The edited gene is for CCR5, which currently doesn’t have known function, but is the entry point for HIV. So editing for prophylaxis. This was probably done because if there aren’t a ton of loss of function beneficial traits, and probably with the main desire to be first. Except, if the reports are true, this is not just an experiment but a person (or people). I guess the main desire is to normalize editing. Brave new world I guess, whether we like it or not.
> "gene is for CCR5, which currently doesn’t have known function"
It's in the article:
> "Even if editing worked perfectly, people without normal CCR5 genes face higher risks of getting certain other viruses, such as West Nile, and of dying from the flu. Since there are many ways to prevent HIV infection and it's very treatable if it occurs, those other medical risks are a concern, Musunuru said."
People with HIV just have to pop a couple pills a day now to take their viral loads to literally undetectable levels. With treatment, people with HIV can expect to live normal lives, and be healthy and active. It's also almost impossible to transmit HIV with such low viral loads.
Truvada which is a HIV prevention drug was priced at ~$1500/mo. I mention it because I know the chemicals in Truvada are similar but IDK the price comparison. Most people on HIV meds are probably hitting their Out-of-pocket max pretty early in the year.
I have had two high deductible plans in the last two year (work changed providers) and here were the things I remember:
Old Insurance:
Deductible: $3,000
Tier: 2
Price: 100%/$60
New Insurance:
Deductible: $3,000
Tier: 3 (maybe 4, I can't remember)
Price: 100%/25%
It was effectively free to me on my old insurance with the copay card (covered $3600) because I would hit my deductible and then have enough to cover the co-pays after. On my new insurance it's not feasible for me to pay ~$400/mo until I hit my OOP ($6000). You might be asking why I didn't look at a PPO plan instead of high deductible, because of the drug tier there was no difference in the price.
Let's just say you want to have insurance. ARVs are something that needs to be free, even moreso that many other health treatments. There is a huge negative externality involved in having untreated HIV since it can be transmitted. If we got everyone tested consistently, and got anyone with HIV on immediate treatment, infection rates would plummet.
HIV tests are still not included in routine bloodwork, even though other diseases like hepatitis are.
If you're on modern treatments life expectancy is near that of a non-HIV person.
The biggest problem is modern medicines aren't available to everyone across the world. So it's still a much more serious problem in developing nations.
According to the OED[0], "treatable" is a boolean that means "able to be cured". "Very" is superfluous here - something is able to be cured or not, I'm not sure what room there is for degree. As far as I know, there is no cure for HIV (but I'd be happy to learn otherwise).
So unless "very treatable" is medical jargon with a different meaning from the how the laity use it, calling HIV "very treatable" does seem to be a stretch.
oh wow. CCR5 has been found to have a role in memory recently. Knockout mice have better learning[1] and pronounced increase in spine formation/turnover[2]. These babies are going to have super-memory:
Echoing another commenter, mouse studies don't necessarily replicate in humans. In fact, it turns out that the mouse => human replication rate is rather poor in many domains. (Turns out we are rather different in many ways!)
Additionally, most cognitive traits come with tradeoffs, so increasing ability in one area may decrease it in another. For instance, some nootropics (modafinil) temporarily improve cognitive performance on complex tasks, at the expense of speed. I don't remember the specifics, but I've also read about similar tradeoffs regarding memory, where boosts in short-term memory may reduce the ability to form new long-term memories. The brain is pretty well-optimized on average, when you consider the unique properties and limitations of its constituent parts/materials.
Right, but mice evidence is still evidence, probably the best evidence you can have unless one is willing to do human experiments. Also, HIV related dementia is a real thing, so there might be some connection.
You have to live to reproductive age for your genes to carry on. So a genetic difference that improves outcome for adults, but harms children won't be carried on as often (per other comments, this one may improve memory--in mice--but has negative effects related to resisting common diseases like the flu). On the other hand, genes related to cancer perpetuate because their impact often is felt after primary reproductive age (at least historical reproductive age, since we've started having children later in life over the last century).
Additionally, nothing has to be selected (evolutionarily speaking). It's a stochastic process. We could be one base-pair swap away from perpetual youth, and never see it because it just doesn't happen (or when it did happen they died from other circumstances before reproducing sufficiently to spread the genes wide enough to be useful).
Well, yes and no. We each have 3.2 billion bases and about roughly 100 mutations each, over 100 billion people who've ever lived. That's about 3000 mutations per base pair, so if the eternal-youth mutation was indeed a single base-pair swap away, thousands of people would already have been born with it. Of those, we could expect some decent fraction to have had children. Given that eternal youth confers a staggering reproductive advantage, and we don't have it, it's safe to say that if it exists at all, it's more than a base-pair swap away.
>improved memory is absolutely something evolution would select for in primates, especially humans.
What if it makes people more scared, because they can remember past experiences better. This could lead to less procreation and thus inverse selection pressure.
Only because a trait is superficially good it doesn't mean nature would select for it.
Why would a memory enhancing drug only increase rememberance of negative memories and not the positive and loving ones? Such people could become more active, motivated and procreating more because life seemed more motivating for them because they remembered all the good from the past also?
That's not the point, I was just giving an example. It could have millions of effects and whether evolutionary selection would favor these genes is not trivial.
That a trait is preferable and not developed can never be an indicator of what a gene is for. The fact that I didn't evolve to fly doesn't mean I don't have the potential genes for that. There's also far less natural selection in evolution than we think. Evolution overwhelmingly happens in relatively short time periods, after which stability seems to take over. This is at odds with the natural selection principle as the primary driver of evolution. Also, most DNA-sharing between organisms happens horizontally, not top down (think single cell organisms). There's really much more that we don't know than what we know here.
Sure but selection only works on events that have happened. Loss of function isn't that common especially if the benefit of the gene is resistance to flu, which is far more important than improved memory on an evolutionary scale. Purging selection trumps almost anything more rational.
I guess time will tell if it leads to any adverse effects. I'm not a biologist which is probably why I'm more wary of this, but if there is some unforeseen circumstances then we'll find out I suppose.
This would actually be preferable to how DNA seems to evolve. In most systems, there's actually quite an acute constraint to genome length due to the Error Threshold; when a genome gets too large, it has too many mutations and therefore the 'fittest' genome, often called the 'master' genome, cannot be sustained in the population. Therefore, there's quite a lot of evolution where the genome becomes essentially minified. Most often, this is done by overlapping genes on the DNA, (mostly by shifting the reading frame by one or two nucleotides for one of the two genes).
Fixing our inverted retina would be one of the low hanging fruits:
>The vertebrate retina is inverted in the sense that the light sensing cells are in back of the retina, so that light has to pass through layers of neurons and capillaries before it reaches the rods and cones. In contrast, in the cephalopod retina the photoreceptors are in front, with processing neurons and capillaries behind them. Because of this, cephalopods do not have a blind spot.
Genetic code in large, multicellular organisms is quite different; in mammals, for certain functions you have multiple pathways to achieve similar things through different vehicles (proteins). In this sense, it is more akin to building or blowing up a bridge in relation to a transportation network; usually, other paths still exist, but sometimes and in certain critical locations it really fucks up the infrastructure.
There are many people that are CCR5 null (largely in Africa due to positive selection for HIV resistance), so it's unlikely to have much effect, but still...
I think the question is not so much the effect of a lack of CCR5 but rather the accuracy of the genetic procedure and whether or not anything else was unintentionally affected. If it was accurate and only desired change was implemented, we have opened pandora's box.
In the short term I think the risks are overstated. Vastly increased health and intelligence looks like it will be possible to select and/or edit for, as well as the elimination of Mendelian disease. The scale of this good is so large it overwhelms most scruples.
The source is idealism. I've noticed a lot of tech people tend to hand wave away implementation details and talk about things as a theoretical exercise on a very wide time frame. So eventually, at some point, this technology will be able to do all the sci-fi stuff of dreams. Probably right around when we achieve singularity.
What kind of references do you want for a procedure that was just done for the first time? We already know that some diseases are affected by genes. It is also clear that intelligence is at least in part inheritable. It's a reasonable assumption that we can improve both if we get good at editing genes.
No, it is not. Heritability does not mean that there is a simple correlation between a trait and a small number of genes that could be exploited for targeted manipulation.
Take height: Height is extremely heritable. If your parents are both tall, you are very likely to be tall as well. But height is influenced by thousands of genes, and each individual gene has only a minuscule influence. And each of those genes is also responsible for many other unknown things.
It's not at all a reasonable assumption that genetic modification will allow us to influence a complex trait like intelligence. That's just wishful thinking.
On the other hand, we can (today!) predict height from raw sequence with correlation 0.65: http://www.genetics.org/content/210/2/477. It does not mean we can do such prediction for designed sequence (predictor likely will fail to generalize), but it can be used to select from natural variation. I don't see any wishful thinking here.
Yes, selecting the "tallest" embryo for implantation sounds somewhat feasible. It's similar to selective breeding with a shorter feedback loop. The only downside is that you are only selecting for genotype, instead of phenotype, so your model might accidentally select for some other things that you didn't expect.
But that's very different from designing an embryo by direct genetic modification.
Agreed, there's a big difference between what's possible with selection and what's possible with editing. Selection is already available (as increasingly sophisticated PGD). It's a lot trickier to do anything useful with editing.
Homozygous CCR5 mutations cause "immunity" against HIV and heterozygous causes a slower disease course. I do not think this applies to all strains of HIV. Unsure.
Pretty sure hiv can infect on other pathways besides CCR5. It’s just not as common. Some of the antivirals block the CCR5 pathways and HIV can mutate to render them ineffective.
the edit was also confirmed and voluntarily implanted in-vitro in willing participants.
It's ethically black as far as I am concerned but it has already happened so we must see where this takes us. IVF born edited zygotes might have serious complications but ideally its a healthy human being. (for everyone's sake)
I agree it will change - actually if this becomes medically responsible nothing needs to change. we just need to stop experimenting on humans. once the science is sound it becomes healing humans with gene therapy
Drug testing is always experimentation on humans. Drugs have to have human trials for safety before we are certain they are safe. Testing on animals reduces the risk but does not eliminate it.
And if the treatment is only effective on infants or children then there's no way to get informed consent. Your options are to experiment the best you can and accept the risk or forgo the opportunity (or more likely let China do it and accept both the risks and the rewards, as they seem willing to do).
Intent and premeditation are strong in western law, hence differences between murder and manslaughter. Consenting to a genetic experiment which then has ramifications on offspring therefore stands apart from the natural inheritance of uncontrolled genetic issues, as well as from the obverse situation where a parent does not undertake medical treatment that could possibly result in preventing inherited genetic issues.
In other words, taking action to make changes is a crucial difference when compared to inaction, even if the outcomes are similar.
of course it is not the same. but i think the argument was on the unborn baby 's rights being violated because of the genetic procedure.
Also this is not a case of arbitrary experimentation, the parents ARE preventing an inherited genetic issue, which is something that so far has been ethically acceptable so far, for embryo selection.
>>the parents ARE preventing an inherited genetic issue
The parents THINK they ARE preventing an inherited genetic issue. I would not dare mess with "god's creation" /evolution. Too many unknowns once you start mix and matching and there's no going back. We know very little...
then you should not have children, but you should clone yourself. because your children are certainly going to be a messed up version of god's creation
This isn't a child though, in a sense. This is a designed good. So yes, they should be responsible for any condition they knowingly design into another person.
If you believe in the possibility of trait selection in this manner to an advanced level, it is vital that this happens. A tyrannical father may demand his children may be atheists, and prevent them from going to church now. A tyrannical father in the future may have the ability to edit the God gene (assuming one exists for the sake of argument) right out before birth, never allowing the chance of it.
And this is the best case, in which the effort to design doesn't saddle the child with a host of other conditions.
well, its just unethical based on USA rules against human experimentation. obviously moral and ethical codes can evolve to accommodate advances in science eventually.
this is not a medical procedure, which is what makes it unethical to perform. its an experiment with unknown outcome which is why current ethics dictates it is not okay to do this.
>well, its just unethical based on USA rules against human experimentation. obviously moral and ethical codes can evolve to accommodate advances in science eventually.
Well, if they "evolve to accommodate advances in science" either they weren't that moral or ethical based in the first place, or moral and ethics gave in for what's technologically possible.
There have been a good deal of medical and technological breakthroughs over the last couple decades. Reusable rockets, VR, machine learning, etc. This is the first article I have read that has made me realize that the future is right here, right now and there is a very high probability that things are now going to change rapidly.
One thing to consider is that via crispr and stem cell treatments, genetic changes can be affected in adults as well, you just need to wait for the kinks to be worked out now and apply large sums of money. Our definition of 'haves and have nots' is potentially going to change in ways we have never imagined.
On the one hand, hurray for them for trying to eliminate a couple of quite serious diseases.
On the other hand, we have very little clue what the long term effects of not having CCR5 will be for these children. Furthermore, do we really trust China to start messing with people's DNA? I could think up several uses for this that are downright dangerous in the hands of a country like China.
Some of them:
- Remove a key gene in a metabolic pathway which can be mitigated by dietary supplements, creating a biological dead man's switch in order to make it easier to control the population.
- Inserting a viral genome into the host genome (preferably also under some deadman's switch), creating in effect a biological weapon
This technology might not work at all, or it might be highly effective after refinements.
If it is highly effective moral arguments are moot. Genetic engineering will be like nuclear weapons. A nation that desires to be competitive or have economic dominance won’t have any choice, it will be forced to adopt its usage (or be left behind).
Even agreements to control nuclear weapons that could cause human extinction still leave nuclear weapons in the hands of many major nations (and a handful of tiny ones) so international agreements have little chance of curtailing genetic engineering.
I never said anything about Western countries being paragons of moral clarity. However, for most of them, it has at least been a few decades since they last made camps where imprisoned people are subjected to torture.
And in most Western countries you don't get imprisoned for speaking out against the government, or being a journalist without government permissions.
And most Western don't feel they have to ban innocuous search terms, such as "Big yellow duck", or "Square", or the letter 'n'.
Crispr/CAS9 is not necessarily about large sums of money, though. It's a cheap technique, I could probably teach you it in 3 days of lab work, and someone with lab experience could learn it even faster.
The issue is more the genomics. We can tinker with genetic code quite effectively these days, however we can't reliably predict which developmental processes will be affected by our tinkering; in short, we are far behind in our understanding of the array of specific roles of genes beyond the narrowly defined disease pathways we want to affect.
Just as an example, say you want to change the encoding for one of the dopamine receptors to discourage dopaminergic activity, hoping to lessen the risk of addiction and reward-based activity. Well, dopamine is also involved in dozens of other processes, including movement, executive function, and more. Who's to say what effects will occur in a fully grown human?
>This is the first article I have read that has made me realize that the future is right here, right now and there is a very high probability that things are now going to change rapidly.
The future? Compared to 1900 we already live in a widely different world, more diff today - 1900 than diff 1900 - 1000 B.C.
And yet, not match would have changed. Aside from a few major western cities (and specific major areas in them too) most cities in 1900 didn't even fully have electric lighting back then, nor central sewage systems, and tons of other stuff.
Technology wise, 1900 cities more like 1000 BC than today. 1000 BC wasn't some cavemen running around, we had established civilizations, with writing, education, math, literature, laws, etc already in place.
> It's "unconscionable ... an experiment on human beings that is not morally or ethically defensible," said Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a University of Pennsylvania gene editing expert and editor of a genetics journal.
This is 100% correct.
(COI: Kiran was my postdoc while I was a student in the lab a decade ago.)
Some theists believe that we shouldn't tamper with God's perfect creation, because everything happens for a reason (including miscarriages, birth defects, and genetic diseases.) Atheists might believe that natural selection has got us this far, so it must be a pretty good process. A scientist shouldn't change anything, because they will be adding unnecessary risk to the natural process of evolution.
But you have to think about the "baseline". Natural selection is actually a brutal and horrific process where genes are just mutated at random. 50% of all pregnancies end in a miscarriage. Birth defects occur in 3% of all live births, and they account for 21% of all infant deaths. Nature is already a mad scientist that runs random experiments on babies.
I read that humans have about 30 genetic mutations per generation [1]. So imagine if a scientist picks 1 gene at random, and they use CRISPR to randomly change that gene. Now the embryo has around ~31 random mutations. Isn't that basically the same result as natural selection? You probably wouldn't even be able to tell that the scientist had changed anything.
Is that an accurate way of looking at it, or am I missing something?
"Theists believe that we shouldn't tamper with God's perfect creation"
Steady with the generalisations there. Your polarised US and various other places might be home to fewer liberal religionists, but that is not necessarily an accurate statement.
This is an inaccurate understanding of CRISPR, which is not yet at the point where zero off-target effects can be expected. That is an important aspect of this discussion.
But if the off-target effect is random, then its not really any worse off than an unmodified embryo, with around 30 random mutations naturally. Of course, the actual numbers matter but in principle this isn't a worse situation.
> But if the off-target effect is random, then its not really any worse off than an unmodified embryo, with around 30 random mutations naturally. Of course, the actual numbers matter but in principle this isn't a worse situation.
There is strong evidence that high mutation rates are selected against, to the point that some have speculated that driving down mutation rate is one of the key functions of selection[1].
Point being that increasing the number of germline variants is an extremely important consideration. The fact that the underlying biological replication mechanisms are not 100% perfect does not alter this point, and certainly doesn't mean that when you artificially increase the number of mutations that "this isn't a worse situation".
I don't think Christians (theism is just a code word for this, true lower-case theists are rare) feel this way, since they acknowledge the world is not pristine due to the fall of man, and suffering and pain exist. Usually the argument on that is that man is made in the image of God, and has special value due to this. They act as stewards of creation and reflections of God himself, and shouldn't be treated like animals.
I'd also argue that non-natural selection can be worse. We have crude forms of it through pet breeding, and cats come to mind. The Scottish Fold in particular:
That's a good point. I'm sure there are many Christians who would be comfortable with gene-editing to prevent disease. And people hold a wide variety of beliefs, so I shouldn't have made such a broad generalization.
Also pet breeding is a great example. But I think that's one of the advantage of CRISPR over selective breeding. Selective breeding results in lots of genetic problems like hip dysplasia, arthritis, etc. because the gene pool is too small. But I think CRISPR could probably fix most of these issues by splicing in the healthy genes from other dog breeds.
It's an accurate way of looking at it, but it assumes humans have a lesser value because lots of them already die, so what's a few more? The difference is a few humans, and that's too big a risk, in my opinion, to take lightly.
Sure, but the scientist is trying to reduce the risk of death and suffering. (They're not just flipping a coin to see what happens.)
We already know a lot about certain genes and what they do. For example, mutations in the HBB gene cause sickle cell anemia. Removing the mutation in that HBB gene is a good idea 100% of the time. You can just look at the 99% (?) of healthy people who have an HBB gene without that mutation.
Maybe the CRISPR process is risky and can cause lots of unexpected mutations. In that case it's not so black-and-white. But if you can edit a gene to prevent a disease, and it can be done in a safe way, then I don't think it's inherently unethical. (Although you could argue that it might be more ethical for parents to adopt a baby and donate money to charity, instead of spending a lot of money on gene-editing and IVF.)
The problem is that we don’t know whether this would prevent diseases with any reasonable certainty, and using non-consenting human beings to try to find out implies a profoundly dangerous devaluation of human life and individual rights.
If you can reach a high certainty level through other kinds of tests, then that would be another story.
Sickle cell disease affects millions of people, and it's the most common inherited blood disorder. We know for sure that certain mutations in the HBB gene cause sickle cell disease, so I think there is 100% certainty when you're correcting this specific mutation. People who don't inherit this mutation don't get sickle cell anemia. (Because their HBB gene doesn't produce blood cells that are shaped like sickles.)
I didn't realize that CRISPR gene editing can cause damage to other genes [1], so it might not worth it yet. If there was a perfect CRISPR procedure that had no other side effects, then it would be hard to argue against that.
> The problem is that we don’t know whether this would prevent diseases with any reasonable certainty, and using non-consenting human beings to try to find out implies a profoundly dangerous devaluation of human life and individual rights.
I sure hope you are pro-life, otherwise making "consent" and "individual rights" a foundation of your view would be pretty hypocritical.
In my view, if you aren't even a fetus yet, you can't possibly have any rights. You're not a human being. During IVF, you select the embryo with the best health prospects - the rest may be destroyed.
Keep in mind I only disagree with the foundation, I still think the procedure is unethical because the scientific basis is poor.
Being pro-choice doesn’t require nullification of an unborn child’s rights. It’s the recognition that the mother’s right to agency over her own body takes precedence.
That does not imply that a doctor or researcher has the right to risk causing debilitating life-long symptoms to another human being at any stage of development without a clear medical justification.
By your reasoning, because an embryo has no rights whatsoever, it would be fine to experiment wantonly for the sake of producing circus attractions. I presume you wouldn’t actually support this?
I also fail to see how the scientific basis is relevant to the ethical question. Whether the science is good or not, we’re talking about unnecessary procedures with inherent failure rates that can have brutal life-long consequences. I can’t see how someone can support this unless they are fundamentally lacking in empathy. As I asked another poster elsewhere in the thread, do you really think you would feel the same if something like this had been done to you and caused you to live with a painful deformity? Would you care then whether the science was good?
> Being pro-choice doesn’t require nullification of an unborn child’s rights. It’s the recognition that the mother’s right to agency over her own body takes precedence.
> That does not imply that a doctor or researcher has the right to risk causing debilitating life-long symptoms to another human being at any stage of development without a clear medical justification.
It's not the doctor making the decision to go ahead with this procedure, it's the mother. So, according to you, a mother has the right to kill an unborn child in the womb because it's the wrong gender (not uncommon in China) and that's "agency over her body" but then she can't attempt to mitigate the HIV risk it has given her child by procreating with an HIV-positive male. This is absurd.
> I also fail to see how the scientific basis is relevant to the ethical question. Whether the science is good or not, we’re talking about unnecessary procedures with inherent failure rates that can have brutal life-long consequences.
Nobody knows if there will be "inherent failure rates that can have brutal life-long consequences". That's why the science is bad. If the science was good, you'd know if the procedure is really that risky or not. If the procedure was 100% safe and effective, it would be unethical not to perform it.
Again, you are effectively arguing that it would be ethical for a doctor to try to experimentally create a glow-in-the-dark baby if asked to by the mother.
Good or bad science has nothing to do with the outcomes--that's good or bad medicine. There's plenty of 'good science' practiced on lab rats that would immediately become horrifyingly unethical if practiced on humans, but that has nothing to do with how well the scientific method is being applied and what can be learned.
Anyway, this discussion doesn't seem to be going anywhere productive, so I will bid you good day.
> Again, you are effectively arguing that it would be ethical for a doctor to try to experimentally create a glow-in-the-dark baby if asked to by the mother.
No, I am not arguing that. That's an embarrassingly absurd conclusion to draw.
These babies have a risk of life-long HIV impairment. This intervention may prevent this. With any medical intervention, you need to trade off risk and reward. Obviously, for an unborn child, there can not be any consent here.
It would be unethical to not give the babies the treatment if there wasn't any risk associated. What makes it unethical is that the risk profile isn't even known. The scientific foundation is poor.
> Anyway, this discussion doesn't seem to be going anywhere productive, so I will bid you good day.
I agree and let me say this: You're by far the worst discussion partner I have ever had on HN.
> The difference is a few humans, and that's too big a risk, in my opinion, to take lightly.
You're assuming it's riskier, in terms of lives, to try this technology. But it could be -- and obviously it's up in the air, which is my point -- that without such technology many more people will end up dying.
The status quo is never neutral with respect to risks.
What if it was used to provide immunity to malaria, as a hypothetical example?
Are you trying to justify innocent human experiments by saying nature is doing it anyway ? Nature is a mad scientist, unfair and horrible so let's be like it ?
Maybe if you were seriously ill because of a genetic experiment we did on you (and that you did not need) as you were an embryo, then you would not hold the same view.
I don't think you get where the morality problem is... It's not about being Amish that say "we shouldn't temper with God's perfect creation".
It's about a country doing human experimentation on innocent people that do not need it, it's not to cure them from an heridetary problem but to breed a stronger race. China will only show the success of their experiments and will hide from the eyes of the world all the failures, handicapped babies, secondary effects of their human experiments. They'll make experiments on babies with lots of failure (it's science, you never get it right at the first experiment) and once in a while they'll put a video on YouTube like they just did saying "Aw look how healthy they are". But behind there going to be a lot of guinea pig children with serious secondary effects. And the worth part is how they'll make sure the rest of the world never see those "failed" children. This might be Nazi-level stuff that's going to happen and this is what people with a glimpse of ethics left are concerned about, it's not about "not tempering with God's perfect creation"
I think you're mainly talking about the worst case situation, which is obviously terrible: Unethical scientists performing unethical experiments for an unethical government.
I'm not arguing for that, and I don't think it's the only possible situation.
> "it's science, you never get it right at the first experiment"
> "there is going to be a lot of guinea pig children with serious secondary effects"
I don't think so. If this does happen then it would be extremely sad, but I don't think it's very likely. Scientists are far more careful than that. A new drug has to go through many stages before it is ever tested in clinical trials, and these human trials are generally very safe. So I'm just trying to say that if this is done properly and with a lot of safeguards, then gene-editing is not inherently unethical.
But you're probably right about China. They have a horrible history of human-rights abuses, and I think they are much more likely to get this wrong. Even if it's not a government program, Chinese companies don't have a great track record [1]. I wouldn't be surprised if they were already performing some reckless experiments, and all of these people should locked up.
Perhaps this is true. I do not know. But human enhancement through genetic engineering is coming. Changes in traits, such as IQ, by 5+ standard deviations looks possible. We would be fools to outlaw it here, for we would become as children compared to future citizens of nations that do not share our taboos.
"Changes in traits, such as IQ, by 5+ standard deviations"... Where in the world are you getting this from? This is unlikely to be true for a long time. Intelligence, as far as genetics controls it, is a complex trait... with few if any large effect (especially positive) mutations.
Though thousands of alleles contribute to intelligence, we would only need to edit a few hundred to get extremely large increases in IQ, especially if you perform a round of embryo selection (or even iterated embryo selection) before editing.
Editing hundreds of alleles may sound incredible to you now, but I don’t think it will sound so incredible for long.
What you are saying is just not supported by evidence. For example, polygenic analysis of the latest meta-analysis from >250K individuals seems to say that the top several hundred variants explain in aggregrate only 5.2% of the variation in intelligence. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0152-6 (Supplement section 2.3.3 if you don't have access).
There is no human with all the positive variants; it is the the distribution of these variants that explains 5.2%. GM would allow you to create such a human.
That paper does not imply what you think it implies: that editing all these variants in an individual embryo would have a small effect.
An individual with the top 200 IQ-enhancing variants edited in (and an otherwise normal genome) would be far, far smarter than than than you seem to think, even though the variants edited only explain 5.2% of the differences within the population.
There is a lot to unpack here. But this is basically science fiction, given how far out we are from understanding how to cosmetically modify complex traits in this way.
Your method of modifying human height is naive because it assumes that your genetic modification technique to increase height would need to modify or even know about height alleles. edit: We last talked October 2015, hi.
You are misunderstanding what 'variance explained' means. It means 'variance', as in, average differences between individuals; nothing to do with the average effect size or possible maxima or anything like that. It refers only to predicting the net effect after, being distributed at population frequencies, most of those hundred variants have canceled each other out. In editing, the population frequencies & distribution don't matter, only the summed effect size of all the variants flipped. Confusing one for the other is like confusing waves on a beach with a tsunami: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#limits-to-iterated-se...
Since they have an average effect size of ~0.05-0.1 IQ points or so, a few hundred of those would in fact be many SDs. You can download the PGS, grab the top few hundred or thousand betas, and sum them if you don't believe me. (I show this with Benyamin et al 2014 in that section above, but no reason one couldn't redo it with a better PGS; the results won't change much.)
And yes, Hsu really does believe this, he is quite explicit in that 2014 paper that that is how it would work (in addition to countless places on his blog & Twitter) and I've discussed it with him in the past.
(As other comments point out, the real problem with this logic is that the hits are usually not causal but tag the causal variant, even if you had some magic CRISPR which could make hundreds of arbitrary edits. That's soluble, but not easily. It is, however, not a problem for selection procedures.)
In addition, even with that much or more explanatory power, we generally do not think we have necessarily identified causal variants in most cases. We identify groups of associated variants that signify an interesting locus. There isn’t currently a generic framework that lets us decide which ones are causal.
I'm bullish on selection approaches generally, but I think editing is not as promising at the moment. Editing via double-strand breaks is just way too unreliable for use in embryos, and base editing is too limited to make use of GWAS info.
This could change if the tech improves, but it would need to improve A LOT.
Just checking: you do know that there is a difference between change of "5 standard deviations" and change of "5 IQ points". 5 standard deviations is equal to "1 in 3.5 million", which makes your claim fairly farfetched with the tech of today or of the future decade or two, especially given how IQ is much more function of nurture than of nature.
I am aware of this. Genetic engineering implies far more power than Gwern mentions for one round of embryo selection. 5 standard deviations may sound a lot for you, but in animal breeding we have changed the distribution of various traits by far more than 5 standard deviations. Into the dozens.
Genetic engineering might be able to prevent certain inherited diseases, but otherwise major net improvements are unlikely. A boost in one area tends to cause problems in other areas. That's why evolution through natural selection hasn't significantly increased average human intelligence over the past few thousand years. The average human genome appears to be close to a local maximum.
Human intelligence has not increased because it has not been strongly selected for. If it was maximized, at the expense of other traits, a lot could definitely happen.
> The average human genome appears to be close to a local maximum.
Absolutely, but it's maximized for the environment we lived in 10-100 generations ago.
Not saying the conclusion is wrong, but that experimental methodology seems sketchy as hell. Why? Their sample consisted entirely of Mensa members. Mensa != the general population of high-IQ individuals.
You join Mensa if your IQ is a large part of your identity. Individuals who have a high IQ but also have a lot of other things going on in their lives (like career success or fulfilling personal relationships) tend to concentrate on those things rather than join Mensa. Therefore, membership in Mensa tends to overselect for individuals whose self-conception is both narrow and focused on their intelligence. There's a lot of other evidence in psychology that a narrow self-conception correlates highly with mood & anxiety disorders. You can also get correlations with physical ailments like environmental allergies and asthma as well, because someone who doesn't have these physical ailments is more able to get outside or pick up sports rather than go to meetings of a high-IQ society.
So the way they designed their experiment, they introduced tons of conflating factors that may or may not actually have anything to do with IQ. It's certainly possible that high IQs are associated with mental and physical disorders - but what the experiment shows is that membership in Mensa is associated with mental and physical disorders.
IQ is positively correlated with physical and mental health, height and longevity. We have strong evidence for all of those. Given it’s generally positive effects and the fact that we have copious examples of high IQ success stories this result seems unlikely to hold up.
> Results: Lower childhood IQ was associated with increased risk of developing schizophrenia spectrum disorder, adult depression, and adult anxiety. Lower childhood IQ was also associated with greater comorbidity and with persistence of depression; the association with persistence of generalized anxiety disorder was nearly significant. Higher childhood IQ predicted increased risk of adult mania.
Childhood IQ and adult mental disorders: a test of the cognitive reserve hypothesis
This is not true. Intelligence is polygenic. The average human is no Von Neumann. At the very least genetic engineering could raise average IQ to Von Neumann’s level. We know that phenotype is possible with no ill effects. It will likely take us much further.
You haven't addressed my point. No one disputes that intelligence is partly genetic. However if it was possible to raise intelligence through genetic engineering with no ill effects then why hasn't evolution increased the incidence of that phenotype already?
Not my area of expertise, but I think the intuition for why evolution didn't make us all Einstein's comes in two parts:
(1) IQ is very polygenetic - a big IQ gene might be 0.1 IQ, and there aren't a lot even that large, if I recall the large genome wide association studies done on this. As GWAS studies get larger we find more, but they're all super small effects.
(2) Having an extra 0.1 IQ point is easy to lose in the noise of other effects on having offspring.
So even if we assumed IQ was perfectly correlated with more surviving offspring in modern societies, it might take an extremely long time (even longer than a whole planet and a thousand years) to make a detectable difference.
Why aren't all birds as smart as crows? Because the Blind Idiot God of Evolution doesn't care that you think increased intelligence is an obvious 'win'.
> the intervention may be simple, give major enhancements, but result in a net loss of reproductive fitness
The famous Ashkenazi theory of intelligence comes to mind. According to this theory, the Ashkenazi were forced into occupations demanding intelligence, and micro-selected for high intelligence. Except the high IQ genes were not previously prevalent among either Jews or gentiles because - like sickle-cell anemia - when they became too prevalent, they result in horrible diseases like Tay-Sachs. In 2007, a unique mutation in a Scottish family was found to increase verbal IQ in afflicted family members vs non by something like 25 points; this would be great for them - except for how that mutation starts causing blindness in one’s 20s or later. (In general, it’s much easier to find mutations or other genetic changes breaking intelligence than helping in cases of retardation26 and autism27.)
It's worth noting that the Ashkenazi theory remains unproven. No one has actually found any variants which would increase intelligence markedly. At some point that starts to look suspicious - maybe they don't exist after all.
Based on all the GWASes and additional studies which have been done since 2007 and a continued absence of confirmed examples of IQ-boosting variants with negative pleiotropic effects, I now would explain the lack of optimization of intelligence as being an example of 'too complex for evolution because too many little changes to do simultaneously', that is, mutation load: essentially, there are too many little effects (which sum up to make us far stupider than we have to be), which have been created & maintained by too many demographic bottlenecks and genetic drift and other effects, too much background selection, and too much selection on other traits (plus some level of dysgenics), for the various harmful variants to have been meaningfully selected against over the past 50kya. And that's why we could boost intelligence a lot with few harmful and many beneficial side effects.
Historrically inteligence has been a trait that had to be balanced with other factors in natural selection, traits such as having lower energy consumption, lower reaction time were important in the past in a way they simply aren't today. Sacrificing in other less relevent areas could easily lead to intelligence gains.
(Note I am not advocating for gene editing)
Also I don't think we have reached a local maximum, human society kind of fucks with natural selection so I imagine there is room for improvement.
Most likely because it seems to be a phenotype that does not reproduce itself. None of Von Neumann’s children had kids if I recall correctly. This environment does not select for IQ past a certain point; this does not imply we cannot engineer people to be more intelligent any more than it implies we cannot engineer people to be dwarfs.
Right so you're getting into deeper questions of what intelligence really means, and whether our measurements are meaningful in practical terms. Even if it was possible to genetically engineer humans with much higher IQs (and that is yet to be proven), there's still no evidence that those hypothetical supermen would end up ruling over us or having more children or whatever.
> A boost in one area tends to cause problems in other areas.
Some problem areas are no longer as such because today's environment is much better at compensating for them than the environment that we actually evolved-for.
Energy efficiency comes to mind prominently: we've never been better at producing human-consumable energy in our entire history, yet we can't actually use the stuff because our bodies still interact with energy much like children-of-the-Depression interact with money.
> Perhaps this is true. I do not know. But human enhancement through genetic engineering is coming. Changes in traits, such as IQ, by 5+ standard deviations looks possible. We would be fools to outlaw it here, for we would become as children compared to future citizens of Asian nations.
What is the relevance of "Asian nations?" to this conversation?
Also, we're talking about a specific experiment that was allegedly conducted in human beings with (good but error-prone) genome editing mechanisms, outside of the purview of peer review or, from what I can tell, an IRB.
"What is the relevance of "Asian nations?" to this conversation?"
I would assume it's because the article describes genetically-engineered babies in China, so obviously it's not outlawed there (or if it is, the law is not enforced). Grandparent poster is pointing out that if genetic engineering gives survival or competitive benefits to those who do it, it doesn't matter what your personal ethical, moral, and legal standards are, because your whole society will be outcompeted by societies without those strictures.
The purists need not be worried. There's always the hope the descendants of those humans who do take the path of editing their own genetic code will, a few centuries from now, give those purists' descendants a nice small patch of land as a reservation.
Or maybe a cozy cage in a zoo, with a little sign next to the bars which reads: "homo sapiens inferior".
Or, you know, the purists will be spared untold suffering that those others will have to go through because of "magician's apprentice" style editing...
Of course the first period of experimentation and discovery will lead to unexpected and unpleasant results. All new technology takes time to mature, for the users to get an understanding of its tricky implementation bits and long-term impact. It's not wise to immediately put all your eggs in a brand new basket. But the ones who experiment and adapt will always eventually outperform those who refuse to change and stick to tried-and-tested. That's the very nature of evolution.
Evolution is blind to such concerns. Those who "experiment" might be wiped out because of their experiments gone wrong, and evolution wont care at all.
A creature inventing tools might have an evolutionary advantage over others. A creature inventing e.g. biological warfare and nuclear weapons might have less an advantage, it can easily wipe most of its own kind and even collapse its civilization (losing even more advantages).
Only true if your country and culture cares about IRBs. China doesn’t, it’s a quarter of the human population and it won’t be long until it’s that of global GDP at least. What a bunch of post Christians with delusions about the universality of their ethical code think does not bother them at all.
>Changes in traits, such as IQ, by 5+ standard deviations looks possible.
This looks totally unlikely.
Not to mention generally undesirable (people with IQ over 150 or so often have severe problems in their social life, and a lot of them don't ever even create or discover much, not to mention the insufferable part whose main accomplishment is to be members of MENSA).
150+ IQ is a lonely place to be because there aren’t many other people to connect with, especially for kids born in more rural areas without resources. It’s easy for these kids to self destruct. Turning a kid that smart into a happy, stable, productive member of society is an intensive 18+ year process that usually involves curated peers and experts with specific domain expertise. Check out Davidson Academy in Reno to read more.
They didn't actually specify positive. It would be pretty easy to reduce IQ by 5+ standard deviations. Plenty of monogenic disorders cause learning disabilities, just gotta knock out those genes...
We do. In China. Not just in biology but also AI/ML. They are willing (and able) to do the things others find reprehensible.
It's already apparent just how far ahead they are in the AI/ML field, I suspect biology/medicine will follow.
It's a very real threat and believing that The West has a head start and is more intelligent/better funded/other excuse is not going to end well for us.
China achieves goals though brute force with very little regard for ethics or norms.
The west has spent far more brainpower in making up bioethics regulations than actually talking about the procedures themselves. Cue the threads over here.
Also note the differences in culture: the chinese parents consented to it. I m not sure how easy it would be to find this in the west.
The unfamiliarity of random HN commenters with genetics is overwhelmingly clear, but that does not mean that geneticists in the US are not thinking about this.
Based on whose ethics and morals? Eventually a country is going to go all in on robotics and genetic engineering, ethics be damned, and the rest of the world is going to be left in the dust -- economically and militarily.
maybe we should be screening couples before we allow them to copulate, then. taking gambles with randomization experiments is 100% ethically indefensible.
please, spare us the "100% correct" and certified ethical positions
"an experiment on human beings [is] not morally or ethically defensible" is not an opinion but an assertion of how genetic editing fits into our current moral and ethical frameworks.
There’s nothing in there that would obviously prohibit the experiment we’re all discussing here. I can see how someone who deals with university IRBs or professional bioethicists might think there is but if we used risk reward thresholds as high as they do, or held to the precautionary principle that strongly we would still be discussing whether fire was a good idea. IRBs are a one way ratchet with tiny incentives to approve and large ones to deny. They are a cancerous growth on science.
You’re saying that you can see how an expert would think that there is something in the Nuremberg Code that prohibits the experiment we are talking about here, but you know better than the experts?
You are an expert in your field of medicine. You are much better at making predictions from data in it than lay people and you are vastly better at effecting changes in your domain of expertise than laymen. That’s real expertise, like engineers, meteorologists, astronomers, microeconomists, or engineers have. Then there are people who are experts on talking about something but have no expertise in doing. Art historians are quite close to astronomers here in that they can be very good at out of sample tests and prediction but have limited ability to do things because their field doesn’t call upon them to do more than render accurate judgments. Then there are people who master a body of lore, who are called upon to discuss things. Ethicists are in this group, like priests, pastors or imams.
Ethicists are experts in talking about ethics. They have no special expertise in acting ethically, compared to other philosophers[1].
Ethicists have expertise in what amounts to a body of administrative law, like rabbis, imams or canon lawyers.
And we have strong evidence of actual harm caused by them. If bioethicists can’t get their shit together enough to defend compensated kidney or gamete donation they aren’t even broadly neutral. There are people being paid to argue against saving lives, and against helping to bring into the world new lives that are actively wanted. There are ethicists who argue that poor people can’t really consent because the offer of some good to sufficiently poor person qualifies as duress.
The Nuremberg Code is good. The system of IRBs and bioethicists built up around it is not just bad, it’s genuinely awful.
[1]The moral behavior of ethics professors: Relationships among self-reported behavior, expressed normative attitude, and directly observed behavior
Eric Schwitzgebel & Joshua Rust
What I often observe on HN is that SlateStarCodex didn't understand how IRBs work, wrote about it, and therefore many people think that IRBs are bad. So, I am wary of IRB arguments here. Not implying that your information on IRBs comes from that one person, just saying that I don't love arguing about IRBs on HN because of a repeated pattern here.
If your point is that "IRBs could be improved in various ways", I'd be happy to agree in many cases. But also, there are some shining examples of enlightened IRBs that make human research at scale quite practical.
I feel ok with supporting Scott Alexander’s position when it is both (a) obviously correct, (b) IRBs regulate sociologists and psychologists doing surveys which is farcical, and (c) Carl E. Schneider, professor of medicine and law at the University of Michigan wrote an entire book on how IRBs fail to work.
IRBs do not have a problem. They are a problem. If we must have IRBs they should be deprofessionalised to the fullest extent possible rather than staffed by people whose job and motivation is to find problems where none exist and add more bureaucracy to prove they are actually doing some work. IRB as jury service seems like it could be acceptable. Twelve people, a three hour course on the Nuremberg code and the scientist presenting their application. And absolutely no bioethicists.
If you’re interested in the book put it on an Amazon wish list and email me the link at barrypcotter at iCloud. I’ll buy it because more doctors and scientists should know IRBs are a cancer on society and science.
If a few dozen or even thousand suffer to prevent the suffering of many millions or even billions in the long run, is that not a trade off one would have to make?
It all comes down to the old debate of deontology vs utilitarianism
It’s called an experiment because no one knows whether it will prevent the suffering of anyone at all.
If you had to live your entire life with a painful deformity because someone experimented on your genes, do you think you’d find this argument convincing?
Fortunately that won't be necessary. Both of us are safe. The Chinese are doing the research for us. If they don't succeed they suffered and we are not impacted. If they do succeed, they suffered, get some food jobs and money and we likely get to benefit from most of the results. So we can have our cake and eat it to. Yay \O/
> He said the parents involved declined to be identified or interviewed, and he would not say where they live or where the work was done.
> There is no independent confirmation of He's claim, and it has not been published in a journal, where it would be vetted by other experts. He revealed it Monday in Hong Kong to one of the organizers of an international conference on gene editing that is set to begin Tuesday, and earlier in exclusive interviews with The Associated Press.
To be honest, _if this is true_ it sounds like he modified them without the parents knowledge or consent. Usually, I'm super skeptical of any "research" coming out of China. However, I've suspected that China has been doing this for a while anyway (without sharing it). So I'm left with three possibilities in my mind:
1. Government is releasing this to see how the world will react
2. The doctor excited to share their work, shared it - but did the work without the parents consent
3. Parents did this knowingly and in a controlled way
Of those options I'm betting #2 followed by #1. Highly doubt even if the parents consented this was entered into with the knowledge of the risks. Seriously if they are using Cas9 who knows what else could go wrong.
The results come hard on the heels of two studies that identified a related issue: Some CRISPR’d cells might be missing a key anti-cancer mechanism and therefore be able to initiate tumors.
It looks like the work they were given supports the cas9 issue you were mentioning:
> Several scientists reviewed materials that He provided to the AP and said tests so far are insufficient to say the editing worked or to rule out harm.
> They also noted evidence that the editing was incomplete and that at least one twin appears to be a patchwork of cells with various changes.
It’s funny to see Western standards here. There exist Eastern parents who will try to train their 2-year-olds to fly. That’s damned risky and an Indian tried it a couple of decades ago.
And we are here, a brave new world. For years I heard and read that we would never need to worry about scientists editing the DNA of a human embryo that would be brought to term. The argument emphasized the fact that professional ethics would prevent it. Well, ethics change and not all professionals will follow them.
As a programmer, I know how hard it is to modify a ball of code without having unexpected consequences. We barely know how the human genome functions. I hope we don't do too much damage.
Nah we are not in brave new world yet. We are in a world where china is willing to brute force its way into it through very risky experiments, while the west is not willing to own up to the reality that our future is no longer natural, and we are not even going to be a single species.
This is quite interesting. There is a certain very small percentage of the world's population that is immune to the HIV virus. These people's T-cells have the CD4 receptor, but not the CCR5 receptor. The HIV virus needs both these receptors to successfully affect the host's cells. The absence of the CCR5 receptor still allows the person's T cells to function normally, so if this works, it can pave the way to creating offspring who are immune to HIV
There are literally millions of healthy people without CCR5 receptors. (Millions is approximately 0.01% of world population and this mutation's frequency is certainly greater than that.)
What about possible dependencies which are also missing or required in those healthy people? That is, if you remove CCR5, are there other components which should be removed/replaced/inserted to enable the anti-HIV functionality? I would venture to guess that nobody really knows... yet.
Apparently removing it may have other consequences:
> Even if editing worked perfectly, people without normal CCR5 genes face higher risks of getting certain other viruses, such as West Nile, and of dying from the flu. Since there are many ways to prevent HIV infection and it's very treatable if it occurs, those other medical risks are a concern, Musunuru said.
This is how China is going to take the lead. They will start breeding disease-resistant, stronger and smarter humans, and the west will take the moral high ground, tweet about how evil China is on their new phones, and fall behind.
We are taking the Chinese route for surveillance, data, AI. It's going to be the same for genetics. Maybe even faster because people don't want to be spied on but want to have stronger/resistant/smarter children, especially when they'll see other people getting those advantages.
That's probably not going to happen. What's probably going to happen is they'll take a slight lead for a few years, then we'll take notice and replicate that.
Oooh, so it is that He, the man used to have a very peculiar reputation on Chinese university BBSes back when China just got internet connectivity. That was what possibly lead to him being ousted from Chinese academia a decade ago.
I myself think it was certainly no coincidence that Stanford picked him up.
I'm afraid calling up some of his opinions, and in particularly on the topic of race, as they will be a ten megaton flamewar bomb. Google him yourself if you know Chinese.
i had thought this wouldnt happen for another few decades
this is bad news for tibetans since their high altitude gene is known even the andes high alt adaptations are being discovered which is really one of the closest things to a genetic super ability you can get
so it will only be a few decades more until this last barrier to han colonization of tibet falls
deep sea diving is another such genetic ability recently investigated
It already causes quite a debate on Chinese internet as well.
People are genuinely concerned about the unknown effects on the babies, and questioning the authors and the hospital's motivation of applying such techniques to human this early without fully understanding its consequences.
If it works and HIV resistance installed in a population, then it opens the possibility HIV could be then could become an effective bioweapon for that population.
1. If it works, you'd need to wait 50+ years until most of your population was immune. You'd have to hope that in that time HIV vaccines/cures aren't developed.
2. HIV would make a terrible bioweapon. It's difficult to spread, takes a very long time to incapacitate people, and there are generally effective treatments.
Here is a controversial article published in 2013 by an evolutionary psychologist that everyone should give some thoughts on:
Disclaimers: I do not have the expertise to evaluate its veracity but if true it will affect everyone in the world in some important ways within a few decades (the effects might already start to appear as we see how fast China has developed technologically. Yes, technology transfer is clearly a factor but few developing nations can absorb and adopt advanced technologies so rapidly). I also have not pondered deeply enough to have a strong position on the complicated ethical implications alluded to in the article and expressed with concerns elsewhere.
> Deng also encouraged assortative mating through promoting urbanization and higher education, so bright, hard-working young people could meet each other more easily, increasing the proportion of children who would be at the upper extremes of intelligence and conscientiousness. ...
> But crucially, Comprehensive National Power also includes "biopower": creating the world's highest-quality human capital in terms of the Chinese population's genes, health, and education ...
> The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness. ...
> My real worry is the Western response. The most likely response, given Euro-American ideological biases, would be a bioethical panic that leads to criticism of Chinese population policy with the same self-righteous hypocrisy that we have shown in criticizing various Chinese socio-cultural policies. But the global stakes are too high for us to act that stupidly and short-sightedly. A more mature response would be based on mutual civilizational respect, asking—what can we learn from what the Chinese are doing, how can we help them, and how can they help us to keep up as they create their brave new world?
Thanks for that super weird article. The author's motivations for supporting China's eugenics efforts are puzzling for sure.
Thankfully we might be safe for the time being. IIRC the BGI IQ sequencing initiative did not lead to any meaningful discoveries since it's not yet obvious or fully proven yet that IQ is that heritable.
My 50c is that we as a population have currently stopped evolving regions of our genome that can keep resulting in progressively higher intelligence, for two possible reasons: 1. there's some evidence at least from my view that any further increase in intelligence will cause other side effects like depression and autism (or perhaps a more intelligent version of us cannot unsee the futility of our lives?); 2. It's not in the interests of the population as a whole to continue having a fight between individuals having heritably different IQs, i.e. we have evolved into a local minima so that all IQ differences are stochastic and it's really hard to leave this minima through mutations.
I think the second possibility makes sense because intelligence is such a huge evolutionary advantage that a population with high instability in this trait might be doomed (more intelligent people can cheat more easily for short term personal benefit at the expense of long term population benefit). I really think that one of the first things modern humans evolved was the genetic ability to make sure that intelligence was completely randomized among the population, and I now hope that's true also because of all these efforts because if it's true none of these efforts would succeed for a long time.
> IIRC the BGI IQ sequencing initiative did not lead to any meaningful discoveries
The BGI initiative led to no meaningful discoveries because of internal disarray & politics & strategic missteps meant that it was never completed; if it had, it probably wouldn't've reported much because they made a failed bet that common variation would be unimportant and it would be more efficient to look for rarer variants which boosted IQ a lot in a few thousand high-IQ participants rather than the 100,000+ that would be necessary using normal people.
We now know that there appear to be no such variants. Common variants with n>100k yielded the first successful IQ GWAS with Rietveld et al 2013 (0.3% variance). GWASes kept getting bigger and better, and the latest one, Allegrini et al 2018 (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/09/17/418210), can now predict 11% of variance in IQ/16% EDU.
> since it's not yet obvious or fully proven yet that IQ is that heritable.
It is, and it says a lot that so many people have such a mistaken impression.
Thank you for the interesting hypotheses regarding the evolution of intelligence. I have a somewhat different take and would like to share:
Some of the most intelligent people in history including renowned philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians did not seem to focus on using their intelligence to acquire as much power or wealth as possible. They seemed to enjoy contemplating more universal and deeper questions than immersing themselves too much on worldly matters. A majority of powerful people did seem to have above or well-above average intelligence but they were probably not in the same league, intelligence-wise, as those famous thinkers. Their other traits were also important to their rise to power.
Environment and population intelligence likely have co-evolved and very high intelligence did not confer much advantage over an above average one for most common professions before the 21st century. The technology and level of economy-of-scale available in the past meant that social graciousness and other personality traits could have been better predictors of career and economic success than intelligence above a certain point.
To have a great engineering or scientific career developing some of our increasingly advanced technologies, very high intelligence seems to present certain advantages over a more balanced group of traits. So a shift in global technological landscape could also mean that the optimal collection of population intelligence and other traits change as well.
As concrete examples, the founders of the largest American tech empires all seem to have/had an IQ at least 3-4 SD above mean based on their academic records.
PS. Your 1) seems possible in some cases and I would add that traits like non-extreme autism-spectrum condition may not be a handicap, but rather an advantage, in a certain environment and career path.
Some of the most intelligent people in history including renowned philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians did not seem to focus on using their intelligence to acquire as much power or wealth as possible.
More significantly, they tend to not have children.
"Men of the highest genius who were childless include Newton, Faraday, and Mendel; Vivaldi, Handel, and Beethoven;
Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle; Plato, Aquinas, Bacon, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant and Mill. Anyone who thinks he can frame a list of comparable individuals who had on the average enough children to counter-balance the childlessness of
these, is welcome to try; but he will not succeed. ...Just below the very highest level, and average number of children is again far below the average for people of no intellectual or artistic distinction. And it is, again, spectacularly depressed by the huge contribution of the childless: Copernicus, Swift, Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Haydn, Dalton, Francis Galton himself - to mention a few examples at random." (David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales)
While I used IQ as a proxy for intelligence, intelligence is obviously still poorly (or conveniently restrictively) defined. But surely some form of "being smarter" would have been advantageous at any point in time in a society? It's not just science and engineering that needs intelligence right?
Oddly enough this reminds me of a clip from the show Young Sheldon where the twins display extremely different, yet equally admoyable manifestations of intelligence: https://youtu.be/nvQkKS75M2o
I agree that “being smarter” or above average intelligence helps with a whole host of stuff besides science and engineering, including business and social skills, all other things being equal.
My point above was regarding the difference between say 2SD above mean vs 4SD. It did not help much and perhaps hurt in a few ways, like getting bored more easily, to have a +4SD IQ in the past. Most businesses and jobs were not very complicated. So having a +2SD intelligence could be optimal in the past in most parts of the world.
Work at today’s multinationals and globe-spanning empires, in many fields, benefit a lot more from +4SD intelligence and the stimulation from complexity helps mitigate some of the drawbacks. The optimal level for career success in many regions/careers might have shifted to +3SD or even +4SD instead.
We know IQ is heritable the same way we know height is heritable. People resemble their relatives more as their shared inheritance grows.
BGI found no common genes of large effect. That means intelligence is more like height than skin colour. There are lots of genes that have a small effect. We know there are rare genes of large effect because Ashkenazim have at least two, the ones that lead to torsion dystonia and Tay-Sachs disease lead to greater IQ in heterozygotes.
We know evolution in intelligence has not stopped because human populations differ in intellectual productivity to absurd degrees of that wasn’t true. Evolution requires heritability, variation and selection and all those clearly exist.
>We know evolution in intelligence has not stopped because human populations differ in intellectual productivity to absurd degrees of that wasn’t true. Evolution requires heritability, variation and selection and all those clearly exist.
Do you have any references to it? I'd like to learn more...
If you’re asking about the degree of difference Ashkrnazim have ~25% of science Nobel prizes having never been more than 1% of global population. That’s one group that’s highly over represented in intellectual achievement. For a more prosaic example look at the list of US spelling bee finalists or national science foundation merit scholarship finalists. There will be a great deal more Asian names than their share of the US population.
As to evolution and its necessary precursors it’s all in Darwin, or shorter on the Wikipedia page for evolution.
I hope that's not all you had in mind when you wrote your comment. All of that shows no proof that it's the genetics that propels the disproportionate level of intellectual achievement. Both of those cases can easily be explained by sociocultural influences within families of various races propelling more intellectual endeavors, and if you don't have peer reviewed references showing otherwise it's probably a good idea to stop thinking that way.
>Ever since torsion dystonia among the Ashkenazim was first recognized, observers have commented on the unusual intelligence of patients. Flatau and Sterling (Eldridge, 1976) describe their first patient as showing ‘an intellectual development far exceeding his age’, and their second patient as showing ‘extraordinary mental development for his age’. At least ten other reports in the literature have made similar comments. Eldridge (1970, 1976) studied fourteen Jewish torison dystonia patients:
Quite, and sociocultural influences are why long distance running is dominated by East Africans and to an even more absurd degree by the Kalenjin, an ethnic group of less than five million people who take more than a third of top three places in competitive marathon running worldwide. Sociocultural influences are also obviously why there have been at most two men not primarily of West African ancestry who ran 100m in under 10s, and almost 70 men of that ancestry who did. Sociocultural influences must also be why the Dutch are the tallest people in the world. They really, really want to be tall and that explains their height.
Based on patterns in the past 2000 years of Chinese history, I suspect they're more likely to undergo a violent revolution before they have a chance to remake the world through eugenics or genetic engineering.
The Shenzhen HarMoniCare Women & Children’s Hospital, the medical ethics committee of which gave a permit to this, was one of the so-called Putian-systems, a medical network established by hundreds of people from Putian, Fujian who earned their first bucket of gold by selling “home made remedies and fake medicine at high prices”.
Gender selection, will have adverse effect without a doubt, nature has a healthy balance between the number of men and women in the world, and certain culture preferring boys / girls will lead to us having too much of one and not enough of the other. There is already evidence of this in China and India.
This will be a great tool to help game the social score.
More intelligence + less risk-taking + more respect for authority = a high-score child sure to get into the top University and have the freedom to travel there.
Looking at how addictive our interactions with technology have become this seems concerning. A future where we can all exist and never look up or leave our thought bubbles could have a dramatic impact on humanity and motivations.
Moral frontiers aside, current gene tech is still not where we'd like it to be in order to pull of these sorts of things and know we haven't done harm. Side edits are a big problem with CRISPR-Cas9.
For the surely upcoming discussion about pros and cons of genetic editing in humans, Kurzgesagt has a basic overview of the space, if you can spare some 15 minutes with your morning coffee.
While the western world is whining about irrelevant ethics the Chinese will eventually eradicate countless diseases, engineer the perfect superhuman and take control of their evolution. Transhumanism is here and happening right now. We are committing a crime against our future generations if we decide not to participate in it. We actively decide against prosperity and advancement. We are luddites.
When I first read this comment I thought it was hyperbole (I've heard about the vaccine and melamine scares -- which harmed and killed many thousands of children -- but not about dead babies being put into pills). But no, it's real fucking thing[1,2,3,4]. What the actual fuck. How is a Hacker News comment the first time I've heard of this?
I don't understand this. They don't advertise the pills as human flesh pills, so why use that material in the first place? Why not dead chickens, or runoff from an abattoir?
