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A comment on UK to allow babies from three people. Parent comment

Re:UK to allow babies from three people by avar on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @03:15AM (#8995831) 

    > Absolutely nothing we can do artificially
    > will have as great of an impact than
    > genetically gifted individuals having
    > children together.
When those two individuals have children their genes are fused together by random chance. Do you really think gene technology won't get better than random chance?

We already have technology that's good enough to improve on that, e.g. splicing out a gene known to cause a disease from one of those parents.

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Re:UK to allow babies from three people by maratd on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @12:53PM (#8998328)
> When those two individuals have children their genes are fused together by random chance. Do you really think gene technology won't get better than random chance?

Yes. Because what really matters is the restriction of the pool from which those random genes are chosen through mate choice. The overwhelming majority of the time you're randomly choosing between identical genes.

When you start playing with genetic engineering, the whole world is your oyster and your choices are liable to be far worse than random chance among a carefully curated pool. I think genetic engineering will be fantastic for curing specific ailments, but will be a total flop when it comes to creating super humans. Natural selection will always do it better.

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