Some gene edited animals have been unintentionally deformed. There are gene edited rabbits with enlarged tongues and pig’s with extra vertebrae.
Rapid progress in gene editing is being made but there is still a lot to learn.
We know enough now to be really dangerous. 20-30 yrs from now this will all be trivial and easy.
There was recently the editing of human fertilized cells and embryos. The cost of actual CRISPR gene editing was as little as one hundred dollars. The far greater costs are the many gene sequencings before and after to ensure that the correct change was made.
The learnings needed are not just that changing one gene or multiple genes has particular desired effects but also what unintended effects occur.
There are already huge gains and benefits with the gene editing and gene therapy that we can perform now.
Crops, microbes and animals can be modified at an accelerated pace. Previously we had been using breeding methods for centuries and millenia. We still use breeding. Now have gene sequencing for systematic breeding and embryo selection.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Don’t shrink the brain.
Yep. Religious people would rather hire morons who are in the same religion than anyone else… which is why they are a threat to the future. No religion will protect you from ignorance over the eons
The solar system is huge in resource potential…..yet we want to go extinct on Earth. Here is a pointer. If we solve our current catastrophically problem on Earth, we also have the technical ability to expand to the stars.
They believe in souls and supernaturalism
It seems science fiction is ahead of the issue. For instance, the evolution of a fage virus disease from botched gene tech to fight disease. In other words, you engineer a fage to attack antibiotic resistent bacteria but it instead infects human cells probably from nonspecificity.
Which leads to epigenetic engineering through RNA….but as long as a human chooses, it will be bad. The order must be maintained
Gene editing exists without human volition. But of course, it is only bad when a human decides
You can’t know unintended consequences till they happen.
Rather, the problem is: human volition.
WE accept the horrid nature of bad genetics as long as a human didn’t mess with the germ line consciously…but when partners cocieve without genetic matching and get really bad genetic disorders, no one bats an eyelash.
If we knew how, CRISPERing everyone into geniuses would be considerd unethical, but enabling morons to become normal wouldn’t. Also, allowing poor people to have the same access as the rich would be considered unethical.
Learning why these things happened is probably more important than a successful experiment.
I’ve seen the “shrink people” idea before. The idea is that all our current stock of buildings, vehicles, food supply, even land would be twice as big if we were all twice as small.
It seems to me to be an idea that sounds cool at a high school debate level, but in real life we would have to rebuild all those buidings and vehicles and stuff to suit our new sizes, and so we could have done the same amount of building to just make twice as much full sized stuff.
Plus we would now be prey sized to dogs.
When the character in question is a Tribble I’ll be worried again.
what??!! why would you want to shrink people??
There’s actually precious little downside to that, except they will be immunologically “blank” universal donor subsets, and not likely grown in a human shaped incubator at all.
In some sense we have been forewarned by the Satanic Conjurors what plans the have for the sub-humans..
The risk is in the second or third order effects inside a complex system. Will doing something seeming isolated and trivial eventually create an incubator for new viruses? It may be low risk but it is hubris to think we can know how small genetic level changes can change the thousands of feedback intensive components of a living system. Also, the temptation is going to be to making these animals more resistant to viruses that kill so many densely packed livestock (since this is the main economic risk). This is playing directly with genes that could breed new species jumping viruses. A pandemic is the #1 risk to humanity … not nuke war or climate change.
‘Degenerate people’ are those that are ‘grown’ for organs to be harvested. We are nice enough to only include the lower brain which is necessary for respiratory function and endocrine system regulation. No more transplant rejection, because the clones share 100% of your genes, but you have to wait 5 years for a kidney or liver; that is why we recommend annual checkups and blood chemistry evaluation.
” to grow more beef that degenerate people ” <– I get to that italicized point and I have to wonder if that was a typo caused by voice to text or something , or if you are only stupid or actually evil.
When we’re at the level that is happening on purpose, I’ll be quite relieved.
Pretty sure we want to figure out such screwups in animals. Seems quite reasonable actually.
I have not read the “Third Reich’s play-book” but it would really surprise me if they were not right about somethings. Just because they were evil does not make them dumb.
How about we start by boosting EVERYONE’S intelligence by 50%. At that point the rest will take care of itself because ALL of us will have much better answers.
There is economic pressure that selects for the predilection to hold religious views so it would likely just evolve again.
Abominations like you??? 😉 Seriously, your notion are right out of the Third Reich’s play-book.
You forgot to mention the religulous
Not to mention getting rid of those that cannot distinguish fantasy from reality. Those that equate beliefs and ignorance with knowledge and enlightenment. Cant wait to cleanse the human race of the selfish, the prejudice, the irrational, the inept, the wicked and the vile.
A bright day is dawning.
“Knowing enough to be really dangerous” customarily implies not knowing enough to avoid the negative consequences of ones actions.
Basic reading comprehension…We know enough to be dangerous with gene editing because “we” know enough of the mechanics of altering genes while not having a clue as to the consequence.
We can make superior humans. Get rid of the gay gene, gender dysphoria gene, mental retardation gene, autism gene, etc. Can’t wait to cleanse the human race of abnormalities and deformities.
R. Kimhi, let me just take a shot in the dark. You have no use for gene editing because you are wealthy compared to the rest of the world and have never known real hunger, plus you have never had a child die in your arms from starvation. If this technology will feed just 1% more of the world’s population I am all for it. But based on studies it can feed a whole lot more than that. Plus imagine if gene editing could make us all shrink to even just 1/2 vour current size what that would do to feeding the world let alone shelter and clothing. Your house would seem like a palace with so much more room.
If you know “enough”, you can probably avoid those “dangerous” consequences. I find this tweet-like article neither useful nor convincing in any sense in explaining how and why we know enough to be dangerous with gene editing.
Maybe we know enough about gene editing to grow more beef that degenerate people but we don’t have a science that is willing to explore the significance of natural conception and orgasm. You need to have a very small mind to not have the ability to accept that we are more than cyborgs.
when they genetically modify people to look like Star Trek characters I’ll be worried…
The buzzword is Epigenetics. Genes exibit direct control over some aspects of growth, and in interaction with other genes or factors, have influence not predicted. There is a whole second level to the language directing biological expression.