How difficult would it be to also apply this to the gamates and thus make any potential offspring also have the same enhanced intelligence (but this time it would go into the gene pool instead of just staying in the brain)?
Not very difficult. In fact it would be easier with fewer things that could go wrong, and a much greater ability to validate.
Does the scientific establishment think this is ethical?
It depends on who you ask, but the general answer is “no”, for reasons no one can ever articulate very clearly. In general most scientists are just extremely risk averse to doing anything that involves reproduction. See the section in the post titled “Vague associations with eugenics make some academics shy away”
Also, if you do something like this, you reduce the homogeneity of the gene pool which could make the modified babies very susceptible to some sort of disease.
Brain editing wouldn’t really affect the immune system.
Frankly of all the potential things we could edit, the one I am most hesitant about is the immune system. There are unique concerns with immunity that don’t apply to other areas: for example, we know there are genetic variants whose allele frequencies increased substantially during the black plague because they conferred significant resistance to the disease.
Some of those variants increas the risk of autoimmune disorders as well!
And given the infrequency of huge pandemics, you can’t do as good of a job making tradeoffs between decreased autoimmune risk and pandemic susceptibility.
There is a HUGE amount of variance in human immune systems. There’s so much variance in the Major Histocompatibility Complex that SNP arrays have noticeably increased error rates when we try to genotype people.
Would it be worth it to give the GMO babies a random subset of the changes to increase variation?
IMO no, but you actually bring up an interesting point: could we generate more genetic diversity by giving huge numbers of babies random variants and seeing what they do?
I think you probably could but it would take a very, very long time to suss out the full effect and incorporate it into your predictors for the next generation. Unless we have a global ban on AI development for many decades, I don’t see any point.
As far as giving different people a different subset of trait-affecting alleles, sure. You could do that in embryos.
With adults though, the bottlenecks due to editing efficiency, no effects from genes that affect development and others mean that you probably don’t want to “deselect” that many variants.
Not very difficult. In fact it would be easier with fewer things that could go wrong, and a much greater ability to validate.
It depends on who you ask, but the general answer is “no”, for reasons no one can ever articulate very clearly. In general most scientists are just extremely risk averse to doing anything that involves reproduction. See the section in the post titled “Vague associations with eugenics make some academics shy away”
Also, if you do something like this, you reduce the homogeneity of the gene pool which could make the modified babies very susceptible to some sort of disease.
Brain editing wouldn’t really affect the immune system.
Frankly of all the potential things we could edit, the one I am most hesitant about is the immune system. There are unique concerns with immunity that don’t apply to other areas: for example, we know there are genetic variants whose allele frequencies increased substantially during the black plague because they conferred significant resistance to the disease.
Some of those variants increas the risk of autoimmune disorders as well!
And given the infrequency of huge pandemics, you can’t do as good of a job making tradeoffs between decreased autoimmune risk and pandemic susceptibility.
There is a HUGE amount of variance in human immune systems. There’s so much variance in the Major Histocompatibility Complex that SNP arrays have noticeably increased error rates when we try to genotype people.
IMO no, but you actually bring up an interesting point: could we generate more genetic diversity by giving huge numbers of babies random variants and seeing what they do?
I think you probably could but it would take a very, very long time to suss out the full effect and incorporate it into your predictors for the next generation. Unless we have a global ban on AI development for many decades, I don’t see any point.
As far as giving different people a different subset of trait-affecting alleles, sure. You could do that in embryos.
With adults though, the bottlenecks due to editing efficiency, no effects from genes that affect development and others mean that you probably don’t want to “deselect” that many variants.