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."
Surely it is a bit of a stretch.
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.
HIV tests are still not included in routine bloodwork, even though other diseases like hepatitis are.
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.
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.
Chlamydia is a curable bacteria infection (antibiotics). There is no known cure for HIV.
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.
Most mouse models don't replicate in other animals either.
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).
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.
There's a psychological phenomenon:
https://www.mdmag.com/medical-news/breakthrough-discovery-in...
I agree, super memory is not necessarily a good thing
The trouble here is that we can't see those consequences until they end up hurting someone.
- it's been written for billions of years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Earliest_biologica...)
- without any sort of upfront architecture or planning
- the development methodology can be summarized as "change characters randomly and see if it compiles"
- incredibly bloated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA)
- contains random snippets copy/pasted from other codebases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_viral_element)
- the only success criteria is that the "program" shouldn't "crash" before it can make a copy of itself
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).
>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.
Imagine trying with million or tens of million year code.
edit: I'll also amend the statement, as the gene is implicated in responses to other viruses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#Potential_costs
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.
But that's very different from designing an embryo by direct genetic modification.
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)
What does that mean?
If it’s highly effective our descendants will think we were barbarians for ever questioning its use.
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).
Do you think parents can consent to this sort of experiment on behalf of an unborn child?
In other words, taking action to make changes is a crucial difference when compared to inaction, even if the outcomes are similar.
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 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...
Nope, whatever happens it's the natural way: mistakes, mix, match and all.
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.
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, 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.
Did the future kids consent?