There are now therapies to cure monogenic conditions like sickle cell anemia or beta thalassemia.
The therapies work by withdrawing your bone marrow, edit the stem cells in solution to insert the working version of the defective protein, give the patient a dose of really terrible chemotherapy designed to eliminate the remaining (un-edited) stem cells, then re-injecting those edited cells back into the bones of patients with the disorder.
This suggests a technology with a poor level of readiness, both in it’s safety and versatility (the chemotherapy is really bad for any enhancement, and even restricted to medicine, I would be surprised if most diseases could be worse. Also, monogenic alterations are almost never that impactful in life, especially positively. So it has extremely limited versatility.)
I obviously agree that in its current form this therapy has no potential for use as a means of enhancement (at least if we define enhancement as deviation above normal human baseline).
But it’s worth pointing out that the chemotherapy step of the treatment was only necessary because ANY remaining sickle-cell carrying stem cells would continue to produce misshapen red blood cells which cause all of the symptoms and problems associated with the disease.
Other conditions are not all like that: going from no cells having a copy of some particular variant to SOME cells having a copy would still produce a positive effect.
The real reason I think somatic cell editing is unlikely to produce any large enhancements any time in the next 50 years is because you have to edit an ungodly number of cells all over the body to have an effect, and some of the modified genes won’t do anything because they’re only active during the developmental phase of a person’s lifespan.
There are now therapies to cure monogenic conditions like sickle cell anemia or beta thalassemia.
The therapies work by withdrawing your bone marrow, edit the stem cells in solution to insert the working version of the defective protein, give the patient a dose of really terrible chemotherapy designed to eliminate the remaining (un-edited) stem cells, then re-injecting those edited cells back into the bones of patients with the disorder.
It looks like in this particular study they actually used a lentivirus rather than CRISPR, but I’ve read of another study where they used CRISPR.
Last I heard though, the therapy cost $500k. At that price, you’d only ever use it for extremely debilitating monogenic mutations.
This suggests a technology with a poor level of readiness, both in it’s safety and versatility (the chemotherapy is really bad for any enhancement, and even restricted to medicine, I would be surprised if most diseases could be worse. Also, monogenic alterations are almost never that impactful in life, especially positively. So it has extremely limited versatility.)
I obviously agree that in its current form this therapy has no potential for use as a means of enhancement (at least if we define enhancement as deviation above normal human baseline).
But it’s worth pointing out that the chemotherapy step of the treatment was only necessary because ANY remaining sickle-cell carrying stem cells would continue to produce misshapen red blood cells which cause all of the symptoms and problems associated with the disease.
Other conditions are not all like that: going from no cells having a copy of some particular variant to SOME cells having a copy would still produce a positive effect.
The real reason I think somatic cell editing is unlikely to produce any large enhancements any time in the next 50 years is because you have to edit an ungodly number of cells all over the body to have an effect, and some of the modified genes won’t do anything because they’re only active during the developmental phase of a person’s lifespan.