Speaking of epigenetics, I’ve just discovered the existence of another class of methods, epigenome editing… And then there’s the topic of nonheritable (and possibly temporary) genetic modifications made to mature organisms. If what you care about is biological intelligence increase, somatic gene-hacking seems likely to get there before germline gene-hacking, because you don’t have to wait for your first generation to grow up.
I read something relevant to this idea tonight that I think makes it less likely we will be able to significantly impact intelligence with epigenetic editing. A paper in PNAS from last year looked at which functional regions of the genome saw enrichment of educational-attainment associated SNP hits:
The EA3 study on educational attainment, a highly polygenic trait, is another notable recent example of this type of analysis (39). A very large number of category enrichment analyses was performed on 1,271 independent genome-wide significant signals detected in a GWAS of 1.1 million individuals with educational attainment data. The authors highlight two broad findings. First, the most significantly prioritized genes that were implicated as causal show trajectories of expression in the brain that are increased before the late prenatal stage of development and decline thereafter. Weaker, newly discovered, associations showed no such trajectory. This suggests a modestly disproportionate influence of brain development relative to active brain functioning in determining differences between individual abilities underlying educational attainment, which is perhaps not surprising.
This suggest that even if we were somehow able to inject some epigenome modifying vector into brains capable of modifying a significant fraction of neurons and even if the inevitable cell mosaicism induced by such changes had no negative impact on cognitive function, we would STILL be severely limited in the proportion of genetically influenced intelligence we could impact.
Not to mention it seems very likely that the cost of modifying 86 billion cells in the brain would far exceed the cost of sequencing embryo DNA.
I read something relevant to this idea tonight that I think makes it less likely we will be able to significantly impact intelligence with epigenetic editing. A paper in PNAS from last year looked at which functional regions of the genome saw enrichment of educational-attainment associated SNP hits:
This suggest that even if we were somehow able to inject some epigenome modifying vector into brains capable of modifying a significant fraction of neurons and even if the inevitable cell mosaicism induced by such changes had no negative impact on cognitive function, we would STILL be severely limited in the proportion of genetically influenced intelligence we could impact.
Not to mention it seems very likely that the cost of modifying 86 billion cells in the brain would far exceed the cost of sequencing embryo DNA.