We dont know enough about it to allow it open slather in the community at large.
> We dont know enough about it to allow it open slather in the community at large.
Who are those "guardians of the community" that are allowed to decide what technology community at large can have access to and what can't? You can argue for regulation preventing fraud: doctors hiding possible complications, editing different genes than what was advertised, etc. but you can't disallow people to decide with what genetic code they create their own children.
See “Chinese footbinding”, “injecting cement into posteriors for beauty”, “plastic surgery” for examples of the absuridty people will go to to fit in.
You would take away a technological advantage from majorities and minorities alike because their choices might not lead to your ideal of diversity utopia.
Suppose it turns out that extremely high-achievers are gambles on the part of nature, which have some chance of going wrong. For example, suppose that every birth of a potential future Nobelist comes with a 10% chance of serious disabling autism. (I stress, I'm not claiming that this is true, just setting up a thought experiment.) Many parents would decline this gamble: 10% is quite a high chance of devoting the rest of your life to care, for a tiny chance of having a world-class star in the family, who will anyway have very little personal gain from his contributions. But if the whole society decides never to gamble, we will (in my scenario!) miss out on major advances.
But even if that was not the case, with gene editing some parents who did not have a chance to make that gamble, will be able to make it intentionally.
I guess I believe that very few parents would make this gamble, because the risks are very personal and the benefits are mostly to others. But I could be wrong. One real live example is that there's been very little push-back against eliminating Tay-Sachs via testing.
For the Tay-Sachs example what would be the reason to push-back against eliminating it? And who should have pushed back? people who had that gene, or people who didn't?
IMO the solution is to simply have more people, if we have 1000 billions on earth (which is possible with seasteading and terraforming deserts), 10 billion on moon 100 billion on mars we'll have enough place to try out all kinds of solutions, for people to decide how much to edit or not to edit their own genes, and many new random mutations arising simply because there are more new people than were in all of the history combined.
Tay-Sachs is the first example I know about, of some genetic strain of humans being deliberately bred out of existence. Phrased like that I think the idea would alarm many people. But it has not. (I should remind myself more of the details of this story.)
Thought experiments aside, note that it's not obvious we need a single new mutation to make much smarter people. We just need the shuffling of the deck to place more of the existing + variants into one body. This will obviously be the goal of embryo selection, and I think would also be the goal of explicit editing. I'd wager that many more of the Nobel-sized brains alive at the end of this century (and the next) will owe their existence to one of these kinds of engineering, than to population growth.
This begs the question. Whether this is an advantage or not is exactly what is at issue.
'Might not lead to your ideal of diversity utopia.'
One of the defining traits of humans is that they are acutely aware of their relative social status. A significant group of those perceived advantages are based upon appearance. The attempt to imitate and supersede others in a toxic battle for recognition creates all sorts of harms. Opening up our germline to that battle seems extremely dangerous. Your comment reads like pure political reaction.
[1] https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...
[2] I was going to say ‘entire population’, then I remembered one of our differences includes a desire to be different; how different we get to be depends on social rules, which is why the number of furries who had themselves surgically altered to look like (say) cats is a small non-zero number.
Also we won't have a monoculture for whole genome any time soon, because that would mean for everyone to raise someone elses kid which people tend to not like.
There is a possibility that some people will try to make changes to appearance eye/skin/hair color, shape of nose. But that doesn't have that much effect on survivability of human kind (balancing higher rate of skin cancer vs vitamin D deficiency has other methods now) and banning gene editing to prevent that would be the same as banning all surgery to simply not allow plastic surgery.
We have always had laws designed to manipulate society to help prevent people from shooting themselves in the foot (see qualified investor requirements, minimum drinking ages, mandatory car insurance, etc). For gene editing it’s particularly kmportant for the long-term survivability of the human race if we do not regulate our own use.
Could you describe some of these benefits?
but if there's any slight advantage to be had by going faster (e.g., there's a moratorium on editing certain traits), then those who would disregard the "rules" may gain and therefore, create a black-market anyway.
I think the only reasonable thing to do is to have unfetted access, and the lowest possible price point. Then let darwinian selection take place.
Proliferation of nuclear-weapon technology has been somewhat effective. Because it's hugely technical and resource intensive. But CRISPR, not so much.
Seems like a useful test case to think about, and read about, rather than relying only on imagination.
The exact same argument could be made against education, or any other human development.
Banning all schools will affect all children.
Banning gene-editing will effect the children of the wealthy, or those who's parents chose to go that route.
A better example will be banning private schools, but even then, that requires the child to at least work hard and the parents to constantly invest for a child to get any value out of it, as oppose to gene editing.
My fear would be that the West, in paroxysms of misguided equal-outcomes ideology, ban genetic improvements - whereas China mandates it, and bans its availability to outsiders, setting themselves up for a long-term fundamental advantage which we might never be able to overcome.
In a sense, it doesn't matter what the West "decides". If China et al have this technology - and they do - and if they decide to exploit it - and they will - we have no real choice but to follow, or face our inevitable and profound outcompetition in the medium to long term.
Could this be overcome by requiring all newly registered children to have full genome DNA tests, along with their parents, and prosecute on the basis of clear genetic modification? Or is that likely to get too many false positives?
[1] http://www.the-odin.com/bacterial-crispr-and-fluorescent-yea...
I can't imagine that setting up a "Department Of Prosecuting New Parents" would go down well. Or even be possible. For example, most first-world countries today have millions of residents with no legal right to be there, most of whom the state does not prosecute/deport/fine. I think both for the lack of capacity to do so, and for lack of popular support for doing this at full scale. And deciding where someone was born (and who their parents are) is much much easier than deciding whether they got 100% of their DNA the old-fashioned way.
See: Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche.
This is a familiar critique that seems to conflate the modern self-esteem craze, communism, and the utopian "equality of outcome" with the traditional religiously based idea of equality, which is that every soul is made in the image of and has equal responsibility before God and that's it. The Lockean idea of human rights is cladistically derived from this.
To me the strongest non-religious argument against doing this is that it will further accelerate wealth benefits, eg if you could make your kids smarter. One of the problems with that however is that this technique is so cheap and easy that banning it will just create a black market, or a single country decides to allow it for economic or political reasons and people travel there to get pregnant.
That impossibility of controlling this is why I think we have no choice but to proceed slowly, cautiously, but under full transparency.
* there are also uncertainties about off-target effects and overall safety of the technique but I'm confident those issues will eventually be fixed too.