Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

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hodj

hodj

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I'd like to see the paper as well, but no one is publishing it because of ethical considerations.
 
hodj

hodj

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Any editing done to embryos is passed on to offspring, with no way to really test or know for certain yet what the long range consequences might be.

And by long range I mean potentially hundreds to thousands of years in the future.
 
Big Phoenix

Big Phoenix

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Ambiturner_sl said:
Outside of religious BS, what are the ethical concerns?
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How would this be any different than circumcising a baby? Its one thing if its fixing bad genetics to remove potential future illnesses like cancer of alzheimer's. But what about changing eye color? Gender selection? Being able to manipulate height?
 
iannis

iannis

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Ambiturner_sl said:
Outside of religious BS, what are the ethical concerns?
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Absolutely none if you're down with Eugenics.

We confer a special status to human life.

Well, most of us do. Regardless of religion. It's going to be an oriental culture that pushes this field.
 
hodj

hodj

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Its not even about sanctity of life or eugenics issues or any of that.

We simply don't know if replacing a mutation that is harmful might result in other changes down the line that we can't control yet.

Also the fact that it only works some of the time is a big issue.

All genetic therapies come with some pretty strong risks. The precision to control exactly where and what genes are replaced isn't perfect, by any stretch. You might end up not excising and replacing the genes you intend to. You might insert a new allele in the wrong spot and result in constitutive activation, upregulation or down regulation of gene expression, the list of dangers is plentiful.

So the ethics of it really is removed from religious reasoning here, its purely a factor of the fact that, even with this study, only a handful of the manipulated embryos had the proper allele replaced, most of them were a bust.

One day it'll happen, but its still a long way off.

Big Phoenix_sl said:
How would this be any different than circumcising a baby? Its one thing if its fixing bad genetics to remove potential future illnesses like cancer of alzheimer's. But what about changing eye color? Gender selection? Being able to manipulate height?
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Biological sex selection would probably have to occur in the gametes, prior to fertilization. So that would be like an in vitro fertilization technique, and then why go to all the bother when you can just select the gametes with the proper sex chromosomes and use combine them directly?

So that's not even an issue, tbh

Height isn't a linear thing where you can alter a single gene and get a taller person. Height is a result of multiple genes interacting with environmental factors such as nutrition all through early life development, so that's not going to happen either.

And we can already alter eye color without the need for genetics manipulation. Everyone has blue eyes naturally. There is a procedure to remove the darker pigments from eyes now that works very well and will probably be in the mass market soon.

About Stroma Medical - Stroma Permanent Eye Color Change Laser

New Procedure Would Turn Your Brown Eyes Blue : Discovery News
 
Ambiturner

Ambiturner

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Big Phoenix_sl said:
How would this be any different than circumcising a baby? Its one thing if its fixing bad genetics to remove potential future illnesses like cancer of alzheimer's. But what about changing eye color? Gender selection? Being able to manipulate height?
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I don't see how any of that is ethically wrong.
 
iannis

iannis

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It is about that though at the root. The question isn't what you do in the cases where you are successful. If we could ensure success there would be no issue at all. How hateful do you have to be to NOT want to cure cystic fibrosis? The trouble arises with the question of what you do with your mistakes.

And we're not talking about "when does life start?????" philosophical questions or simple oopsies. We're talking about, like you say, very long test cases. Biological systems so newly understood that the field which studies them is only about 25 years old. There will be unintended consequences. To assert otherwise is either arrogant or ignorant. So the ethical question is, "wutdo?". And there's just not a very good answer.

Because there has never been a field of science, or even a field of inquiry, which progresses without mistake.
 
ZyyzYzzy

ZyyzYzzy

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There is no knowing the secondary effects of the methods. To elaborate on what hodj said about gene therapy, certain methods and vectors ysed for gene insertion have been known to cause immunosuppresion in individuals.

Same unknown secondary effects would apply in this case.
 
khalid

khalid

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While I can understand ethical concerns being something you definitely need to keep in mind, I am not a fan of avoiding publishing because of them. Science is pretty much always worse (both in progress and safety) when done in secret and without peer review.
 
Kuro

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Just get it peer reviewed by a sociology journal.
wink.png
 
AngryGerbil

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hodj_sl said:
A storyboard forBack To The Future Part IV: Genetics
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I have no doubt in our ability to make waves in gene pools. I'm not so sure in our ability to extinct our own selves through simple embryonic manipulation. If we fuck up, we must trust that that fuck-up will likely not breed. We'd be in the clear.

For us to become another species....over long stretches of time? Certainly. Maybe we will even be able to shorten that stretch of time by a small factor? Sure. But to be able to nosedive the entire gene pool in a Andreas Lubitz sort of way, is probably not a thing, to my understanding.

At worst, in my opinion, we will alter the environment faster than we could genetically adapt to it. In such a fantastic and far-off case, the ability to manipulate genes might even be an asset.

By the way. I like to think of myself as more of a member of a 'sentience' than as a member of a 'species'. Species is an amorphous term. Much like 'American'. It is not perfectly black and white. Neither is sentience for that matter, but in any case, it doesn't bother me think of humans as changing species over time. Just so long as whatever species is our eventual descendants, is as happy and wholesome and sentient as possible. I hope the supermaster genetic overlords read Homer and Lao Tzu and Newton and etc. etc..
 
hodj

hodj

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AngryGerbil_sl said:
. I'm not so sure in our ability to extinct our own selves through simple embryonic manipulation. If we fuck up, we must trust that that fuck-up will likely not breed. We'd be in the clear.
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I'm not talking about accidentally inserting a terminator type gene into our species and killing ourselves off, though. There are probably consequences worse than that, tbh,. I know the planet wouldn't miss us if we were gone, that's for sure.

Also the idea of just throwing new genes into the human species and "Trusting" fuck up won't reproduce or something is insane Dr Frankestein levels of crazy.

I'm for genetic manipulation, GMOs, etc. This isn't even about my opinion. Its about the facts of why the Journals Nature and Science won't even touch publishing this shit yet because the peer review boards know that its simply technology that isn't ready for prime time yet, and won't be for a long ass time.

We need to be able to produce more than 1 Dolly out of half a thousand tries before we're fucking with human embryos on this level. Its really just that simple.

Like I said

One day it'll happen, but its still a long way off.
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Shit simply isn't ready for human trials on any large scale basis yet, and probably won't be for another 50 plus years.
 
hodj

hodj

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That's really not how the scientific community works, especially when it comes to genomics.

When that quack in South Korea announced that he'd cloned human embryos back last decade, the world didn't gasp in fear and suddenly start trying to clone human embryos more.
 
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