House spending panel drops U.S. ban on gene-edited babies

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/house-spending-panel-drops-us-ban-gene-edited-babies

by okket • 7 years ago

71 100 7 years ago

The provision was dropped because it was inserted in private 3 years ago and has never been subject to public debate

I've heard about this law before (so it's not obscure) but I never knew this. I wonder how many other common laws were just inserted into other laws behind closed doors that affect us every day.

jschwartzi• 7 years ago

Most of these are riders on the appropriations bills because the congressperson in question knows there's no other way to get their pet ideology past the house. For example if this ban were just a bill it probably wouldn't make it past the committee. But by attaching it as a rider to the appropriations bill they make sure that anyone voting against the rider looks like they're voting against funding the federal government.

rayiner• 7 years ago

There was nothing "closed door" about it. Congress held a contemporaneous hearing on the issue: https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2015/06/mcnally-testi.... It was included in house bundle of amendments: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/2029.... That set of amendments then had to be reconciled between the house and senate versions before it was ultimately voted on. It made sense to include it in a budget bill, because the ban only precludes using federal funding to do such experiments.

ZhuanXia7• 7 years ago

Anyone paying attention to cognitive genomics knows wide-spread germ-line engineering is inevitable. The gains are just too great. Once we know the causal variants, raising IQ by 5+ standard deviations will be very feasible. In the short term (next 5-10 years) half a standard deviation is possible with single-trait embryo selection.

And iterated embryo selection (which does not require knowing the causal variants, just the predictive ones) will also be possible, and offers 5+ SDs.

Gwern has a great write about about it here: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection

With this in mind, does anyone really think China and Singapore will not embrace this? And if they do it and we do not we would be as children compared to them.

Max_aaa4• 7 years ago

All it takes is for one group to start. Then the rest would either have to follow or be overtaken.

zapita• 7 years ago

Actually all it takes is for one group to make the assumption you just made.

ZhuanXia7• 7 years ago

Exactly, it is overdetermined. In the west we have Lysenkoists on the left (who refuse to acknowledge that intelligence is even heritable) and on the right we have people who believe embryos have souls.

Asia has none of these problems, and will thus force us to get over our scruples.

ladberg• 7 years ago

Where are you getting 5+ standard deviations from? That's an insane number. Assuming a normal distribution, around ~2000 people in the world would fit that description today, and finding those 2000 and analyzing their genes to find what's different would be a nearly impossible task.

ZhuanXia7• 7 years ago

It does not work like you would intuitively think, where smart people have special unique alleles that make them so smart, instead they have a higher proportion of common alleles that have a slight positive effect on IQ and a lower proportion of common alleles that have a slight negative effect on IQ.

RobertoG• 7 years ago

"And if they do it and we do not we would be as children compared to them. "

It seems to me that if that happen the big division (us and them) will not be along national lines, but generational. So, we would be like children, compared to our children, anyway.

Maybe I'm growing old, but sometimes I already feel like that.

brighter2morrow• 7 years ago

If we can edit cognitive things like IQ then will we be able to modify other cognitive things like sexuality and gender identity?

devoply7• 7 years ago

Here we go again... You would think we learned the first time with the Nazis... but nope... The seduction of the ubermensch is too strong.

I would like to point out that there is no higher, just fit for purpose. If you give these technologies to businesses and to governments they will use it instrumentally to create stronger soldiers that can take more abuse or build better workers that don't feel any negative emotions and can work longer hours. In the current environment this is stupid.

Just look at what we have done to dogs, you want to see human equivalent to pugs or chiwawas.... or rottweilers?... or hell chickens.

dekhn2• 7 years ago

complex phenotypes like intelligence are dominated by small effects caused by large numbers of variants. it's not simple "causal variant" like you see in mendelian disease.

We also don't know what the long term effects of making changes like this are.

ZhuanXia7• 7 years ago

I know that; I said "causal variants" not "causal variant."

It will take hundreds of edits to raise IQ several SDs. I think this will be very feasible in 10 to 20 years.

quotemstr8• 7 years ago

It really doesn't help that much of the public conversation is based on the false premise that intelligence is primarily an environmental phenomenon and that heredity has only a minor influence or none at all. The blank slate model is severely incompatible with how biology actually works, and a civilization holding onto it when competitor civilizations are embracing gene editing technology and intelligence augmentation will guarantee failure.

buckminster• 7 years ago

If very high intelligence was an unmitigated good then wouldn't evolution have done this already?

SkyBelow• 7 years ago

No. Evolution works on a 'good enough to not die out' basis, except quite a lot of species do die out.

devoply7• 7 years ago

Just look at high intelligence and its correlation with all sorts of other issues including rare diseases, social issues, mental health issues, etc. It's empty idealism to think that the human condition can be solved through genetic engineering, if anything it can be made quite a bit worse.

quotemstr8• 7 years ago

Why would it? Evolution cares about only "fitness", which is the ability to survive and reproduce. It doesn't care about intelligence or happiness or health or anything else except to the extent that these things promote survival and reproduction.

Current human populations are actually being somewhat negatively selected for intelligence, since at least in the developed world fertility is inversely correlated with education (except at the insignificant extreme high end).

scohesc• 7 years ago

I'd say they've already embraced genetically modifying animals and now most likely humans. There's a lot we don't know about in China considering their secrecy and control of information.

djohnston• 7 years ago

I agree with you on most points, but I do hope the timeline isn't so fast. I was hoping to be dead before this happened.

danarlow• 7 years ago

This is not correct reasoning about genetics. I've seen a lot of comments with this same incorrect claim on HN recently. In a complex trait like IQ, there is no reason to believe that stacking all of the alleles that each are individually associated with small gains in IQ will result in a large cumulative effect on IQ, let alone an additive effect. It could easily result in decreased IQ-- there are plenty of examples of negative epistatic interactions between loci. Even if you had all the individuals in the world in your GWAS, you couldn't estimate all of the possible pairwise interactions between loci, let alone fit the higher-order terms. The only way to really measure the effect of a combination of alleles is to find a subpopulation with that combination. That hasn't stopped people from trying to fit polygenic models for IQ based on all of these tiny effects, and unsurprisingly the best model only explains 10% of the heritability of the trait. I don't think that model has been carefully validated in a new cohort either, so I wouldn't be surprised if the true predictive power was lower.

dooglius• 7 years ago

Is there any reason to disbelieve it? It seems like a reasonable thing to try.

est31• 7 years ago

This is interesting. Do you have any links to research about the topic?

hodder2• 7 years ago

Your claims are completely unverifiable speculation and are frankly absurd. I would bet every dollar I have against there being a simple method to increase IQ by 0.5 SDs within 5-10 yrs. I’m sorry but your prediction of 5SD increase is frankly science fiction novel territory. It is not science.

Gene editing will be pursued around the globe, and countries that fail to embrace it may be left behind in health and wellness. However, let’s not radically rush to science fiction level conclusions (stated as fact) of megahumans without any evidence that it may be possible.

[Edited for an incorrect use of hyperbole around the math of 5x standard devs. I removed it from the post as I am acknowledging that using excess hyperbole in a post specifically directed at criticism of wild predictions is beyond ironic and unfair to the OP above.]

ZhuanXia7• 7 years ago

I did not say 1000 times smarter. I said 5+ standard deviations. John von Neumann had an IQ 5+ SD above the mean. We know this phenotype is possible. It is not science fictional to think we can raise the average to at least his point. In animal breeding we increase traits by much more than 5 standard deviations all the time.

Iterated embryo selection and/or direct genetic engineering will be able to do this. It breaks no physical laws, it is in concert with what we have already observed and our understanding of cognitive genomics is getting to the point that it is becoming increasingly obvious to anyone paying attention that we will be able to select/edit for intelligence comparable to John von Neumann.

Look at the "Known for" section of his Wikipedia page to see what such people will be capable of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

"That sounds vaguely like a science fiction story" is a very poor heuristic for determining if something is possible.

Max_aaa4• 7 years ago

The Gattaca future is slowly turning into reality.

52-6F-62• 7 years ago

Mixed with Brave New World.

quotemstr8• 7 years ago

Gattaca is a favorite of mine, but I've always thought of it more as a utopian film than a dystopian one.

Max_aaa4• 7 years ago

If you think about it, there really not much difference. As one person's utopia would at the same time be another's dystopia.

It is all a matter of perspective.

Ancalagon2• 7 years ago

I know this article is more about the political dance than actual gene-edited babies, but modified human embryos is a whole can-of-worms and is such a game changer I feel the need to worry about it. We don't even fully understand the consequences of much of the technology we use today. Altering gene lines is such a huge power, we'd literally be playing god, and probably rolling the dice on so many aspects of the future for generations to come. If ever there were a technology humanity needed to think conservatively about, this is it.

okket• 7 years ago

but modified human embryos is a whole can-of-worms and is such a game changer I feel the need to worry about it.

Playing random lottery and hoping not to draw the gene-defect ticket while only evolve on a scale of 1,000s of generations is better? We might not even have 1,000 generations left on this planet.

Ancalagon2• 7 years ago

Well notice I said conservatively. I do think gene-editing for very specific diseases should be permissible, given societal approval and control. Allowing enhancements for things in more ethically gray areas (height, intelligence, good-looks, etc.) will in the short run quickly make you and me obsolete. In the long run edits like those will make the current wealth stratification of society look cute in comparison.

Y-bar• 7 years ago

I believe it is more about who get to have access to this and the social consequences of that. It could conceivably create a permanent class structure where those who can afford to have “perfect” healthy, smarter, longer living, and so on offspring will inevitably exploit that position. It could make me the wealth and class divides with better care and better schools the rich can afford we see today seem quaint in comparison.

Wowfunhappy• 7 years ago

Something that has been niggling at me for a while:

• C-Sections now account for 30% of all births, compared to 5% in 1970.

• Preliminary evidence suggests that babies born via C-Section are themselves more likely to have children that require C-Sections.

Source: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/12/7/13855350/c-...

Assuming this applies to other traits as well—as evolutionary theory suggests it should—what are the long term consequences for humanity? This line of thinking has led past leaders down some very dark paths, which I am fully uninterested in traveling.

But, what is the ethical alternative? The only one I can think of is to take control of our evolution directly, rather than allowing natural selection—or lack thereof—to run its course. And thank god, it actually looks like modern science will make this possible!

logfromblammo5• 7 years ago

90% of bulldogs require c-section to deliver successfully.

It can become a problem in humans, but as our evolution may be self-directed, we might also decide that larger cranium-to-pelvis ratios make it easier to educate those babies to become obstetric surgeons.

And eventually, it might be prudent to gene-hack the plumbing, to reroute the birth canal so that it does not pass through the pelvic opening. Then enormous-head mutations could more easily survive without intervention.

cadlin• 7 years ago

C section rates above ~20% aren't correlated with better health outcomes. They will probably decline as federal heartbeat detection improves, as a major driver for them right now is losing track of the heartbeat and performing a c section as risk mitigation

ars3• 7 years ago

I hope not, c-sections are much harder on the mother, far more painful, and more disabling.

I really hope we do not end up in a world where c-sections are the only way.

I even more prematurity the solution instead?

mtgx• 7 years ago

Companies have argued before that they own the products created with their modified genes. Will they try to claim ownership of these babies, too?

gaogao• 7 years ago

Eh, the baby is probably enough of a transformative work to be covered under fair use.

carbocation• 7 years ago

Here is the view on germline gene editing from the discoverer of CRISPR, the one who brought it into human cells, the director of the Broad Institute, and other scientists who actually work with gene editing technology:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00726-5

Title: "Adopt a moratorium on heritable genome editing"

ourmandave• 7 years ago

Will Alabama have to amend their anti-abortion bill to include no exclusions if your designer baby is genetically defective?

logfromblammo5• 7 years ago

If you want to terminate on demand anywhere in Jesusland, you need to genetically engineer your babies to not have souls.

One might argue that this has already been done, and the results are now running the legislature.

ars3• 7 years ago

There are plenty of atheists who are opposed to abortion.

Atheists do not believe adults have souls either, but are opposed to killing them. All you have to do is consider the unborn child alive to be opposed to killing it, it's not necessarily a religious argument.

program_whiz2• 7 years ago

I doubt we have the moral discipline to correctly control this technology. Look at how our genetic engineering of dogs and cats, and food has gone. Those with power have used those to permute that which they control for their own good. Think its just going to be "super smart kids"? Probably for those that are rich enough to afford the treatment, but it will probably also mean "workers without emotion", and "super soliders" who are willing to kill anyone on command.

This is assuming that any train can easily be manipulated like intelligence, and that it is isn't polygenic (there are over 500 genes), and that by editing them you won't cause other problems along the way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

quotemstr8• 7 years ago

Who are you to define what counts as correct use of this technology? What's immoral in my book is slowing the deployment of this extremely beneficial technology on specious ethical grounds.

If you don't get to decide for other people the criteria for pairing up and having children, why should you get to decide for them which fertilized embryos they choose to implant and raise?

As for genetic engineering of food? All domestication is genetic engineering. GMO just accelerates the process, and it's allowed us to maintain extremely high yields that feed the world population. Would you kill half the people on the planet to undo the green revolution? Is biotechnology that much of a moral offense to you?

program_whiz2• 7 years ago

No biotech isn't a moral offense to me, I see the usefulness of it. I'm just pointing out that we don't view the natural state of things as sacrosanct -- once given the tools we will attempt to engineer ourselves into a new vision of perfection. The most likely outcome is total disaster (see almost every bioengineering attempt around the world by introducing or modifying species). There are 99 ways to fail for every 1 that improves the situation (and most of the "improvements" are short-term and from one limited perspective e.g. GMO corn prevents short-term starvation, but has other unexpected consequences on water / land / politics).

Given our lack of moral / ethical maturity as a species in general (just look back at the early days of any tech and the experiments on humans), I'm just projecting out the likely outcome of having this at hand.

While most of us wouldn't abuse this, you're giving the tools to do this out to a species with 7 billion members, so even if 1 smart person in 7 billion or any person in the future decides to abuse this tech to harm humanity somehow, then it can / will happen. And even if every single person who ever uses it only tries to "improve things", then at best we can expect something like our current environmental engineering efforts (e.g. some good, mostly disaster).

devereaux3• 7 years ago

Reading the comments here, all I see is doom and gloom. Not a single positive view. It is sad to read that on HN of all places.

Will some bad things happen? Yes, like when humanity learned about atom fission. But the overall result is a net positive: lots of energy for everyone (and yes, that includes Iran) and no world war since then, even with major tensions like during the cold war.

As someone else said, there seems to be a curious wrapped view in the West that did not exist some generation before. Just even looking at old tv shows (Star Trek TOS) you can see people had faith that the future would be better. And the future kept its promises - lower mortality, longer lifespan, a dramatic reduction in poverty worldwide, etc. But the very few movies where you still see this positive stance are usually not made in the West.

For some reason it has fashionable to signal the future will be a dystopia. Sorry, no - there is no future, just what we are doing. If you do not like what you do, maybe do something else to make the world a better place? Or at least, don't complain about your own choices.

Fortunately, many countries in say Asia do not have the binders the West has. And please, do not say that they are "backwards" and will "evolve" their morals to see the light and adopt your own biased views. In my book, it's the West that's getting backwards and entering into some new middle age based on the new religion of environmentalism and naturalism.

Whatever. I personally do not care which country furthers humanity scientific progress, and I will take any advance as a "win" for team humanity.

Analemma_4• 7 years ago

You could've picked so many examples to support your thesis, and you went with fission? That is the worst possible choice.

Will some bad things happen? Yes, like when humanity learned about atom fission. But the overall result is a net positive: lots of energy for everyone (and yes, that includes Iran) and no world war since then, even with major tensions like during the cold war.

The fact that we haven't (yet) destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons is mostly thanks to sheer dumb luck, which becomes obvious when you start really looking at the history of nuclear weapons: all the close calls, the combination locks on warheads set to 000000, etc. Using fission as your go-to example of "See? It's OK, we can handle world-ending technologies" is just appallingly wrong, it actually demonstrates precisely the opposite. We can't be trusted with fission and only still have it because political realities mean we can't get rid of it.

Or to put it another way, in any given year there is an X% chance we destroy civilization with fission. X is probably considerably less than 1%, but it isn't zero, and so the Law of Large Numbers essentially demands if we keep rolling the dice without total disarmament, sooner or later they will come up snake eyes. What you want here is to introduce new ELE-enabling technologies, essentially multiplying X by a constant. Madness.

devereaux3• 7 years ago

Using fission as your go-to example of "See? It's OK, we can handle world-ending technologies" is just appallingly wrong, it actually demonstrates precisely the opposite. We can't be trusted

The fact that we are alive seems to demonstrate precisely the opposite. You also conveniently forgot how many countries engaged in bilateral disarming programs (well, maybe Ukraine shouldn't have...) and how it generally makes sense because these nuclear weapons are expansive to maintain.

Still, you consider global atomic war a recurring risk every year, because you do not trust fellow human beings taking the right decision: "we can't be trusted".

This is why I believe this opposition comes from wrapped world views, a lack of trust in the future and future generations.

It seems like a sad way to live. Meanwhile, the world is improving, little by little.

DanielBMarkham• 7 years ago

Interesting discussion here.

I don't care what you do with your genes or your kids' genes.

Having said that, there's this slippery-slope we get on where we say something like "Here's this new thing that gives us X. We've never done it before and we're really not sure what the side effects are, but X is pretty cool! Since other people are doing X, we have to do it as well!"

You can run that line of argument with dozens of cutting-edge scientific topics. At the extreme, you end up with some version of "Anything that might make us better than the other guys, we are forced to do -- even if it has terrible consequences"

Since that extreme does not work for me, there must be some limiting factor here that we're not talking about. I do not know what that factor is. It does make sense, however, that asking for public funding along these lines doesn't look like a good way to keep the peace. Eugenics wasn't a good idea, was it? Forced sterilization? How about encouraged or paid-for sterilization? Please keep these as rhetorical questions -- the only reason I brought them up is to show that "better humans through genetics" doesn't have a very happy history.

Hasz• 7 years ago

Speaking only of intelligence modification.

Everyone seems to be making a leap from high IQ --> dominating the world. Sure, your average world leader is probably has a higher IQ, on average, than her constituents. But this relationship is not causal, nor is it reversible. Simply making babies "smarter" is not going to result in them ruling the world in a few years and causing massive generational strife. If you'd like examples, I recommend checking out a MENSA meeting (Kidding, there's some perfectly nice people there). But the point still stands -- social standing, zip code, parental achievement, and even height are all important factors in success; intelligence is only one facet of a successful individual.

This is, of course, assuming that we can freely increase intelligence with no repercussions -- are these high IQ individuals at risk of [schizophrenia](http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/000607.html), or other mental disease?

I would also like to point out that the biggest real gains will come to those who move first. You can't be 5 sigma out when everyone else has the same gene modifications as you.

ZhuanXia7• 7 years ago

This is, of course, assuming that we can freely increase intelligence with no repercussions -- are these high IQ individuals at risk of [schizophrenia](http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/000607.html), or other mental disease?

The whole "IQ is a curse" thing is mostly cherry picking. IQ basicly improves everything about a person: https://www.gwern.net/iq

It is not associated with any illnesses, save for poor eyesight.

Analemma_4• 7 years ago

You're responding to an argument the parent didn't make. They weren't saying IQ is bad, they're saying it's not sufficient to rule. Charisma, sociopathy, parents' socioeconomic status, and physical attractiveness all seem to correlate with political power much more strongly than IQ does.

namlem• 7 years ago

But we can edit genes related to other traits as well, such as charisma or emotional resilience.

CriticalCathed• 7 years ago

How about making your baby smarter, healthier, and more ambitious? Less fearful?

Balgair2• 7 years ago

Less fearful?

That is going to be a mixed bag, at best.

mc32• 7 years ago

Wait... why would people who govern countries and institutions being intelligent (or high IQ) be bad or undesirable? Would people rather have average or low IQ people dominating world leadership and institutions?

CM30• 7 years ago

Agreed 100%. People really overvalue intelligence when it comes to predicting who can take power or rule the world. And up to a certain point, there is certainly a correlation. Someone whose IQ is significantly lower than average is likely going to struggle to run an electoral campaign or gain popular support for their policies.

But yeah, other factors outweigh this significantly. If you grow up in an extremely poor area with limited resources, then having an IQ that's twice the national average is probably not going to help that much. Even in places with a working political system, things like economic class, your parents, plain luck, etc have a huge impact on your chances.

And heck, even then it's not guaranteed. People don't vote 100% rationally, and the politician who does well is often less the guy who knows most about the issues affecting the day/has a better academic pedigree and more the one average Joe can see themselves going out for a drink with.

Even then there's still a good risk of this potential high IQ politician having the 'wrong' political views (which would make them virtually unelectable), the media not taking them to them well (which could destroy their reputation) or people in general just not liking them for whatever petty reason.

As you say, merely making them smarter won't result in them ruling the world, and nor will improving every other characteristic/quality necessarily do the same.

paulkon• 7 years ago

If there was a gene for 'hustle' and 'street smarts' it would make a difference across the spectrum of social classes and environments.

Balgair2• 7 years ago

I also feel that this is all so much hand-wringing in the end.

We're just at the start of understanding how the genome and proteome interact, let alone the development from one cell to one trillion. Likely, barring some very extreme and barbaric live-human tests, we'll never really know how this all works.

Gene editing will be mostly used in beneficial ways, not in these extreme ways. Diseases will be bred out of our species, cancers will be sequenced and then better chemo will be used against them (already happening), CRISPR CAS-9 will be used for sensory restoration techniques like elminating color-blindness and hearling loss. Sure, a few million eyes will be blue instead of brown, and sure, there will be a lot of taller people.

But, due to the complexity of development, the genome, and the (correct) adversion to human experimentation, things as complex as 'smartness' or 'tenacity' or 'beauty' will not be modified in such extreme ways.

gwern• 7 years ago

This is, of course, assuming that we can freely increase intelligence with no repercussions -- are these high IQ individuals at risk of [schizophrenia](http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/000607.html), or other mental disease?

You realize that all of the studies cited in that link show that schizophrenia positively correlates with lower IQ, right, and that higher IQ is protective? (Which is correct, as the inverse correlation between IQ & schizophrenia has been documented for a very long time, and is re-documented on the genetic level now that we have schizophrenia PGSes.)

House spending panel drops U.S. ban on gene-edited babies

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