Designer Genomes

shadar wrote:

AuGoose wrote: ((Nods vigorously)) See? Better living through Science!

While the Nazi's have thoughtfully put eugenics back about a thousand years, its hard to imagine loving, hopeful, and anxious parents saying 'No' when you tell them, "would you like for your child to be safe from heart disease? Would like for them to not need glasses?"

In the futures I imagine the human race will re-write itself not in some grand Huxley-esque governmental conspiracy to divide up the Alphas and Epsilon's... it'll happen one child at a time, a piecemeal-patchwork of shaved off dead ends and the most gentle additions working its way through to populace over generations. Because while societies like to get wrapped around the axle about the possibly morality, parents JUST WANT WHAT'S BEST FOR THEIR CHILD. It's a sales pitch that will not be denied.

Its amazing the number of directions that SF has already taken us regarding this topic, but most have been dystopian visions of how it can go wrong.

But what if it goes right? The idea of parents being able to edit their DNA to ensure their kids only get the good parts is a no brainer.

When I left Asia ten years ago, this was already a topic, and not just in SF forums. It started with cryo-banking of cord blood at birth (rich stem cell source to regrow organs and fix whatever breaks down the road). The better hospitals had a busy cord blood bank office right next to the maternity ward. Most middle-class parents were providing this legacy for their children even back then.

Given fewer morality constraints among the more practical Asians (you rarely find Chinese who subscribe to fundamentalist religious thinking), plus the incredibly strong desire to make their children more successful than their parents (spending every dollar on ensuring that), there is a ready market for the technology. So the practical applications will almost undoubtedly start there. Singapore and China for sure.

Innovations may come out of North America and Europe, but the rubber will meet the road in Asia, and almost certainly in our lifetimes. Or so I see it.

It'll start with fixing/removing bad genes. But it won't take long to move to inserting better genes than the parent's possess.

Based on what I saw with women selecting from a sperm bank menu (one exceptionally brilliant and physically gifted Danish man has 'fathered' thousands of babies through sperm banks), it will move to allowing extremely gifted people to license portions of their genome. Doesn't take much imagination to see where that could go.

What you can depend on is that it will start with the rich giving their kids exceptional advantages. Just like they do today, only more so. How many wealthy men have married exceptionally attractive younger women and produced exceptionally attractive children? Or just exceptional people marrying other exceptional people. Then send their kids to the finest schools on the planet. Common enough.

But there is still a lot of chance and even some randomness in the outcome. But what if they could ratchet that up another order of magnitude with surety of the outcome? It would sell. Guaranteed.

Not sure we get to Gattaca this way, and if that drove even more inequality, then that could get dicey. But such technology will have such a strong driver as AuGoose states that it will not be denied. We're talking some primal forces of parenting here.