What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

It’s almost as if this self-proclaimed adventurer, explorer and missionary never actually read a single word about the history of adventurers, explorers and missionaries. On top of that, this idiot probably just exposed the entire population of the island to pathogens they have zero natural defense for. Jesus is not impressed.

Did the thoughts and prayers not protect him? I can’t believe he forgot to do the thoughts and prayers.

What if he was an evangelist for progressivism and LGBTQ tolerance?

This is just sad.

The progressives are probably why these islanders remain so isolated. The Prime Directive and all that.

I’m kinda torn on this…on the one hand, gene editing is a really powerful tool that could do a lot of good. On the other hand, the ways it could be abused are endless.

The other shoe drops.

The president of He’s university called an emergency gathering of researchers connected to the project. “This has nothing to do with SUST, the research wasn’t conducted at SUST, and the researchers are currently suspended without pay,”… . According to the school’s biology department the research “seriously violates ethical and academic standards and regulations.”

Gengineering introduces all sorts of ethical quandries, should it be restricted to repairing defects, what is a defect, but I love my downer baby just as he is, what if I want a baby with blue eyes, etc, etc, the usual barrel of shit. The response to this has been to ban it wholesale.

Problem is that technology advances, and gets easier and cheaper, and sometimes that happens faster than you think is possible. Think self-driving cars five years ago, they were science-fiction.

Soon you’ll be able to download the specs off the internet and tailor a virus to do pretty much whatever you want. And if we don’t research appropriate uses for this technology and methods to control it, it’s gonna become commoditized and someone will buy a Chinese ripoff builder kit off gearbest.com for $199 to gengineer a super ebola that’s contagious like measles and we’re all gonna die.

We should not be engineering perfect babies. This will setup the ultimate arms race for perfection in people, casting away millions or billions who did not have the money to manufacture their children in the future. Eugenics will destroy humanity as it almost did once before.

Generally, when people are that rich - and that narcissistic that they need to engineer traits in their off-spring they will also engender the worst of humanities traits in those kids.


So they don’t know who sponsored the research? I know the type that would sponsor that kind of unregulated human guinea pig research and they’re pure scum:

PETER THIEL

The number of individuals who changed the world with imperfect genes is pretty large. At the same time, it’s hard not to want to limit the genes that lead to terminal or debilitating illnesses. Then the pressure on the kids… parents put a lot of pressure on their not perfect to order children. Can you imagine what would happen if that perfect model baby wound up being fat by the age of 10…

As someone who got to watch his grandfather waste away to ALS, and just saw one of his gf’s favorite showrunners ever pass to the same, I absolutely grasp the horrifying implifications of gene editing and designer babies, but there is a lovely undercurrent of horrifying, guilt-inducing panic that continuously shrieks “FUCK THAT NOISE CRISPR MY 'SOMES BABY” in the back of my skull.

Don’t worry. Climate change will kill us all before this becomes an issue. Look on the bright side.

Gengineering is unavoidable, it’s manifest destiny. The technology exists, can’t put the genie back in the bottle, and it will get cheaper, fast. We need to figure out how to deal with that.

This is the horrible double edged sword. Think of our current loser leader and his insane narcissism. His “my kids are better than yours because they’re thin, blue-eyed, blond haired etc”. I’m also disgusted with the designer embryo facilities. There’s a person who remains nameless who decided she needed blond haired, blue eyed kids with specific traits. It made me want to barf cause it was just like when they went shopping for a designer pure-breed dog. I think these facilities should only match -parental natural eye/hair color and not let you choose because it turns having children into some sick shopping experience.

On the other hand, debilitating diseases, if they could be treated embryonically would be great. But… what about those people who can’t afford it? The sick become stigmatized as the “too poor to avoid disease” types.

And you know me, I have one of those horrible inherited diseases. So the only way forward is to have the most ironclad laws world-wide to keep the lid on the eugenics with protections for the rest of us (along with an emphasis on research to treat existing and newly merging diseases) to do this right. In this country alone, 40% the population is batshit crazy.

The moment some high profile celebrity or political type designs their kids to fit a Eugenics scheme? Yikes.

Here’s where things are messed up on that purported research. HIV is not untreatable, nor is it an inherited disease. It is not like an ALS, CF, nor Alzeimers. Not only is it not baked into our genes, there will be a vaccine in the not too distant future. So this experiment fails every single ethical standard known to exist. Not only that, HIV is not widely endemic to the Chinese country, so yet again this makes no sense in the context of the disease nor the parents home country.

I would not wish terrible, painful or just unfortunate diseases on anyone, but some of those people changed the world. Who is to say they would do that if they could have had normal as an option. It’s moralistic dilemma that won’t be solved soon, if ever, and while some will be arguing about it for years the rich will just go out and get it done because someone will offer it at a high price no matter what any government or ethics committee has to say about it.

I will say this though, diversity in a species, any species, is important.

Life is messy :(

  1. HIV is treatable, but it still killed nearly a million people globally last year. More than malaria and TB, both of which are also treatable.

  2. Nobody knows when, or if, a vaccine for HIV will be developed. If you contract or die of HIV tomorrow, it no longer matters that a vaccine is right around the corner.

  3. This research is unethical because genetic manipulation of an embryo can have permanent unintended consequences, not because genes are sacred. If we could be absolutely certain that CRISPR was 100% safe, then there would be no ethical dilemma.

  4. The father of the Chinese children has HIV, which is why children were considered at risk. Can’t say I understand the reasoning, but it has nothing to do with the endemic rate of HIV in China.

The majority of those dying of this disease (Africa), I doubt could ever dream of being able to afford custom edited embryos via IVF. CRISPER and protein entrenchment aside, IVF on its own is insanely expensive (at least in the United States).

This set of trials has me optimistic:

While I’m not sure if can be infallible due to the rapidity of HIV to mutate and change its protein coat, I hope it comes through.

There are still plenty of people dying of HIV in the US. About 5,000 last year, roughly as common as deaths from motorcycle accidents.

Also, whether the treatment is affordable has nothing to do with whether the research is ethical. Brain surgery is incredibly expensive, yet is still a major focus of research.