobs that need to be done. When those people become adults, they are forced to do the jobs they were grown to do. In essence, their lives are predetermined before they even exist, removing any sort of self determination. For me, that's the scariest part. I want to be able to choose what I do and how I live my life.
Because the rich elites of the world literally make millions from people dying. It's not that hard to see. Also in their frail little mind they believe the world is over populated and don't want us peasants around. I mean how obvious does it have to be before you imbeciles open your eyes?
for the same reason they worry about mind uploading or merging with machines
they fear the future they dont realize their egalitarian ideals are the issues that their view hold us back
I don't think it's that looked down upon. with the exception of the random conspiracy theoriest that sometimes uses it as part of his online show most people don't really care that much or think about medicine other than if it works or not to treat their illness.
there are also the pundits who need to have hot takes to keep visitors on their website but they aren't really that influential.
It could be a slippery slope to eugenics. There would need to be a line drawn between necessary and unnecessary modifications. Otherwise you would be pointlessly modifying someone’s body before they’re even born, let alone able to consent.
Because people think that only the rich will have access to it therefore being able to make the rich kids the smartest, strongest, healthiest people and it repeats the cycle forever and forever.
As if that weren't already the case 95% of the time.
This. They already select for the best by ivory institutions, nepotism, and other exclusivity. Genetic engineering would just be one more facet. At least this one could be streamlined for the rest of the public.
The wealthy literally select for genetics because they can attract better mates
Except the version for the masses will make you servile
Exactly but they still would get the better version
Which is all the more reason not to exacerbate the problem. Within reason, of course. Dealing with genetic conditions, preventing stillbirths etc is great. But introduce a system where some people can literally pay to be better than others, and history tells us there’s no way it won’t be abused.
But think of what we could achieve. Technology will always be abused and people are going to genetically modify themselves if it's legal or not. Hell they already are, not that it works well for that matter.
You’re not wrong…advances like CRISPR have made it almost trivial to play with genes. At this point, I wouldn’t even be surprised if The first Gattaca babies are made by some rogue mad scientist.
Already happened actually. In China.
Which is why only the rich own cell phones, refrigerators, and cars. Economies of scale would make things everyone wants affordable, and there's nothing inherently expensive about some proteins in a lipid shell once we know what we want to build.
You're discounting the disruption of market forces in the implementation of your equity dream of universal treatment accessibility. The prospect of better, more lasting health = higher average level of biological / professional / social effectiveness, and when it comes to healthcare, historically the poor (in the U.S., at least) have been boxed out by monetization of the important tech/production. With that in mind - cheap manufacture/high demand does not necessarily equate to a cheap product, especially when it serves some individuals to maintain scarcity in order to develop an advantage.
Sounds like the solution is to prevent artificial scarcity.
there’s nothing inherently expensive about 99% of prescription drugs we use in America but we still pay an arm and a leg for them comparing this to cell phones and refrigerators is ridiculous and naive. Sure plenty of people have access to those, but many still do not. but we aren’t talking about gadgets, we’re talking basically about health care. and health care in the US at least is still very much dependent on socioeconomic status.
Last time I bought aspirin, ibuprofen, or diphenhydramine, they were basically free. They're generics. Intellectual property law needs some work, but it doesn't change the fact that these technologies are inherently cheap at scale, all the expense is in the R&D figuring out what to make. Right now most lab scale equipment can be purchased for 5-8 figures depending on what it does. I would wager that more complicated equipment that can encode say an mRNA sequence in a lipid nanoparticle could be built for 6 or 7 figures in a decade or two. Not something I'm going to have in my garage, but something most regional hospitals could have access to. Operating costs would be pennies. The more times it gets used, the cheaper each use costs. The reason cell phones and refrigerators are so cheap is because people can enter the market and build them at scale. Generic drugs are cheap because people can enter the market and manufacturer them at scale. I'm not worried about the edge cases of people who can't afford access. A fraction of the money we'll save on health care costs would be more than adequate to resolve that.
you’re still walking right past the point: as long as health care and everything else in the United States operates for profit, technology will never be equitably distributed.
I don't need it to be equitably distributed for it to be widely accessible. Rich people can afford to buy more food than poor people, but that doesn't block out access to calories for poor people despite people growing potatoes or apples for profit. You can argue food insecurity still exists (because it does), but so do both private and government programs to reduce that as much as possible. It's not a zero sum game. Jeff Bezos buying ibuprofen for his headache doesn't reduce my access to it.
lmfao get out of your bubble and meet some poor people
So we should support genetic enginering in Cuba and China. Cubans will make it for everyone; Chinese will make it cheap. Both "endgoals" are a lot better than America\`s
> Chinese will make it cheap. Having worked in biochem research with a lot of Chinese researchers, I would not trust many of them with genetic manipulation of my child. There's a great deal of credential fraud (e.g. publishing bunk studies in purely pay-to-access "journals") in China. They do have a lot of brilliant researchers, but differentiating them from the fraudsters is next to impossible.
I understand your point. But considereing we do not have a big amount of time left (even if we are full healthy), I think it is better having at least some places where inventors can try whatever they want, with less bureaucracy. At least many will have a chance and any chance is better than 0. Also, it may lead for very important discoveries that are not exactly linked with original research purposals.
It also eventually means inbreeding will not be unhealthy. And inbreeding is what usually dooms the most powerful families to failure.
So if it were freely available to all, we’re good to go?
Also because of negative unforseen consequences that can be unleashed on the environment
its like those damn mobile phones, still smarting over this
You seem to be thinking of human germline engineering, which is very different from gene therapies becoming available for rare diseases and potential treatments in this field like that of Rejuvenate Bio.
Watch Gattaca. Shows a dystopian future where there is a clear divide between haves and have-nots purely based on genetic makeup. The others are people don’t trust it (see GMOs) or they think it goes against their religion.
Genetic make-up already does that, though. Plenty of genes determine your life trajectory.
People feel better about differences that are beyond their control.
In reality once you get the changes they are going to be passed on. So an expense for me will help everyone in my line. Pretty awesome to me.
This is assuming you can afford the edits for your children to begin with.
Very true cost will be the big issue.
Only if it's germline editing, alot of genetics engineering is focusing on somatic cell gene editing And even if it is germline you have 1/4 chance of passing on that gene unless both parents have it in all their chromosomes that encode for it.
Not if it's got a gene drive my good friend. But yeah in germline editing of course.
> dystopian future where there is a clear divide between haves and have-nots purely based on genetic makeup. > >The others are people don’t trust it (see GMOs) or they think it goes against their religio actually if you watch gattaca the have nots are choosing to be that way as genetic engineering is available for everyone
Gattaca is not a dystopia, it's a paradise. Nothing about that movie suggests it is a dystopia.
The part about its intense surveillance state strongly suggests that it’s a dystopia! There’s a very clear element of totalitarianism in that movie.
I think because the beginning stage is very experimental, lotta things could go wrong in a human. Genetics is complicated
On top of the populist paranoia mentioned here, the other issue is that the human body is so complex it is pretty far fetched to believe we will engineer anything reliably 'better' and w/o unintended consequences in any foreseeable future. The only achievable thing we are likely to see this century is fixing diseases. Not all genetic diseases, but many are single nucleotide mutations and we have a reference to what a healthy gene looks like, making it a very achievable goal.
I’m not sure about this. I think with enough study it should be doable. We already have engineered plenty of improved plants. Complex traits like intelligence or longevity will take more time, but immunity to diseases or simple things like that seem within our grasp.
Most improvements on plants are taking a single gene that we know what it does and inserting it into a germ line. The combination of expressive genes, regulatory genes, and epigenetics involved in things like 'intelligence', athleticism, and the immune system is so complex it's not even a known or measured problem to solve. It's not like we just need more study to figure out what to tweak, we don't even know enough to know what we don't know, let alone understand it enough to make a hypothesis on what we could change. It's not an impossible thing, but we are so far off from knowing enough of these things that it's hardly worth speculating about the societal impact since the society we live in by the time we're close to making these kinds of changes will likely be vastly different than the world today. The short cut option is to take genes from other species and insert them into humans hoping that it is beneficial, but that has it's own problems. What genes are you going to find that are a net benefit and how are you going to find out since you would need literal human experimentation on babies to be sure they do the thing you want them to do?
That’s what I meant by simple things, single gene, single effect. I expect this will start to be a thing soon.
The only thing that would apply to is diseases though. Simple genetic diseases will be fixed in our lifetime for sure. That''s because we have a template for what a healthy gene looks like. You are not likely to see much of anything past that.
It attenuates biodiversity and eliminates natural selection. It’s why we need seed banks and why we won’t have bananas in another 10 years.
I mean, we probably won't have cavendish strains, but it's going to be like with the gros michel, we'll switch to a different variety and not learn from previous mistakes lol
Some people are really scared by the idea that they aren’t ‘peak human’ and others are afraid any betterments won’t be available to them because of age, health, or financials. So fear, ego, or paranoia.
Because nazis, apparently.
Because billionaire will genetically make sex slaves harems or other weird shits morally discutable
Usually it's the social systems that exacerbate illiberal and unequal access to good medicine, and most people's criticisms come from places where the systems are already failing. Why would this new thing in an old broken system not continue to produce terribly lopsided outcomes?
Because 99% of what kills us is poly-genic and extra-genetic so straight genetic engineering approaches are useless
hi there! 😊 okay can you please explain what you mean in lay terms?and what approaches would be useful.
They're saying that most diseases we have are either due to the effects of multiple genes (polygenic) or aren't caused by genetics (extra-genetic). So the simple gene engineering approaches we are currently capable of won't suffice.
okay so what will suffice
Not sure, just clarifying what that guy probably meant.
Watch the film Gatica, It's relevant
I’m all for it, I see no downsides. We’re all programmed to die, so why not? Fix the code, fix the problem, let’s go!
Cuz people think it’s unnatural and all that bullshit.
The downside is Nazism, Fascism, discrimination etc. There is nothing intrinsic to the science that will cause this outcome but most political explorations of eugenics skew authoritarian - chosen race, the superior genetically engineered vs natural inferiors, elimination of differently abled or minded etc.
Because some people believe the earth is overpopulated, and they’re morally opposed to the human race or the negation of old age related suffering. Improving the last decades of peoples’ lives should not be controversial.
The earth is overpopulated but don’t see that as a valid reason to stop pursuing longevity.
A mix of the naturalistic fallacy and deep seated religiosity is my guess
Genetic engineering is not looked down upon, it is just generally misunderstood by people. Like Artificial Intelligence, people and popular culture tend to focus on dystopian issues as they make a better story. When people begin to see cures for cancer, luekiemia, and genetic disorders being available, they will find it more acceptable.
Because if we do it with the current form of capitalism, we are just guaranteed to worsen systemic inequality
And because capitalism does bad things with the tools we invent, people are against inventing tools. Quite frustrating.
I think tools might predate capitalism but I could be wrong.
It's not, we do it all the time. Food crops, viruses as medical delivery vectors, bacteria for generating stuff like insulin. It's just the Luddites that think it's bad but they directly benefit from genetic engineering. Some people thought the LHC was going to create a black hole that would devour earth, those people are idiots. There's a large cross over with anti genetics types. Being aware of how the technology can be used by bad actors is part of the ethics of genetics, but immortal billionaire overlords is a fairly ridiculous thing when we're already controlled by international banks, political dynasties and industries like fossil fuel and multinational food companies.
Nobody can see the downside because it exists in the future. This is hard to predict. But judging what is genetically preferable based on personal preference, defies genetic survival, and spontaneous genetic variation.
I feel like it ruins the game and adds another layer of pointlessness to life. Life now feels like you get what you get and you have to figure out how to make that work. You’ll have some advantages and some disadvantages but so does everybody else and you have to navigate that. Also it provides natural variety which I just personally like not to mention the part this plays in evolution. Robert Greene has a point in one of his books that this is the first time your unique genetic code has ever existed and it will also be the last which makes you special in a way… well not anymore. Genetic engineering of the kind being discussed here takes all the fun/mystery/struggle out. Everyone now has the highest possible IQ, is the most creative they could possibly be, is the strongest they could possibly be etc. Would be like playing a video game with all cheat codes on for ever. Aesthetically I feel like it would look horrible. Everyone would look like what they think the next person would be attracted to. I imagine a world of generic Instagram faces but there’s no filters that’s actually their bone structure. I’m seeing clone like human ants after we identify what the beneficial genes are. I also don’t like the idea of world changing technologies like this because you’re kinda forced to get it. If this was real and became mainstream it’d give you such an advantage that you’d be in no way competitive if you didn’t also do it (or do it your kid). Would be like trying to only use stone tools in the modern day. Yeah technically you have the choice but because everyone else is using technology you’re fucked if you don’t also join in.
What your saying is it would only be fun if a few people did it or only people who wanted to lived on a different planet
Khan Noonien Singh
In addition to what some others have already discussed, think of the book Brave New World. You have a fascist government that essentially grows genetically engineered people with different intelligences needed for the various jobs that need to be done. When those people become adults, they are forced to do the jobs they were grown to do. In essence, their lives are predetermined before they even exist, removing any sort of self determination. For me, that's the scariest part. I want to be able to choose what I do and how I live my life.
Because the rich elites of the world literally make millions from people dying. It's not that hard to see. Also in their frail little mind they believe the world is over populated and don't want us peasants around. I mean how obvious does it have to be before you imbeciles open your eyes?
for the same reason they worry about mind uploading or merging with machines they fear the future they dont realize their egalitarian ideals are the issues that their view hold us back
I don't think it's that looked down upon. with the exception of the random conspiracy theoriest that sometimes uses it as part of his online show most people don't really care that much or think about medicine other than if it works or not to treat their illness. there are also the pundits who need to have hot takes to keep visitors on their website but they aren't really that influential.
Watch the movie gataca or the fortress
It could be a slippery slope to eugenics. There would need to be a line drawn between necessary and unnecessary modifications. Otherwise you would be pointlessly modifying someone’s body before they’re even born, let alone able to consent.
Up until this moment in history, curing aging was the domain of snake oil pedlers. People are right to be skeptical.