Experiment on who, exactly? How do you get consent from an embryo for the life it will have to live as a result of what you're about to do to it?

"I detest the precautionary principle."

Sometimes, a little bit of caution is what keeps someone alive long enough to reproduce. Plenty of Darwin Award winners could have used a little more caution.

It will start off very slowly. I'd argue we're already doing "genetic engineering" on a small scale with IVF. At some point, the IVF clinics will start offering "screening" for incrementally less harmful diseases, disorders and traits. And then it's a small step from that to simply picking "the best" embryos. E.g. They'll "filter-out" all the embryos that will end up being very short. Then they'll filter out all the embryos that are "most-likely" to be below-average in intelligence, or most-likely to be mentally challenged, etc.

Even if it isn't down-right engineering/splicing/etc, and using only the parents' egg/sperm combinations, they can still offer to "move our society" forward at a snail pace.

I personally see no reason to be against it, as it's the logical extension of natural evolution. It's just more refined, scientific, guided, and devoid of some of the randomness or trial-by-error properties that are inherent with natural evolution.

I completely agree that a little bit of caution is important. That's not at all what the precautionary principle is. It says that before you do something, you must first prove that it's harmless.

This kind of proof is of course impossible, and in practice it means "never do anything".

The fun thing about is that people only advocate applying it to things they don't want to do, never on their own favorite projects

It is fair that caution is needed - otherwise we're just a bunch of Qyburns, right?

GRRM framed Qyburn negatively. You could view him from a positive angle instead: he's a brilliant scientist who left the scientific community so he could pursue groundbreaking research without being slowed by obsolete and conventional ideas. That's a heroic narrative, not a sinister one.

ASOIF is fiction. We live in reality. The problem is far more often that we're held by obsolete and suffocating rules than that we're moving too fast. I'd rather try new things than hunker down in fear of the unknown.

> GRRM framed Qyburn negatively. You could view him from a positive angle instead: he's a brilliant scientist who left the scientific community so he could pursue groundbreaking research without being slowed by obsolete and conventional ideas.

I think GRRM very carefully made by both the positive and negative parts key to the framing of Qyburn; he's quite clearly both a brilliant scientist who rebelled against obsolete and conventional ideas which did not work, and, a monster who is utterly indifferent (or so nearly so as makes no difference in practice) to the suffering inflicted on the pursuit of his research, either directly or in his efforts to maintain the support he needs to continue his work.

GRRM tends not to make unidimensionally good or evil characters in ASOIAF (there's a few that seem that way on the evil side, but they are mostly also ones we don't know as much about.)

There are multiple ways to interpret fiction. I'm reminded of that Russian fanfic that cast Sauron as a heroic industrialist doing his best to drag Middle Earth into an industrial revolution, all the while being hampered by superstitious people from the steppes constantly raiding his cities.

The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Eskov in case anyone's interested.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer

It's easy to say you'd like to "try new things" when you're not the one being experimented on.

How would you like to be born a mistake in such experimentation. That's why the ethical issues are serious. If it's not safe, the mistakes will be paid for by utterly innocent and unwilling participants.

How would you like to be born with Huntington's disease, knowing that your parents could have taken an unknown risk to save you from it?

We are all utterly innocent and unwilling participants in being born. You can either take the random cards that nature deals you, or we can try to act to have better outcomes. Just because you refuse to take action doesn't absolve you from taking a suboptimal action.

This could also easily turn into a larger discussion about the ethical considerations of procreation when one is not in a favorable position (e.g. poor, homeless, addicted to drugs, mentally ill). What's OK and what's not? Who decides for everyone? Is that the best way? Should people be allowed to decide for their future children?

That larger topic is indeed a touchy one. I tend to have a controversial stance in that discussion, so I do get plenty of down votes on it. Somehow, people feel very strongly about about adults' "rights" to procreate. Even if that right results in the involvement of an unwitting participant who then leads a very short life of struggling.

It's actually very saddening to watch a completely avoidable & preventable problem, whose N-amount of obvious solutions end up being shoved under the rug because we refuse to draw the line.

the end goal in this is a class of priest-like experts to decide, obviously. I'm surprised no one realizes the tyranny of being forced to justify your right to procreate at all, let alone unguided by scientific experts with their own clear ideals of what should be done with your child.

Very few people are honest with themselves and admit the end goal is not making better, its making more controllable/more in aim with how the rulers want their population to be.