I think almost everyone misunderstands the level of knowledge we have about what genetic variants will do.
Nature has literally run a randomized control trial for genes already. Every time two siblings are created, the set of genes they inherit from each parent are scrambled and (more or less) randomly assigned to each. That’s INCREDIBLY powerful for assessing the effects of genes on life outcomes. Nature has run a literal multi-generational randomized control trial for the effect of genes on everything. We just need to collect the data.
This gives you a huge advantage over “shot-in-the-dark” type interventions where you’re testing something without any knowledge about how it performs over the long run.
Also, nature is ALREADY running a giant parallelized experiment on us every time a new child is born. Again, the genes they get from their parents are randomized. If reshuffling genetic variants around were extremely dangerous we’d see a huge death rate in the newborn population. But that is not in fact what we see. You can in fact change around some common genetic variants without very much risk.
And if you have a better idea about what those genes do (which we increasingly do), then you can do even better.
There are still going to be risks, but the biggest ones I actually worry about are about getting the epigenetics right.
But there we can just copy what nature has done. We don’t need to modify anything.
True, and this does indicate that children produced from genes found in 2 parents will not be outside the range which a hypothetical natural child of theirs could occupy. I am also hopeful that this is what matters, here.
However, there are absolutely, definitely viable combinations of genes found in a random pair of parents which, if combined in a single individual, result in high-IQ offspring predisposed to any number of physical or mental problems, some of which may not manifest until long after the child is born. In practice, any intervention of the type proposed here seems likely to create many children with specific combinations of genes which we know are individually helpful for specific metrics, but which may not often (or ever) have all co-occurred. This is true even in the cautious, conservative early generations where we stay within the scope of natural human variations. Thereafter, how do we ensure we’re not trialing someone on an entire generation at once? I don’t want us to end up in a situation where a single mistake ends up causing population-wide problems because we applied it to hundreds of millions of people before the problem manifested.
I think almost everyone misunderstands the level of knowledge we have about what genetic variants will do.
Nature has literally run a randomized control trial for genes already. Every time two siblings are created, the set of genes they inherit from each parent are scrambled and (more or less) randomly assigned to each. That’s INCREDIBLY powerful for assessing the effects of genes on life outcomes. Nature has run a literal multi-generational randomized control trial for the effect of genes on everything. We just need to collect the data.
This gives you a huge advantage over “shot-in-the-dark” type interventions where you’re testing something without any knowledge about how it performs over the long run.
Also, nature is ALREADY running a giant parallelized experiment on us every time a new child is born. Again, the genes they get from their parents are randomized. If reshuffling genetic variants around were extremely dangerous we’d see a huge death rate in the newborn population. But that is not in fact what we see. You can in fact change around some common genetic variants without very much risk.
And if you have a better idea about what those genes do (which we increasingly do), then you can do even better.
There are still going to be risks, but the biggest ones I actually worry about are about getting the epigenetics right.
But there we can just copy what nature has done. We don’t need to modify anything.
True, and this does indicate that children produced from genes found in 2 parents will not be outside the range which a hypothetical natural child of theirs could occupy. I am also hopeful that this is what matters, here.
However, there are absolutely, definitely viable combinations of genes found in a random pair of parents which, if combined in a single individual, result in high-IQ offspring predisposed to any number of physical or mental problems, some of which may not manifest until long after the child is born. In practice, any intervention of the type proposed here seems likely to create many children with specific combinations of genes which we know are individually helpful for specific metrics, but which may not often (or ever) have all co-occurred. This is true even in the cautious, conservative early generations where we stay within the scope of natural human variations. Thereafter, how do we ensure we’re not trialing someone on an entire generation at once? I don’t want us to end up in a situation where a single mistake ends up causing population-wide problems because we applied it to hundreds of millions of people before the problem manifested.