My son Oliver was born with mitochondrial disease and was killed by conditions associated with it at the age of 19. Some of the people mentioned in the report here were involved in his diagnosis and care.
His life deteriorated from that of a normal, fun loving intelligent kid to an isolated bed-bound disabled teenager, fed by total parenteral nutrition and suffering a variety of awful complications. His eventual passing was cruel and brutal. I'm not sure we will ever get over it as a family.
This treatment does now at least offer me a glimmer of grandchildren (my daughter having decided she would not risk children of her own until now). It's a remarkable achievement.
As a parent of teenagers it pained my heart to even read this. I cannot fathom what it is like to endure it and live with it after the fact. I am very sorry for what you experienced and what Oliver experienced.
I think it would be better to describe this as an ‘organelle’ transplant as it would be easier for people to understand and discuss. Yes there is a donor (egg) and yes the new child will pass on the mitochondria to her children. But calling it a 3 person baby is unhelpful and misleading as IMO mitochondria DNA is of a different category to chromosomal DNA.
It's inheritable so it's more than a liver transplant.
I agree that DNA in mitochondria is much smaller than DNA in the nucleus. But in each person there are many mitochondria and they nay have slightly different DNA. And the DNA in mitochondria has a different variation than the DNA in the nucleus. So it's difficult to weight both.
Can we say 2.1 parents? A long time ago I read that most binary classifications are not completely binaries, it's just that 2 options cover almost all the cases. (Are virus alive?) I guess integer classifications also have hidden corner cases.
I also remember from a biology book that in a lab they mixed two blastula(?) of small lizards(?) or something like that. They had different skin color and the baby had patches of both colors. Does that count as 2 or 4 parents?
Certainly Mother Nature is not obliged to have simple easy to understand binaries where it would be convenient for us and so if we think we see such a binary we should keep in mind that maybe we hallucinated it into existence because it was convenient and that's all.
I agree wholeheartedly. This strikes me as the way science works. Theories are useful because of their predictive value. If we think of biological sciences as different than physical or mathematical, it seems we have set ourselves up for failure. Yet that seems like exactly the kind of perspective missing and trying to be pointed out by the earlier comment's attempted splitting of the difference to "2.1 parents" to me.
While it is a different category that chromosomal DNA, it is still an essential part of mammalian life. None of use would exist in our current forms without mitochondria
As I understand it, a human egg has about an equal quantity of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA. The mitochondrial DNA is highly replicated, though (about 100,000 mitochondria, each with ~16600 base pairs of DNA).
> For most organisms the "stop codons" are "UAA", "UAG", and "UGA". In vertebrate mitochondria "AGA" and "AGG" are also stop codons, but not "UGA", which codes for tryptophan instead. "AUA" codes for isoleucine in most organisms but for methionine in vertebrate mitochondrial mRNA.
This is such an incredible breakthrough and a huge win for science and families alike, however its sad that despite decades of work there is still no cure for mitochondrial disease. But the chance to preventing it being passed on is still such a major improvement. Also it’s sad that only the uk is capable of doing this atm bc it was the first country in the world to introduce laws to allow their creation after a vote in Parliament in 2015, while other countries were debating that it would open the doors to genetically-modified "designer" babies
It is an incredible breakthrough and if it prevents disease then all well and good, but are our Administrative Systems set up to handle such an arrangement?
I really struggle why we keep maintaining some archaic definitions around the “family unit” anyway. So someone has 3 parents instead of 2 - nothing wrong with that.
It's not that hard to imagine a rational argument where humans have evolved to grow with one or two parents, leading to all sorts of psychological prewiring.
(I'm not supporting the argument, just saying that it's not hard to come up with a plausible rational one)
I would expect that to activate the immune system. "the unique components of mitochondria, when exposed, reveal their prokaryotic history and are recognized as foreign by innate immune receptors triggering an inflammatory response." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6218307/
Maybe if you suppress the immune system, introduce working mitochondria, and then stop taking the immunosuppressants, any mitochondria that are still outside cells get cleaned up and the ones that got absorbed are shielded and can do their job.
Clever. So they fertilize an egg from the mother and another egg from a donor with the fathers sperm. Then they yank out the donor/father “pro nuclei” and replace it with the pro nuclei from mother/father egg. Thus the child ends up with the donor’s mitochondria.
In vivo zygote mitochonrial transplantation. Neat! This is going to add an interesting exception to matrilineal DNA testing in the future.
Another thought, what about three parent households engaging in IVF? Will this be an option to have 3 biological parents regardless of disease? How will we keep records properly? What are the legal consequences? Do mitochondrial parents need to pay child support?
The amount of mitochondrial DNA is tiny though (~0.1%, according to the article), and not particularly unique to any individual, since it is passed down lately unchanged apart from the occasional mutation. There's no point having 3 biological parents unless there's a bad mutation in the mother's mitochondrial DNA.
I'm not sure there's any point to it. I know a couple poly families and my own situation isn't far off. The kids have a similar relationship with their parents as two-parent kids do. What DNA they happen to have doesn't matter, outside the occasional teenage outburst.
Yes, that’s my understanding as well. Those who can afford it, can travel to a different country and try. But I assume it’s so expensive that only a select few can go through this process.
Some states have tried to make it illegal to travel to another state to have a banned procedure such as an elective abortion. I don't know how that has held up in court in practice.
Meh, those "personhood at conception" [0] folks will always be whining at reality anyway, since what they imagine to be "plain common sense" is actually crazy. To wit:
1. Identical twins from one conception are not a single person.
2. An entity with chimerism (two conceptions) is one person, not two people simultaneously.
3. If I make an SCNT clone [1] of someone, that's another person, not property or a mobile body part.
4. They aren't freaking out about zillions of regular miscarriages, because they don't actually believe those are people-deaths.
_________
[0] They say life, but it really helps to nail them down to a much more specific definition ASAP, because they often to retreat into fallacies of equivocation. HeLa cells are not a person.
I am personally aware. Yet why do you believe people declaring chanting "life begins at conception" do not make preventing miscarriages into a part of their national political platform the same way as criminalizing abortion?
That's like someone who says "cows are people" and wants the death penalty for hamburgers, but they're a-OK with dairy farms and leather.
It shows that even the proponents of the slogan don't actually believe it.
Embryo selection is the easiest way to minimize the risk of miscarriage.
The only reason why you would say that there is no way to prevent them is that I infer from your posts that you are most likely against embryo selection.
The comment I was responding to suggested eliminating miscarriage as a policy objective. I said that was impossible. Your response with a suggestion to minimize risk while increasing the amount of total human death does not address the point, regardless of my comment history (ad hom.?).
> why do you believe people declaring chanting "life begins at conception" do not make preventing miscarriages into a part of their national political platform
Because it's already a national political consensus?
National health organizations go to serious lengths to make sure women are not unknowingly consuming things which would cause them to miscarry. Assaulting a woman and causing her to miscarry is penalized with charges above and beyond what would be assigned if not for the miscarriage. Societally, we try to encourage people to be gentle, careful, and accommodating towards/with pregnant women, and to encourage mothers to not drink or smoke while they're carrying.
What strawman world are you living in where this isn't the case?
You're right that there is a consensus of "miscarriages are unfortunate, let's try to minimize how often it happens."
What does not exist is a consensus that a blastocyst is (consistently) equal in personhood to a newborn, with equal levels of loss and tragedy. I trust that this is obvious without the need for lurid comparisons.
So while the two vectors may share a direction, the amplitudes are very different. Kind of like how it's important to floss your teeth, it's not so important that failure becomes a crime.
"Just read the words" isn't a good-faith response.
If one actually does that, reading it literally and without context, then it becomes a flat-out lie: The vast majority of biological "life" on the planet never involves "conception" at all.
Stop trying to disguise your insincere trolling as the Socratic method.
If you label something as a "strawman", that means you are already aware of distinct and relevant differences between it and the "real" thing.
But instead of presenting those things that you claim to already have, you're running away, unable to explain your own words! Much like someone that hurled "strawman" as a reflexive insult after they felt uncomfortable reading the text.
I am pretty sure most people would not be all right with organ donation a la The Island. The fact that the person is vulnerable and invisible doesn't make it better.
> According to the Metro, several states have prosecuted women for miscarriages or stillbirths. They include South Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas, Texas, California, Mississippi, and Ohio. It appears West Virginia has joined the ranks as well.
> Though California has since passed laws banning criminal charges and investigations of pregnancy loss, it previously jailed two women for stillbirths.
Also:
> Raleigh County Prosecuting Attorney Tom Truman told WVNS 59News that a number of criminal charges under state code, including felonies, could be levied against a woman who flushes fetal remains, buries them, or otherwise disposes of remains following an involuntary abortion, also called a miscarriage.
We've established arbitrary lines on when the embryo progresses to the point of having a legally mandated funeral in some parts of the US.
Rhetorically, I'm not willing to grant so-called "obvious" corrections automatically. Rather, obvious mistakes indicate an incorrect argument. People can just say what they mean.
That’s not a correction. You misinterpreted the comment and decided it was patently wrong. With mistakes this obvious, maybe your argument is the one that’s incorrect?
So mother and father contribute the nucleus, and donor egg has everything else-- which is a lot more than mitochondria.
DNA required by mitochondria are both in the mitochondria and in the nucleus. This seems to show there is no co-evolution of the two; or the genetic distance of the donor might matter.
Still TBD whether other problems arise. If they do, I wonder if the affected person has any ability to get medical records of the other subjects, to compare diagnoses or treatments, notwithstanding privacy protections.
DNA that codes for proteins that are required by the mitochondria...
The DNA in the nucleus itself does not make its way to the mitochondria.
> This seems to show there is no co-evolution of the two
There is plenty of co-evolution between the two. But the idea that the genetic distance between donors doesn't matter is pretty substantiated by the fact that people of two races can have children.
In modern science, the idea that humans can be separated into "races" genetically is completely debunked. All humans are members of the genus Homo and more specific the species H. sapiens. Two people of different skin color may well be genetically more similar than two people of what you would call the same "race."
stop. this is harmful. if you think someone of african descent has the same risk of sickle cell as someone of south asian descent and ignore a diagnosis based on that assessment you might be committing medical malpractice.
You seriously need to open a history book to get some perspective on what is actually harmful with this agenda. As for the science, maybe check out wikipedia on human genetics [1]. You'll find tons of further sources there.
>The lack of discontinuities in genetic distances between human populations, absence of discrete branches in the human species, and striking homogeneity of human beings globally, imply that there is no scientific basis for inferring races or subspecies in humans, and for most traits, there is much more variation within populations than between them.
well as a member of a non white race, I have had a family member die because white doctors misprescribed a drug (statin) at a dosage inappropriate for my race.
I live in Newcastle and it's great to see Newcastle Uni in the news. Bobby McFarland is an international authority on paediatric neurology and of course mitochondrial medicine - he is also a truly lovely guy and intimidatingly smart. Everyone talks about Great Ormond Street but the paediatrics stuff being done at GNCH is world class.
This might be a silly question: I understand the mitochondria from the mother's egg is unusable due to disease. Why do they need a 3rd person to provide one? Is there a reason they could take one from a father's cell?
> Mitochondria in human sperm contain no or very little DNA because mtDNA is degraded while sperm cells are maturing, hence they typically do not contribute any genetic material to their offspring.
I believe the simple answer (vs complicated truth) is that the donor cell, a fertilized egg, is in a state accepting a not-quite-formed nucleus. There are no male cells that can get into that state AFAIK, possibly excepting pluripotent stem cells that are somehow convinced to undergo ovogenesis.
The truth is of course much more complicated than my limited understanding.
Fascinating that you can replace the nucleus of a cell and it keeps working fine, given cells are so complex... I wonder what (if any) setup/precautions are required in the cell biology to make it work. And I wonder if there are genetic conditions in which it can't work (e.g. some sort of mismatch between genes and what's already present in the donor cell)?
I am by no means a callous person, in fact, my therapist tells me I have a problem with too much empathy, and in no way do I wish parents to loose their children so young.
But what I am also not is a eugenicist, which is what this is, eugenics.
"Eugenics is a set of largely discredited beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population."
Now remember, first they are only preventing the chance of a baby being born with mitochondrial disease. But more importantly, these mitochondrial diseases are still evident in the human population because there is some survival advantage. This is what happens with sickle cell disease [1]. The sacrifices these babies make, dying so young, is a sacrifice for the survival of a genetic population. In the case of mitochondrial diseases, this favors the survival of female babies over male babies, or even the benefit of higher amounts of oxidative stess in the mother to fight off infection.
So by this method, even the female baby will be born without the Mitochondrial mutation. What will this mean for her?
"Accordingly, their model revealed that some mutations confer a net replicative advantage over unmutated (wildtype) mtDNA, causing the mutant mtDNA to proliferate within individual organisms."
We know so little and we are acting like we know everything. Humanity needs to stop thinking we are gods and accept our fates. Eugenicists thought they knew what the best genes were to survive, and this is no different.
I think your argument is “we’re screwing with nature in big ways and we have a demonstrated history of being so confidently wrong. This is dangerous.” Which I think is a deeply important discussion to be able to comfortably have without the layers of disclaimers.
I think a lot of these biotechs that raise alarms are pretty safe, and the problem is that we’re really bad at explaining in lay terms how it all works, and people naturally assume the worst.
I think it’s also an issue of practicality (and this is where it flirts with being eugenics). What’s the alternative? To tell people not to reproduce if they have known disease prone genes? To make them not reproduce? To tell them they don’t get universal healthcare if they do?
I think mucking about with our building blocks is the least bad option we have.
Thanks for not being reactionary. You are in the minority so I figured I would disclaim.
> What’s the alternative?
Acceptance. These parents can still reproduce. A female child will most likely be healthy, like the mother. And the male child will not always be born with a mitochondrial disease. People do not realize that father's can also pass mitochondrial genetics to their children. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/6639/)
In trying to remove all risk from our lives we are making it inherently risky in other, usually unknown, ways.
All the spiritual practices talk about acceptance, so just pick one.
But my bigger point is that it is still eugenics. And that is bad no matter what the goal is.
As a parent of young kids, this is a core issue I grapple with. I want my kids to have fun and take risks and learn how to handle the bumpiness of life. But I don’t want my kids being maimed or killed.
I think the argument could be simplified to “we’re collectively better off if we live in a manner where one consequence is that x% of us will get badly hurt.” And I personally believe that’s a true statement.
My youngest was one of the x%. He played in a risky way (that was entirely normal when I was a kid) and later that night a team of orthopedic pediatric surgeons had to put his body back together.
The hardest thing for me is not to be constantly saying “that’s too high; get down from there; don’t go too far; slow down” because that trauma lives with his mom and I far more than it does with him. But I believe it’s important for him to keep taking risks.
I also believe it’s up to each parent to decide how they want to raise their kids. We don’t get to collectively decide for the parents.
Which relates back to the topic: I think it’s collectivism vs. individualism. I believe we cannot decide for people that they don’t get a choice in the matter. Even if one might argue that this poses a collective risk to the population.
I'm so sorry that happened. As a parent, stories of injured children get that bad-news stomach drop to me, and I both empathize and sympathize. We are dealing with a similar (but older child) issue now and it is just heartbreaking to see them hurt.
The idea of individualism is a hard one for me. Are we really individuals? I mean, we get half our genetics from each parent, so where is the individual? Can any of you live as a total individual, without the assistance of even a small group? When in human history, even primate history, have you seen our species survive without a community?
When a parent makes this decision for gene therapy, that does not just affect the parents, it affects the child (the outcome of which is still not understood) and it affects those child's children.
Natural selection exists for a reason, but the eugenicists think they can control it.
Comparing gene therapy to cognitive therapy (telling your kids to not be stupid), is in no way comparable. Doing gene therapy is not "raising your kids", it is creating your kids.
I am saying this as someone who lives with THREE genetic disorders. von Hippel-Lindau syndrome (Father and Mother, hemangioblastomas), Cystathionine beta-synthase deficiency (Mother, homocystinuria), and a DNM1L Deficiency that leads to mitochondrial fission dysfunction (myoptahy, ME/CFS, OCD, Anxiety, Asperger's).
So as someone who spent the last few years caring for a kid with a genetic defect.... I really don't wish that on anyone.
If there is a way to detect or prevent genetic defects before the kids are born, we should really allow people to make a choice.
And I really don't care if doctors mix genetic material from 3 people to make a healthy baby. It's still a form of evolution. I'd think we should really try to give two people who really want to have a kid a chance to have a healthy kid...
> But my bigger point is that it is still eugenics. And that is bad no matter what the goal is.
You're literally advocating for letting genetic diseases cull the afflicted populations, "selecting for the better genes" that way. Seemingly the exact opposite of your claimed position, I hope you appreciate.
Or you have no problem with selection as long as "nature does it"? That's the best idea I have for reconciling this at least. Are we humans not part of nature though? Is you preferring what nature does not just a preference still?
If we figure out that some specific genetic difference results in people eventually dying before they reproduce, what's the difference between editing that out vs. letting nature do its thing?
> If we figure out that some specific genetic difference results in people eventually dying before they reproduce, what's the difference between editing that out vs. letting nature do its thing?
We're not that smart. Everything has unintended consequences. One example some people have studied is sickle-cell anemia. It's a recessive trait so if you get two copies of the gene you get sickle-cell which is a horrible disease. However, if you only get one copy of the gene it provides substantial immunity against malaria.
Now, maybe in this case you could say, okay, we will cure malaria somehow, not worth sickle-cell existing. But the thing is that gene isn't "the gene for sickle-cell anemia," nor is it even "the gene for malaria resistance and sickle-cell anemia." It affects hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of different things.
I think there are some conditions where I don't have a problem doing that, and sickle-cell, mitochondrial disease, these things do seem "bad enough" to be worth putting our fingers on the scale. But I am not sure it's so clear-cut, and I think it's right to say that eugenics are categorically suspect.
How do you determine that? We've come far enough to see and manipulate individual atoms, emit and count individual photons, and build machines that understand human language (if ever so fleetingly). Unless how we work is fundamentally betraying how we can reason about the world, and we find that that's intrinsically linked to our genetics, I really don't see us not cracking it eventually proper.
> Everything has unintended consequences.
People use medications every single day that are effective for what they are taking it for, yet have "unintended consequences" that are consciously ignored or are found otherwise negligible by them. Seems like unintended consequences are not a blocker. The criteria hasn't been perfection even up to this point, it's always been a desperation-driven best-effort. Much like life and civilization as a whole.
I can appreciate e.g. hesitance in taking on the responsibility of possibly being wrong about how something like this works - nature cannot be blamed, but humans can and that feels bad. But the alternative is pretty clear and is not going away on its own. I'm pretty sure at least that just like how genetic traits can be evolved multiple times independently, genetic defects can be too. This is also why I think to characterize this as eugenics is extremely and fundamentally wrong. Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on - a concept that flagrantly flies in the face of this independent recurrence effect, for one.
> We've come far enough to see and manipulate individual atoms, emit and count individual photons
The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.
> Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on
Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“. They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason. And that’s because on Balance They are not bad, but for some they are very bad. Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral. It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.
> We've come far enough to see and manipulate individual atoms, emit and count individual photons
The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.
> Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on
Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“. They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason. And that’s because on Balance. They are not bad, but for some they are very bad. Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral. It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.
I've posted a reply to this in haste, but it was a bit more emotionally charged than ideal. This is a reworded version that I believe reflects my thoughts more accurately.
> The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.
That is a very far removed interpretation of what I wrote. As I'm sure you're aware, nuclear bombs operate on fission (or in rarer cases, fission and fusion). These are atomic-scale processes, but do not involve atomic-scale control (or in some cases, even control at all - natural fission sites exist). A more faithful example for what I said would be semiconductor manufacturing, where the state of the art is 40-atoms wide tracks of patterning resolution. The atomic pick-and-place I describe was demonstrated, but has no practical implementations that I'm aware of (would be way too slow). But even if we go back to fission, nuclear plants are providing stable, relatively clean baseline power at reasonable costs, and for better or for worse, the world didn't yet descend into WW3 either, and it's more than fair to speculate that this is due to the temporary checkmate nuclear bombs provide us. So as far as I'm concerned, no, I think we're pretty alright still.
> Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“.
But your position doesn't seem to care much for if this assumption is correct or not. Even if it's bang-on perfectly correct, you stated that this is eugenics period, therefore it's bad. Was that not what you meant to suggest then?
> They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason.
How would you know? What if I disagree that reason and purpose are ontologically real?
> Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral.
I disagree that human genetics would be a conscious process, and that it can thus care about things. I also disagree that it can know anything about morals - morals are a human concept, and they're not even universally shared across us. Very clearly just the two of us seem to hold ourselves to very different definitions of what's moral, for example.
> It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.
I don't suppose you're claiming that this treatment (or other genetic treatments) result(s) in the vast majority of the patients dying?
I think FollowingTheDao has a point worth exploring and it's easy to be afraid of it because it sounds cruel and against modern individualistic thinking.
Genetic diseases that have survived a long time in our population may well have some positive selection pressure and may be good to the population overall. He gave the example of sickle cell, but I also recently read about a similar idea with schizophrenia. Suppose we eliminate the schizophrenia genes from the gene pool? We would also lose the benefit they provide - probably to people who don't quite become schizophrenic.
> I don't suppose you're claiming that this treatment (or other genetic treatments) result(s) in the vast majority of the patients dying?
I think he is claiming that but the vast majority is future generations who die from some other problems that this "bad" mitochondrial DNA was protecting the rest of the population against.
I'm not sure if he meant "a moral" or "amoral" but genes evolve to ensure their own survival and that might be done more effectively by killing a few babies with mitochondrial disease as a side effect of something else.
These unknown benefits of genetic diseases might simply be keeping mutations out. Mutations are going to happen anyway and maybe it's useful to the species for them to be fatal instead of just degrading performance in life which might accumulate over generations. Consider a program stopping with segfault vs silently continuing with corrupt memory.
I do not think they have a point that can be explored much, or that they're suggesting an exploration of anything to begin with. I further think that the fear is on their side: fear from being associated with a historically malicious movement (eugenics), fear from being the possible culprit of unintended suffering (gene editing going wrong downstream) and thus having that responsibility, and fear of the disruption of some higher balance they believe exists (religion).
For example,
> may well have some positive selection pressure and may be good to the population overall
How will we find this out if we espouse gene editing in general as bad?
From my perspective, like religious folks in general, they wish for leaving unknowns remain unknown and just being passive; unfortunately, I think this goes against the very essence of life, and our very fundamental biases that come from being alive and perceiving ourselves as sentient.
If I took their worldview to the extreme, I wouldn't be able to do anything: the smallest things would require a full and complete understanding of the entire state of the world, lest I might cause some unintended effect that may hurt me greatly, and so when I do do anything, I'm exhibiting hubris. This is also why I brought up healthcare in general being a best effort, because all active actions in life are at most a best effort due to the impenetrable wall between our perception of the world, and the world in its actuality.
To tie it back to your example:
> Consider a program stopping with segfault vs silently continuing with corrupt memory.
Think about how you can reset your graphics driver by pressing Win+Ctrl+Shift+B without having to restart your entire system. Or how you continue to write programs, despite not being able to guarantee that the code you write for those programs is actually what's going to execute, on the state you expect them to be executed on, in the environment you expect it to execute in, in a way you expect it to execute. You might get other programs inject themselves into your program, other programs manipulate the memory of your program, the system libraries you call into do something unexpected because 20 years have passed and now things are different, or simply being scheduled out and your program not even receiving CPU time, meaning if your program powered a real time experience, that now ceases to be that way.
Yeah, I find it pretty telling that the person arguing against eugenics is in its distilled essence telling me to not reproduce, because I might have an undesirable trait I do not wish my children to inherit.
It's like he managed to be against eugenics, because it's eugenics, but not be against any of the negative consequences that eugenics brought in the past. For me this reeks of someone putting on a facade.
> Yeah, I find it pretty telling that the person arguing against eugenics is in its distilled essence telling me to not reproduce, because I might have an undesirable trait I do not wish my children to inherit.
I did not say that at all. Mitochondrial diseases are not transmitted 100% to the children so I am saying go ahead and reproduce and accept the results.
But my bigger point is that it is still eugenics. And that is bad no matter what the goal is.
That's a thought terminating cliché for the ages ! The problem with eugenics is the noneconsensual, racist, ignorant ways and ideas of the early egenists. But the idea of editing out genetic mutation that purely detrimental (like the COMT-Val158Met polymorphism that make people prone to psychosis and schizophrenia, or one of the defective variants of the many genes that cause hereditary blindness or deafnessl would be a net positive for everyone. How can you argue otherwise?
They should not mess with genes where the sciences is not 100% settled but that still leaves a lot's of mutations known to be 100% deleterious. There are no benefits in having hereditary blindness, deafness or schizophrenia!
Because I know more about how integrated and complicated genetics is than you?
Now you’re talking about editing out polymorphisms, not even mutations? Did you know the COMT is only a minor risk for schizophrenia, right? And that it not only metabolize is catecholamines, but also estrogens? How did you know the COMT enzyme is stimulated by magnesium and SAMe? Maybe the person needs just more of those than needing to have genetic therapy.
You didn't argue for anything! Assuming science had the ability to cleanly edit that variant (which is not the case today), the ethical choice is to remove that small risk factor.
That variant of the COMT gene have a mountain of evidence against it and no evidence showing any benefit whatsoever. The fact that the COMT enzyme is also implicated in estrogen metabolism is not an argument for or against editing out the known defective variant of the COMT gene.
There is an argument to be made that we should wait until medical science has the means to cleanly and reliably do a single gene edit but I don't buy the argument that removing a gene variant from the humans genes pool is eugenics therefore it's bad and should be forever forbidden.
> That variant of the COMT gene have a mountain of evidence against it and no evidence showing any benefit whatsoever
When you look at a single gene, you can see there’s no benefit. But when you look at the gene in contacts of the whole genome, there could certainly be a benefit to having a slower COMT enzyme.
For example, in someone with higher homocysteine, this would be an advantage.
So you see the problem, you see the gene is bad because of looking at the gene as an individual, but I see it as probably beneficial when I look at the whole genome. And this is why I am against gene editing. Unless you take the gene, you wanna edit in the full context of the whole genome you don’t see the bad effects it might have in the long run. And who is doing that? nobody.
Eugenics gets a bad rap for good reason. But like everything in life, it's not black-and-white. It's one of those scary words people are afraid of because some assholes used it for evil. But avoiding having children because you don't want to pass on genetic diseases doesn't make you Hitler. So let's leave the charged language in the trash where it belongs.
I've got a genetic disease. I decided not to have kids because I didn't want to pass it on. Ended up with one anyway, and I hope for his sake he didn't inherit it, because I don't want him to have to deal with the problems I have. You might say that's not natural, but humans have evolved to care about our offspring. What can be more natural to a human than not wanting to watch your child suffer?
Your argument could be used to justify abandoning health care altogether. I should have died of gangrene when I was 12, but I had ingrown toenail surgery that saved my life. I wear glasses, surely that goes against natural selection since I wouldn't be as fit a mate as someone with 20/20 vision. My girlfriend had breast cancer, should her children have grown up without a mother for the sake of the species? Should I abandon her because her breasts and ovaries were removed and she's no longer a fit mate?
Evolution is just a process, and one we've been opting out of for thousands of years, ever since the first human helped another human survive something that should have killed them. Don't make Darwin your god. The irony would spin his coffin right out of the ground.
When applied to non-human life, the alleged benefits of eugenics goes by the names domestication, husbandry, and similar.
Correct me if I am wrong because I am absolutely not a historian. Eugenics was horrible not because we understand Mendellian genetics but because it was forced on people in the intent to allegedly "improve" a (political boundary placeholder)'s population in some way that was outright obscene, including use by Nazi Germany and many other places and regimes. US courts, etc.
I think the difference here is that the technology is not forced to be used.
Not all eugenicists had what they thought were Negative intentions. In the 30s the plan was to send Native Americans to the cities to to interbreed breed with white people to make white people more communal.
And besides, aren’t we forcing these genetic changes onto the children without their consent?
Eugenics is any choice that influences the genetic makeup of your descendants in a way that you believe to be desirable. Choosing a tall partner because you want your kids to be tall is eugenics. Eugenics happens every day, in every country. The bad rap comes from historical attempts to apply it coercively. Parents choosing to eliminate their genetic diseases is not the same.
> we are acting like we know everything. Humanity needs to stop thinking we are god
These activities are in no way evidence for people thinking (too?) highly of themselves or "as gods". Just a completely made up accusation.
I also don't see why the scary labels are relevant necessarily. To be afraid of whether this qualifies as eugenics or if you qualify as an eugenicist is sitting backwards on the horse completely. But maybe I just misinterpreted your catious wording and there's no being afraid here - in other comments you outright state you consider this eugenics, for example.
> [As] Humanity[, we need to] accept our fates.
No, we really don't. Though if you and people of the same opinion just accept fate, you also accept this research and similar continuing on, so maybe this is not even a point of debate in practice.
Unfortunately, the stupid state of public conversation is that you can't talk about these things without couching it in "I'm not a racist but..." type language. People will see the smallest hint of wrongthink and reactionarily conclude you're a Nazi in disguise.
It doesn't matter if something or someone qualifies as eugenics or not. What matters is the outcomes of the actions. FollowingTheDao seems to be concerned about long term consequences on the overall population which may be best served by individuals accepting their babies will die. Or it may not - but it's worth discussing without going into pedantry about the meaning of words.
Presumably all of medicine too since it keeps us from "accepting our fates" and lets us procreate worse genes instead of letting billions of people die sacrificially due to their genes which is a "huge loss for evolution".
Kinda funny to attack TFA by associating it with a naughty word while tracking in such awful ideas as if we're unable to evaluate the ideas ourselves.
Indeed. My understanding is that eugenics is typically something where the choice is not allowed by the person or, before birth, parents of the person affected by the procedure.
But gene therapy can fix the genetic makeup of the living child, then enable it to pass on its defective material. That seems patently worse for evolution?
If you take the case of sickle cell anemia, you’ll find this is not the case. You need to understand more about genetics and why these mutation survive over generations. They don’t survive by accident they survive because when they are heterogeneous, they are beneficial to the population. It’s only the unlucky child that ends homozygous that will suffer from illness. But that is the balance and sacrifice nature makes to keep a population alive. It’s indifferent and amoral, it’s utilitarian. And it’s way beyond the comprehension of human knowledge.
No, not religious, I just am averse to human hubris, so maybe since that theme that echos in all the religious texts which is why you might think so. God told Even not to get knowledge by eating the Apple, Them he dispersed the people of Babel because they were trying to become like God.
I see Daoism as a scientific, observational life view. To know everything is impossible, and all the God stories say that God knows everything. No one can even know the Dao, all you can do is feel it in a sense. You can get an idea of the laws and let it take you. In other words, acceptance. The Dao (law of nature) controls evolution and why a baby is needed to live or die. We we try to change that we go against the Dao, and that leads to imbalance, and then problems.
For someone averse to human hubris, you repeatedly speak as if you were the voice of the world (nature, "Dao"?), merely spreading the will of the world (nature, "Dao"?). This is also why you were asked if you're religious, I assume.
Eugenics has always been a technological problem, not an ideological one.
If there was a cheap and cost effective way to edit your genes as an adult in a 100% safe way, then everyone would be doing it.
The reason why eugenics has a bad reputation is that there are incredibly low tech solutions that require an authoritarian surveillance state and such states have indeed existed and abused their powers in the past. I'm talking about forced sterilisation.
The first problem with these low tech approaches is that their models suck and aren't founded by actual genetics research. E.g. fascists defining their own ethnic group as superior over other ethnic groups.
The second problem is that they didn't just think that they were helping the people born through eugenics avoid diseases or become better people, they were thinking that people with the wrong genes shouldn't procreate or exist at all, because they are a waste of resources and therefore should be killed even if they somehow manage to deal with their complications.
But if we take a step back and start off with a higher level of technology and scientific progress, these concerns turn out to be meaningless.
If there is a gene that objectively causes a disease or harm and it can be identified reliably, then having children with that disease becomes morally questionable. This means some people are prevented from having children that they would otherwise want. However, if there is a technology that allows people to have children without the disease, then suddenly the opposite happens. It becomes a moral imperative to give them access to the treatment so that they can have children. In the extreme limit, no matter how bigoted an eugenicist is, he must always allow even the most "inferior" people (in his eyes) to have children and procreate. The discriminatory part of eugenics collapses into itself as if it never existed.
This then leaves the actual problems with eugenics: lack of genetic diversity and unforeseen consequences of unrestricted gene editing.
The solution to this problem would be to never implement precise genetic editing in the first place. Instead, whole chromosomes should be swapped out. This will increase genetic diversity by allowing a single child to have the combined genes of multiple fathers and mothers.
Generally the reason we think of Eugenicists as "bad guys" is because they've been characterized by being happy to sterilize or kill people to prevent their
"subhuman genes" from being passed down to the next generations.
This is different, another step in the erasure of genes that harm humans. This is not a genocide.
It seems like your argument boils down to we should continue to have horrible suffering and early death because diversity of DNA is good and we shouldn't edit out potentially helpful mutations (that also cause horrible suffering) - if we can beat malaria, why would we need sickle cell?
So I think this person is wrong, but the one little nugget in there that is partially right is that I do think it's important that, before we start modifying genomes on a wide scale, we should have a pretty comprehensive database (100's of thousands to millions) of whole-genome sequences (alongside mitochondrial DNA) stored.
To my understanding that's still super expensive. We can do short SNPs (snippets? Not my field, I'm armchairing) for cheap like good ole 23andme but not full genome cheaply.
As of 2023, it was apparently <$1000/sequence [0], which means it would be a few hundred million to maybe a billion dollars. Which is a lot, but it really only needs to be done once, and is a global project. That seems pretty reasonable all things considered. But also, we can probably wait a little while since it's not super crucial until artificial genetic modification starts to get widespread, which is still probably a decade off or so. We could probably start just collecting samples now, and as long as they are appropriately preserved, the actual sequencing could be done later when it gets even cheaper.
It occurs to me that the sequencing itself probably wouldn't be the main cost. Collecting the samples, and the manpower needed to do it, would be far, far more expensive. Probably at least 10x the cost, especially if you were really serious about getting the full range of diversity.
This is just the beginning of all that. "Designer babies" will obviously be a big business in the future, and one can take that logic VERY far, even for an entire nation where all babies will be mandated to have certain genes or characteristics... or worst, mandated specializations...
Of course, science fictions authors,scientists and philosophers have written plenty of material on the matter and the danger of such societies... and it might blow up in our face one way or another, but nothing aside of our demise can stop scientific progress...
I mean click-bait par excellence. No shit it would come from0.1% of someone else. Give me something like three headed baby, you know that enquirer stuff, just class it up. Theres like 10,000 research articles published every year, there’s gotta be some damn interesting speck in this business.
I'm prolife. Perhaps. You're destroying one human in this process.
Some of us are a bit more comfortable with IVF-like processes because the intent is to foster human life rather than take it, just as it's acceptable to cause an abortion in the process of saving a mother.
Afaik it's a misconception that MRT necessarily involves the destruction of an embryo. The spindle transfer method transplants the mother's egg's DNA into the donor's egg before fertilization, so only one embryo is ever created. The UK trials exclusively used the older pronuclear transfer method, where two embryos are created and the donor's is destroyed, because the journey to full regulatory approval took about a decade and embryos are currently safer to freeze and thaw than eggs. In a hypothetical scenario where MRT became as widely available as IVF, this would not need to be the case for new patients.
> Some of us are a bit more comfortable with IVF-like processes because the intent is to foster human life rather than take it, just as it's acceptable to cause an abortion in the process of saving a mother.
But that (fostering human life) is also not a settled debate if the laws in some states are any indication. But debate is hard in jurisdictions where minority opinion can hold sway (like in Florida where a referendum hit 57% for enshrining a right to abortion).
While I'm resolutely pro-choice and don't consider a fertilized cell to be "human", (before I continue I want to be clear, I 100% support these types of procedures in the article) there is eventually going to be a grey area where debate needs to happen before we hit Gattaca-style dystopian editing.
PS This is not meant to argue against your view per se, which I disagree with but respect. I mean to illustrate how very quickly this gets messy and rational debate flies out the window. But that's the same with anything political in today's climate... :-/
How so? They're removing the pro-nuclei before they fuse (which is when a new human, specifically their first sovereign cell and their DNA, would be formed). So even if you consider life to start at conception, this is precisely just before that still, meaning there's no human being destroyed here - unless I misunderstand the biology going on (or the article is not correct).
> The eggs from both the mother and the donor are fertilised in the lab with the dad's sperm.
The article seems clear. Another comment [1] suggested it should be possible to do as you suggested but I certainly do not know the science in this space.
The article uses the colloquial definition of fertilization, i.e. that fertilization is a moment, specifically the moment the sperm enters the egg. In literature, fertilization is a ~24 hour long process instead, which kicks off when sperm meets egg, and finishes when a zygote is successfully created [0] inside. The sperm entering the egg is relatively early on during that.
The article further refers to "donor" and "parent" embryos. This is also not correct as far as I undestand, eggs turn embryos once the fertilization process completes, and a zygote is present. [1] Even this could be considered misleading as there's also an "embryo proper" which forms about a week later still, but I wanted to keep to the reference frame of the GP.
That's very interesting, thank you for the context. I imagine I learned some amount of this long ago and have lost it to disuse. I also think I agree with the majority of your analysis after reading your references as well as [1] and [2]. And I apologize for my uninformed quoting of a line from the article and appreciate the education.
I found [2] particularly informative because it outlines a multi-stage process through which an embryo goes, the earliest of which is fertilization as you described. My reading in the article, and perhaps relying too much on the artwork, seems to put the process described there at stage 1b-1c since the pronuclei looks to be in the process of fusing. My conclusion in cross-referencing [1] is that your "embryo proper" is around stage 4-5 and would have been implanted?
> They're removing the pro-nuclei before they fuse (which is when a new human, specifically their first sovereign cell and their DNA, would be formed).
I wish I'd had the context to appreciate this before my earlier reply. :)
I also enjoyed reading parts of [3] and imagine there is probably better information nearly 60 years later.
> My conclusion in cross-referencing [1] is that your "embryo proper" is around stage 4-5 and would have been implanted?
No, I believe what happened is that they made their mitochondrial changes before the pronuclei fusion, and inserted this modified egg into the womb. There it the continued on with the fertilization process, finishing up, creating the zygote, etc.
The embryo-proper bit was only relevant to the "from what point is it a human life" part of this, it is not relevant to the procedure specifically. That comes a whole week after fertilization I believe.
Being anti-abortion (what you call pro-life) doesn’t also automatically mean that you share the belief that human life and the associated rights thereof begin at the instant of fertilization.
It seems you mean to imply that you are against the destruction of a fertilized viable embryo, but then the rest of your message seems to suggest that it isn’t that important.
I think it's higher than that. The Catholic Church is against IVF. Although not all its followers will stick to all its teachings a significant number will.
Strictly speaking no, dogma has a very specific definition and refers to things of a theological nature like the dogma of the Immaculate Conception which 90% of American Catholics wouldn't get right (most would answer that it refers to the virgin conception of Jesus).
That doesn't mean the Church's teaching isn't final and binding.
It absolutely means that. If you are a Catholic and believe that a church teaching is wrong, you have a duty to speak up and dispute it.
Teachings can be reversed and they are absolutely not binding. These disputes are supposed to be done in humility with the assumption that the church is probably right, but that's pretty much the same as arguing with Linux kernel devs...
Where I came from (rural and very conservative) everyone is 100% against IVF and frankly, religion aside, I'm not sure it's good. There are certainly ways to abuse it and there's a certain kind of person it's popular with.
Yeah, this is throwing the baby with the bathwater. I am with you, if you are talking about "designer babies" etc. A basic Google search will tell us about studies where vast majority of Americans are okay with even gene editing, to prevent diseases, but not for performance enhancements.
Social norms are not objective truths. Social norms include racism, sexism, antisemitism, etc.
Openly disagreeing with the in-group cannot be nonchalance, almost by definition (if you don't care, why bother having an opinion?), and it can't be cowardice if the issue matters.
If you are equating conceiving children with IVF to goods to be bought off the shelf, there is really nothing to talk about.
Having biological kids is a hard-wired instinct, and one of the very basic survival-of-the-genes things. I have no idea what you mean by kids deserving parents. There are no kids without parents to begin with.
A lot of things are "hard wired" and yet we expect people to control themselves.
Men's sexual drive, for example, is tuned to fairly rapey if not for a "patriarchal" society that crushes this drive through the threat of a girls father beating a boy to a pulp. Stats are pretty clear here too wrt sex workers and their relationship to their fathers.
And IVF is a tragedy of rented wombs, unfulfilled motherhood dreams, expensive and painful surgeries almost exclusively brunt by women whilst profited by men.
But I'm not worried. A society that inverts the child-parent merit is one whose open loop gain is less than one. It's pretty obvious why: those who think children are deserved are unlikely to have the ability of self-sacrifice to want more than the one, maybe two kids.
Edit: we unbanned you because you promised you wouldn't do this kind of thing, and your account seems to have reverted to the earlier pattern. I'm not just talking about the current comment—I mean the pattern of using HN primarily to comment on political/national/religious/ideological topics. If you would please fix this so we don't have to ban you again, that would be good.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Wouldn't it be significantly easier to just use the donor's egg here ?
Or adopt?
This feels a bit narcissistic. If you and your partner determine you have genetic traits you'd rather not have, you have the option of not having biological children.
This just feels like it's going to open Pandora's box. You and your partner are short and near sighted, edit in some height and vision.
You're partner has ethnic traits they don't want to pass on ? Just edit those out.
This feels like something that's going to start well intentioned, but snowball into very strange outcomes.
God forbid this ever comes to America's profit driven health system. The rich would have the option to edit in "better" traits. Gattica here we come
Humanity has discarded natural selection thanks to modern medicine. Gene mutations that would have meant someone didn't survive now can be treated.
The cold truth is that it is thus inevitable that in the future humanity will need gene modification to avoid the spreading of harmful mutations. This is what they are doing here, especially since mitochondrial DNA is inherited directly from the mother means that any problems will be propagated to all future generation unlike normal genes.
>Humanity has discarded natural selection thanks to modern medicine. Gene mutations that would have meant someone didn't survive now can be treated.
There is still selection going on and it is difficult to argue that it is not natural. The pressures we are exposed to are just not consistent with some idealized natural state and thus seem "unnatural".
Be careful, "natural selection" is a specific descriptor that describes a selection process that is contrasted by "artificial selection". The second one comes up from time to time in human context; we call it "eugenics".
It's not really a "cold" truth: eugenics isn't inherently bad, it's just us humans have an annoying cultural problem where we do horrible horrible things (including, but not limited to, genocide) whenever anyone tries to attempt eugenics. (It might be "human nature" preventing us from ever doing eugenics ethically, but all the evil eugenicists have a shared cultural background, so it's hard to tell.)
From this perspective, techniques that are technically eugenics, but can't feasibly be used in evil ways, are unambiguous progress. I'm wary of gene editing, but the technique described in the article doesn't seem like a slippery slope to me.
I just think people are going to heavily disagree what is moral and immoral eugenics. Like there was an article here recently about how there was drama with gene editing to remove blindness in one's children in the blind community
Can you link to that? This is particularly interesting to me because, as I've commented in the past, I've never encountered this feeling in the blind community, while it's relatively common in the deaf community,
When I've investigated why there's drama (though there isn't actually much for blindness, afaik: HN comments by sighted people are not primary sources), I've found that it's mainly concerns about the eradication of culture – which are understandable: the way the world's currently organised, all non-normative cultural expression is penalised.
There are people who have a deep emotional need to control other people's lives and use all available tools to do that.
There are also people who don't have that need at all and would very much like to use the same tools to improve themselves or their children.
These are two separate groups but "we" are limiting the second group's access to tools in order to prevent the first group from misusing it.
In fact, some people tabooize the tools and intentionally attack even the second group for using them because they either afraid of the first group or, more often, because they are not even aware there are different types of people with different motivations and driving needs.
Adopt who? There is almost no children available for adoption, only highly handicapped children who needs an auxiliary family.
Might be easier with a donor egg, but where are you going to get that? Egg donation is highly regulated and many would find it hard to get a donor. Of course this solution also requires a donor egg, so you'd already need to have that available.
> There is almost no children available for adoption
This is not true, at least in the United States. For one thing, there are many children in foster care who want to be adopted. It is also possible, though difficult and expensive, to adopt infants from mothers giving up their children for adoption as well. I am not saying it's an easy option or that everyone should do it, but it is an option.
And there's plenty of foster kids, like Dave Thomas who was adopted as a foster kid.
So was my friend D. D's adopted parents asked the state of NJ for the kid that needed parents the most. And boy did the state of NJ deliver.
D had a foster home raided by the FBI. Another foster house beat him. He didn't know how to read until grade 5.
Now he has masters in microbiology from a top 20 program, a job as a data scientist and he's making the better part of $200k to take care of his wife and three kids.
As annoying as he is (he is from Jersey), I know he's a guy I can call who will show up to help.
All because a couple of God fearing parents asked NJ for the most messed up kid in the system. For me, D's parents are saints.
It's sick that our society thinks people deserve children instead of the other way around.
The issue where I am is that all adoption agencies facilitating adoptions from other countries have shutdown. All of them because of massive scandals where the adopted children was more or less sold or the parents where lied to. Adoption from abroad is tricky at best, and now it's no longer possible.
As for children within the country, the majority is multi-handicapped children, most of which cannot say at a normal home full time. So the adopted family basically become a place to put the children during the odd weekend or vacations. This isn't a family life, this is you helping the government at your own cost with no benefit to you. As harsh as that sounds, it's not something most people can do. It's incredibly taxing mentally, and you're still not getting your wish of a family.
That's not to say that there aren't children being adopted, but the waiting list is 10+ years. Most children are placed in foster care, which is very different.
"The issue where I am is that all adoption agencies facilitating adoptions from other countries have shutdown. All of them because of massive scandals where the adopted children was more or less sold or the parents where lied to."
Specifically, American parents tried to return to sender a kid they didnt like. Ie they thought they deserved a kid.
"Adoption from abroad is tricky at best, and now it's no longer possible.
[...]
That's not to say that there aren't children being adopted, but the waiting list is 10+ years."
Being a parent is a about giving yourself away. If you cant do that you're not ready or suitable for a kid.
"Most children are placed in foster care, which is very different."
Who deserve loving families.
Look, I haven't adopted a foster kid: because Im scared Im not good enough; I admit it. But let's not pretend that there aren't a plethora of kids in need of families that we must have IVF for those who are not capable of conceiving their own.
Oh, sorry if that wasn't clear. Foster children here aren't up for adoption, only in very rare cases. The two systems are for different purposes. The foster children typically have needs that require foster parents with special training. Often the foster children still have some contact with their biological parents, so again, specifically not up for adoption. Adopting is difficult, you'd have more success as a foster parent, but it's harder to be approved as a foster family, e.g. you need special training.
I get that systems are different around the world, but solutions like this is still required or at least wanted in countries where adoption is pretty much not an option. It is a pretty fortunate situation to have a society where adoption is so rarely needed, but it's also massively hurtful to would be parents to suggest that they should simply adopt, when they want to, but does have that option.
That's beautiful about your uncle. Becoming a well paid classical musician is very rare, he must be very good; your grandparents did well.
When I was in undergrad there was this 16 year old street urchin (for that's what he'd become) who'd hang out with us. He was a foster kid, and his was a life long story of abuse and neglect.
He was a nice kid too and, despite all the drugs he took, he could have been very smart.
My cousin started as a foster kid, which there are no shortage of.
Most foster kids have complicated situations, which I suspect a lot of people wish to avoid. But ultimately it’s going to be work either way.
I’m not opposed to IVF, but this story is just strange. They have to create a healthy embryo from the donor egg, instead of just using that healthy embryo, they rip its DNA out to shove into another embryo.
Feels like a story of just because you could doesn’t mean you should. I’ll take all the downvotes, I’d wholeheartedly vote to ban splicing multiple embryos together like this.
I doubt problems would be unique to America, many parts Asia are more aggressive with selective births and distorting sex ratios already, I suspect this will be readily embraced and with the much larger populations will be more an impact.
I think Fisher's Principle will assert itself in those cases where the balance is disturbed currently. People will see how "excess males" don't have as good outcomes as "scarce females".
It's definitely not unique to America, in fact America is in some ways only catching up to other countries. What is considered legal and ethical in say Mexico or Brazil if you have money is a lot looser than in the USA. IVF clinics happily advertise that they let you do sex selection.
And? I suspect that when the first glasses were made, someone complained about people playing God, too: why do you want to correct your eyesight when you were not intended to see well by the Almighty?
Correction of genetic problems early on seems a lot better than various complicated treatments down the line.
"Strange" often means just "we are not used to it", but the next generations will take such things for absolutely granted.
It is no less strange that I, a Central European, am talking to an American in almost real time and free of charge, and can read his replies. That would be indeed very strange to anyone prior to 1995 or so.
And yeah, this connectedness has downsides as well, but we may work on them.
In some Asian countries modifying your eyes to look white is a common practice. You could easily end up with biracial people editing out some of their more ethnic features for the next generation.
Not to mention their might be some mistakes along the way. You can't git reset --hard a human.
As imperfect as humans are, that's what makes us human.
Now if as a consenting adult you want to modify yourself, laser eye surgery, etc, go ahead.
What about leaving this to the parents? Does the rest of the society (in practice: busibodies who have enough time to care) have a standing to stop them? Why should anyone worship their ethnic features? That strikes me as extra dystopian.
Obviously there are degrees to what is considered a problem.
Few people would argue for leaving Huntington's or ALS-related code in. That is just cruel.
There are deaf activists who protest any attempts to cure deafness, but I would say most people won't agree with them either.
Eye color may not be a problem per se, but does not strike me as particularly important either - unless the state is based on some neo-racist ideology, it probably should not regulate this.
IMHO the real zone of shadows begins at outright enhancements, especially those that will have downsides. Maybe a certain gene sequence taken from bats or whales will confer high resistance to cancer, but at the cost of XXX or YYY. This is the sort of decision that will be really hard.
Very young kids cannot consent to any treatment, and if we said "no treatments without personal consent of the patient", we wouldn't be able to treat sick newborns at all.
"ohh well that's the cost of progress"
Yes, it is. We can be a bit more careful, but progress is ultimately risky, because you are entering an unknown terrain. A lot of modern products that you now safely use, including electricity, air travel and banal over-the-counter medications, has a nontrivial body count. If your attitudes prevailed, we would have none of those.
Experimental procedures to save those already here != Experimental reproductive technology.
Before trying to play God and manipulating the very fabric of life itself you can be a foster parent or have a very frank conversation with your partner on your options.
No one’s going to know the long term effects of this until 20 or 30 years later.
“Sorry Billy , you have painful incurable diseases because we created you with experimental procedures that required merging multiple embryos together, good luck.”
What if this creates completely new genetic illnesses? Might not happen this generation, might happen 2 or 3 generations down to the line.
If most diseases are caused by errors in DNA, cannot we make mandatory DNA screening, detect such errors, and warn potential parents not to make children? Eventually this could lead to these diseases simply disappearing, and studying invalid DNA sequences seems to be much cheaper than researching the treatment for the disease.
The mapping from DNA to health outcome is unbelievably chaotic/high-cardinality, then mixed in with various environmental/social/cultural factors that don’t show up in DNA at all.
Drugs are in fact how we come to understand this chain of causality, piece by piece.
So yeah, what you describe is obviously the dream (hand waving through some ethical considerations) but we just don’t know anywhere close to enough about the biology.
My son Oliver was born with mitochondrial disease and was killed by conditions associated with it at the age of 19. Some of the people mentioned in the report here were involved in his diagnosis and care.
His life deteriorated from that of a normal, fun loving intelligent kid to an isolated bed-bound disabled teenager, fed by total parenteral nutrition and suffering a variety of awful complications. His eventual passing was cruel and brutal. I'm not sure we will ever get over it as a family.
This treatment does now at least offer me a glimmer of grandchildren (my daughter having decided she would not risk children of her own until now). It's a remarkable achievement.
I'm very sorry that happened to your son, and that you and your family had to endure it.
Wanted to share same sentiment. Thanks to gp for sharing.
As a parent of teenagers it pained my heart to even read this. I cannot fathom what it is like to endure it and live with it after the fact. I am very sorry for what you experienced and what Oliver experienced.
My deepest condolences.
I think it would be better to describe this as an ‘organelle’ transplant as it would be easier for people to understand and discuss. Yes there is a donor (egg) and yes the new child will pass on the mitochondria to her children. But calling it a 3 person baby is unhelpful and misleading as IMO mitochondria DNA is of a different category to chromosomal DNA.
It's inheritable so it's more than a liver transplant.
I agree that DNA in mitochondria is much smaller than DNA in the nucleus. But in each person there are many mitochondria and they nay have slightly different DNA. And the DNA in mitochondria has a different variation than the DNA in the nucleus. So it's difficult to weight both.
Can we say 2.1 parents? A long time ago I read that most binary classifications are not completely binaries, it's just that 2 options cover almost all the cases. (Are virus alive?) I guess integer classifications also have hidden corner cases.
I also remember from a biology book that in a lab they mixed two blastula(?) of small lizards(?) or something like that. They had different skin color and the baby had patches of both colors. Does that count as 2 or 4 parents?
Certainly Mother Nature is not obliged to have simple easy to understand binaries where it would be convenient for us and so if we think we see such a binary we should keep in mind that maybe we hallucinated it into existence because it was convenient and that's all.
I agree wholeheartedly. This strikes me as the way science works. Theories are useful because of their predictive value. If we think of biological sciences as different than physical or mathematical, it seems we have set ourselves up for failure. Yet that seems like exactly the kind of perspective missing and trying to be pointed out by the earlier comment's attempted splitting of the difference to "2.1 parents" to me.
It’s a binary that works in 99% of cases. Doesnt seem like a hallucination to me
While it is a different category that chromosomal DNA, it is still an essential part of mammalian life. None of use would exist in our current forms without mitochondria
As I understand it, a human egg has about an equal quantity of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA. The mitochondrial DNA is highly replicated, though (about 100,000 mitochondria, each with ~16600 base pairs of DNA).
DNA can migrate between the nucleus and the mitochondria (and vice versa) so its not entirely black & white.
I've read about migration from mitochondria to nucleus, but I don't remember in the other direction.
Anyway, it's a very slow procces, IIRC like millions of years. We can ignore it in the human escale.
Also, both DNA use a sligtly different genetic code. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_genetics
> For most organisms the "stop codons" are "UAA", "UAG", and "UGA". In vertebrate mitochondria "AGA" and "AGG" are also stop codons, but not "UGA", which codes for tryptophan instead. "AUA" codes for isoleucine in most organisms but for methionine in vertebrate mitochondrial mRNA.
So it's not as easy as cut&paste.
This is such an incredible breakthrough and a huge win for science and families alike, however its sad that despite decades of work there is still no cure for mitochondrial disease. But the chance to preventing it being passed on is still such a major improvement. Also it’s sad that only the uk is capable of doing this atm bc it was the first country in the world to introduce laws to allow their creation after a vote in Parliament in 2015, while other countries were debating that it would open the doors to genetically-modified "designer" babies
The UK leads in this space as a previous PM had his newborn die of a genetic disease.
Amazing the domino effect.
David Cameron a conservative ex PM.
He's currently working in the genetic disease space: https://www.paediatrics.ox.ac.uk/news/former-uk-prime-minist...
It is an incredible breakthrough and if it prevents disease then all well and good, but are our Administrative Systems set up to handle such an arrangement?
Sure. The mitochondrial donor can be treated as a source of tissue and you are all done.
I really struggle why we keep maintaining some archaic definitions around the “family unit” anyway. So someone has 3 parents instead of 2 - nothing wrong with that.
It's ok to not know why something is.
My daughter doesn't know why we have archaic laws around seatbelts either, but she's 3.
This makes no sense.
The seatbelt laws are not archaic by any meaning of the word, and they can be justified with rational arguments.
Care to try doing the same for family thing? Aside from tradition.
It's not that hard to imagine a rational argument where humans have evolved to grow with one or two parents, leading to all sorts of psychological prewiring.
(I'm not supporting the argument, just saying that it's not hard to come up with a plausible rational one)
Before DNA testing nobody could tell anyway.
Cells can exchange mitochondria so in theory it might be possible to flood the body with healthy mitochondria and get them to slowly take over.
I would expect that to activate the immune system. "the unique components of mitochondria, when exposed, reveal their prokaryotic history and are recognized as foreign by innate immune receptors triggering an inflammatory response." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6218307/
Maybe if you suppress the immune system, introduce working mitochondria, and then stop taking the immunosuppressants, any mitochondria that are still outside cells get cleaned up and the ones that got absorbed are shielded and can do their job.
Maybe we can find some way to deliver mitochondria right into the cells.
> it might be possible to flood the body with healthy mitochondria and get them to slowly take over
it's not possible, these are organelles that are too big to be taken up by your cells, unless you can magically teleport them somehow to each cell
Mitochondrial health is definitely going to be a big theme in the coming years.
Clever. So they fertilize an egg from the mother and another egg from a donor with the fathers sperm. Then they yank out the donor/father “pro nuclei” and replace it with the pro nuclei from mother/father egg. Thus the child ends up with the donor’s mitochondria.
In vivo zygote mitochonrial transplantation. Neat! This is going to add an interesting exception to matrilineal DNA testing in the future.
Another thought, what about three parent households engaging in IVF? Will this be an option to have 3 biological parents regardless of disease? How will we keep records properly? What are the legal consequences? Do mitochondrial parents need to pay child support?
The amount of mitochondrial DNA is tiny though (~0.1%, according to the article), and not particularly unique to any individual, since it is passed down lately unchanged apart from the occasional mutation. There's no point having 3 biological parents unless there's a bad mutation in the mother's mitochondrial DNA.
I'm not sure there's any point to it. I know a couple poly families and my own situation isn't far off. The kids have a similar relationship with their parents as two-parent kids do. What DNA they happen to have doesn't matter, outside the occasional teenage outburst.
> In vivo zygote mitochonrial transplantation. Neat!
Absolutely not. This is in vitro:
>> The eggs from both the mother and the donor are fertilised in the lab with the dad's sperm.
In vivo would make no sense.
>In vivo would make no sense.
It would certainly be one of the more stranger ways to explain the birds and the bees
This would be awesome for so many households. We should stop acting like two biological parents is the only way to go.
We already crossed this with donor eggs and surrogacy. As for multiparent households i am aware of recent developments and will not say more.
Which recent developments? So you are against people choosing how they want to live?
Your conclusion has no supporting evidence.
This will run into objections from those who believe that life begins at conception. I can imagine this procedure being illegal in many jurisdictions.
This procedure is already banned in the US, despite the fact that it was pioneered in New York.
Couldn't patients have the procedure performed elsewhere as medical tourists? I don't see a viable way to prevent it.
Yes, that’s my understanding as well. Those who can afford it, can travel to a different country and try. But I assume it’s so expensive that only a select few can go through this process.
Some states have tried to make it illegal to travel to another state to have a banned procedure such as an elective abortion. I don't know how that has held up in court in practice.
The US constitution protects rights to interstate travel, but I'm not sure what the courts will do.
Meh, those "personhood at conception" [0] folks will always be whining at reality anyway, since what they imagine to be "plain common sense" is actually crazy. To wit:
1. Identical twins from one conception are not a single person.
2. An entity with chimerism (two conceptions) is one person, not two people simultaneously.
3. If I make an SCNT clone [1] of someone, that's another person, not property or a mobile body part.
4. They aren't freaking out about zillions of regular miscarriages, because they don't actually believe those are people-deaths.
_________
[0] They say life, but it really helps to nail them down to a much more specific definition ASAP, because they often to retreat into fallacies of equivocation. HeLa cells are not a person.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_cell_nuclear_transfer
Many families have private ceremonies for miscarriages
I am personally aware. Yet why do you believe people declaring chanting "life begins at conception" do not make preventing miscarriages into a part of their national political platform the same way as criminalizing abortion?
That's like someone who says "cows are people" and wants the death penalty for hamburgers, but they're a-OK with dairy farms and leather.
It shows that even the proponents of the slogan don't actually believe it.
Miscarriages are a personal tragedy. There is no way to prevent them.
Embryo selection is the easiest way to minimize the risk of miscarriage.
The only reason why you would say that there is no way to prevent them is that I infer from your posts that you are most likely against embryo selection.
The comment I was responding to suggested eliminating miscarriage as a policy objective. I said that was impossible. Your response with a suggestion to minimize risk while increasing the amount of total human death does not address the point, regardless of my comment history (ad hom.?).
"Does God have the ability to prevent miscarriages, but will not? Then why call him God?"
Or something like that... can't remember how it goes exactly.
Where do you get this expectation that biological processes should have a zero percent failure rate?
> why do you believe people declaring chanting "life begins at conception" do not make preventing miscarriages into a part of their national political platform
Because it's already a national political consensus?
National health organizations go to serious lengths to make sure women are not unknowingly consuming things which would cause them to miscarry. Assaulting a woman and causing her to miscarry is penalized with charges above and beyond what would be assigned if not for the miscarriage. Societally, we try to encourage people to be gentle, careful, and accommodating towards/with pregnant women, and to encourage mothers to not drink or smoke while they're carrying.
What strawman world are you living in where this isn't the case?
You're right that there is a consensus of "miscarriages are unfortunate, let's try to minimize how often it happens."
What does not exist is a consensus that a blastocyst is (consistently) equal in personhood to a newborn, with equal levels of loss and tragedy. I trust that this is obvious without the need for lurid comparisons.
So while the two vectors may share a direction, the amplitudes are very different. Kind of like how it's important to floss your teeth, it's not so important that failure becomes a crime.
So much straw here I'm looking for Rumpelstiltskin.
Then what do you believe the slogan "life begins at conception" actually means instead?
Why do you think it has a meaning other than literal?
The literal meaning is incoherent nonsense because the sperm and egg were both alive before conception.
"Just read the words" isn't a good-faith response.
If one actually does that, reading it literally and without context, then it becomes a flat-out lie: The vast majority of biological "life" on the planet never involves "conception" at all.
I'm happy to restrict it to human life.
What do you think it means?
Stop trying to disguise your insincere trolling as the Socratic method.
If you label something as a "strawman", that means you are already aware of distinct and relevant differences between it and the "real" thing.
But instead of presenting those things that you claim to already have, you're running away, unable to explain your own words! Much like someone that hurled "strawman" as a reflexive insult after they felt uncomfortable reading the text.
My position is the literal meaning of my words in everyday usage.
Your rhetorical games belie your ability to engage in simple discussion.
Good luck!
I heard from the news in the UK that it’s currently only allowed in the UK and one other country, which I think might have been Australia.
[flagged]
You should publish your findings in a bestselling book.
The Holy Babble.
Lies, I haven't talked with anyone yesterday.
I am pretty sure most people would not be all right with organ donation a la The Island. The fact that the person is vulnerable and invisible doesn't make it better.
When is it a person?
Are women carrying partial people in their eggs?
If most fertilized eggs naturally fail to implant then should we monitor urine and arrange funerals for those lost?
> Are women carrying partial people in their eggs?
Yes.
> If most fertilized eggs naturally fail to implant then should we monitor urine and arrange funerals for those lost?
Weird strawman.
Not that weird of a strawman:
> According to the Metro, several states have prosecuted women for miscarriages or stillbirths. They include South Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas, Texas, California, Mississippi, and Ohio. It appears West Virginia has joined the ranks as well.
> Though California has since passed laws banning criminal charges and investigations of pregnancy loss, it previously jailed two women for stillbirths.
Also:
> Raleigh County Prosecuting Attorney Tom Truman told WVNS 59News that a number of criminal charges under state code, including felonies, could be levied against a woman who flushes fetal remains, buries them, or otherwise disposes of remains following an involuntary abortion, also called a miscarriage.
We've established arbitrary lines on when the embryo progresses to the point of having a legally mandated funeral in some parts of the US.
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/new-law-in-us-state-could-le...
Where's the part about monitoring urine to do funerals?
> Weird strawman
Comparing abortions to harvesting organs from cloned humans? I agree, definitely a weird strawman.
"monitor urine for unimplanted eggs"
Not how that works.
Monitor urine for signs of viable pregnancy, obviously.
Rhetorically, I'm not willing to grant so-called "obvious" corrections automatically. Rather, obvious mistakes indicate an incorrect argument. People can just say what they mean.
That’s not a correction. You misinterpreted the comment and decided it was patently wrong. With mistakes this obvious, maybe your argument is the one that’s incorrect?
So mother and father contribute the nucleus, and donor egg has everything else-- which is a lot more than mitochondria.
DNA required by mitochondria are both in the mitochondria and in the nucleus. This seems to show there is no co-evolution of the two; or the genetic distance of the donor might matter.
Still TBD whether other problems arise. If they do, I wonder if the affected person has any ability to get medical records of the other subjects, to compare diagnoses or treatments, notwithstanding privacy protections.
> DNA required by mitochondria
DNA that codes for proteins that are required by the mitochondria...
The DNA in the nucleus itself does not make its way to the mitochondria.
> This seems to show there is no co-evolution of the two
There is plenty of co-evolution between the two. But the idea that the genetic distance between donors doesn't matter is pretty substantiated by the fact that people of two races can have children.
>people of two races
In modern science, the idea that humans can be separated into "races" genetically is completely debunked. All humans are members of the genus Homo and more specific the species H. sapiens. Two people of different skin color may well be genetically more similar than two people of what you would call the same "race."
stop. this is harmful. if you think someone of african descent has the same risk of sickle cell as someone of south asian descent and ignore a diagnosis based on that assessment you might be committing medical malpractice.
You seriously need to open a history book to get some perspective on what is actually harmful with this agenda. As for the science, maybe check out wikipedia on human genetics [1]. You'll find tons of further sources there.
>The lack of discontinuities in genetic distances between human populations, absence of discrete branches in the human species, and striking homogeneity of human beings globally, imply that there is no scientific basis for inferring races or subspecies in humans, and for most traits, there is much more variation within populations than between them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation
well as a member of a non white race, I have had a family member die because white doctors misprescribed a drug (statin) at a dosage inappropriate for my race.
I live in Newcastle and it's great to see Newcastle Uni in the news. Bobby McFarland is an international authority on paediatric neurology and of course mitochondrial medicine - he is also a truly lovely guy and intimidatingly smart. Everyone talks about Great Ormond Street but the paediatrics stuff being done at GNCH is world class.
This might be a silly question: I understand the mitochondria from the mother's egg is unusable due to disease. Why do they need a 3rd person to provide one? Is there a reason they could take one from a father's cell?
> Mitochondria in human sperm contain no or very little DNA because mtDNA is degraded while sperm cells are maturing, hence they typically do not contribute any genetic material to their offspring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm
So the sperm’s mitochondria are degraded, and I guess, you don’t want somatic cell components for various reasons.
I believe the simple answer (vs complicated truth) is that the donor cell, a fertilized egg, is in a state accepting a not-quite-formed nucleus. There are no male cells that can get into that state AFAIK, possibly excepting pluripotent stem cells that are somehow convinced to undergo ovogenesis.
The truth is of course much more complicated than my limited understanding.
I assume it's because it would be hard to filter out the mitochondria from the egg and easier to swap the much larger nucleus.
You only inherit the mitochondria from your mother. The sperm don't contribute mitochondria, they are all in the egg.
Fascinating that you can replace the nucleus of a cell and it keeps working fine, given cells are so complex... I wonder what (if any) setup/precautions are required in the cell biology to make it work. And I wonder if there are genetic conditions in which it can't work (e.g. some sort of mismatch between genes and what's already present in the donor cell)?
Im a father and can maybe understand 0.1% of what this would feel like. I’m so sorry for what you and your family went through.
Who has to pay child support?
Huge win for science ...big loss for evolution.
I am by no means a callous person, in fact, my therapist tells me I have a problem with too much empathy, and in no way do I wish parents to loose their children so young.
But what I am also not is a eugenicist, which is what this is, eugenics.
"Eugenics is a set of largely discredited beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population."
Now remember, first they are only preventing the chance of a baby being born with mitochondrial disease. But more importantly, these mitochondrial diseases are still evident in the human population because there is some survival advantage. This is what happens with sickle cell disease [1]. The sacrifices these babies make, dying so young, is a sacrifice for the survival of a genetic population. In the case of mitochondrial diseases, this favors the survival of female babies over male babies, or even the benefit of higher amounts of oxidative stess in the mother to fight off infection.
So by this method, even the female baby will be born without the Mitochondrial mutation. What will this mean for her?
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/evolution/mitochondrial-dna-evolu...
"Accordingly, their model revealed that some mutations confer a net replicative advantage over unmutated (wildtype) mtDNA, causing the mutant mtDNA to proliferate within individual organisms."
We know so little and we are acting like we know everything. Humanity needs to stop thinking we are gods and accept our fates. Eugenicists thought they knew what the best genes were to survive, and this is no different.
[1] https://globalhealthnow.org/2024-06/how-sickle-cell-disease-...
I think your argument is “we’re screwing with nature in big ways and we have a demonstrated history of being so confidently wrong. This is dangerous.” Which I think is a deeply important discussion to be able to comfortably have without the layers of disclaimers.
I think a lot of these biotechs that raise alarms are pretty safe, and the problem is that we’re really bad at explaining in lay terms how it all works, and people naturally assume the worst.
I think it’s also an issue of practicality (and this is where it flirts with being eugenics). What’s the alternative? To tell people not to reproduce if they have known disease prone genes? To make them not reproduce? To tell them they don’t get universal healthcare if they do?
I think mucking about with our building blocks is the least bad option we have.
Thanks for not being reactionary. You are in the minority so I figured I would disclaim.
> What’s the alternative?
Acceptance. These parents can still reproduce. A female child will most likely be healthy, like the mother. And the male child will not always be born with a mitochondrial disease. People do not realize that father's can also pass mitochondrial genetics to their children. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/6639/)
In trying to remove all risk from our lives we are making it inherently risky in other, usually unknown, ways.
All the spiritual practices talk about acceptance, so just pick one.
But my bigger point is that it is still eugenics. And that is bad no matter what the goal is.
> remove all risk from our lives
As a parent of young kids, this is a core issue I grapple with. I want my kids to have fun and take risks and learn how to handle the bumpiness of life. But I don’t want my kids being maimed or killed.
I think the argument could be simplified to “we’re collectively better off if we live in a manner where one consequence is that x% of us will get badly hurt.” And I personally believe that’s a true statement.
My youngest was one of the x%. He played in a risky way (that was entirely normal when I was a kid) and later that night a team of orthopedic pediatric surgeons had to put his body back together.
The hardest thing for me is not to be constantly saying “that’s too high; get down from there; don’t go too far; slow down” because that trauma lives with his mom and I far more than it does with him. But I believe it’s important for him to keep taking risks.
I also believe it’s up to each parent to decide how they want to raise their kids. We don’t get to collectively decide for the parents.
Which relates back to the topic: I think it’s collectivism vs. individualism. I believe we cannot decide for people that they don’t get a choice in the matter. Even if one might argue that this poses a collective risk to the population.
I'm so sorry that happened. As a parent, stories of injured children get that bad-news stomach drop to me, and I both empathize and sympathize. We are dealing with a similar (but older child) issue now and it is just heartbreaking to see them hurt.
> I think it’s collectivism vs. individualism
The idea of individualism is a hard one for me. Are we really individuals? I mean, we get half our genetics from each parent, so where is the individual? Can any of you live as a total individual, without the assistance of even a small group? When in human history, even primate history, have you seen our species survive without a community?
When a parent makes this decision for gene therapy, that does not just affect the parents, it affects the child (the outcome of which is still not understood) and it affects those child's children.
Natural selection exists for a reason, but the eugenicists think they can control it.
Comparing gene therapy to cognitive therapy (telling your kids to not be stupid), is in no way comparable. Doing gene therapy is not "raising your kids", it is creating your kids.
I am saying this as someone who lives with THREE genetic disorders. von Hippel-Lindau syndrome (Father and Mother, hemangioblastomas), Cystathionine beta-synthase deficiency (Mother, homocystinuria), and a DNM1L Deficiency that leads to mitochondrial fission dysfunction (myoptahy, ME/CFS, OCD, Anxiety, Asperger's).
So as someone who spent the last few years caring for a kid with a genetic defect.... I really don't wish that on anyone.
If there is a way to detect or prevent genetic defects before the kids are born, we should really allow people to make a choice.
And I really don't care if doctors mix genetic material from 3 people to make a healthy baby. It's still a form of evolution. I'd think we should really try to give two people who really want to have a kid a chance to have a healthy kid...
> But my bigger point is that it is still eugenics. And that is bad no matter what the goal is.
You're literally advocating for letting genetic diseases cull the afflicted populations, "selecting for the better genes" that way. Seemingly the exact opposite of your claimed position, I hope you appreciate.
Or you have no problem with selection as long as "nature does it"? That's the best idea I have for reconciling this at least. Are we humans not part of nature though? Is you preferring what nature does not just a preference still?
If we figure out that some specific genetic difference results in people eventually dying before they reproduce, what's the difference between editing that out vs. letting nature do its thing?
> If we figure out that some specific genetic difference results in people eventually dying before they reproduce, what's the difference between editing that out vs. letting nature do its thing?
We're not that smart. Everything has unintended consequences. One example some people have studied is sickle-cell anemia. It's a recessive trait so if you get two copies of the gene you get sickle-cell which is a horrible disease. However, if you only get one copy of the gene it provides substantial immunity against malaria.
Now, maybe in this case you could say, okay, we will cure malaria somehow, not worth sickle-cell existing. But the thing is that gene isn't "the gene for sickle-cell anemia," nor is it even "the gene for malaria resistance and sickle-cell anemia." It affects hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of different things.
I think there are some conditions where I don't have a problem doing that, and sickle-cell, mitochondrial disease, these things do seem "bad enough" to be worth putting our fingers on the scale. But I am not sure it's so clear-cut, and I think it's right to say that eugenics are categorically suspect.
> We're not that smart.
How do you determine that? We've come far enough to see and manipulate individual atoms, emit and count individual photons, and build machines that understand human language (if ever so fleetingly). Unless how we work is fundamentally betraying how we can reason about the world, and we find that that's intrinsically linked to our genetics, I really don't see us not cracking it eventually proper.
> Everything has unintended consequences.
People use medications every single day that are effective for what they are taking it for, yet have "unintended consequences" that are consciously ignored or are found otherwise negligible by them. Seems like unintended consequences are not a blocker. The criteria hasn't been perfection even up to this point, it's always been a desperation-driven best-effort. Much like life and civilization as a whole.
I can appreciate e.g. hesitance in taking on the responsibility of possibly being wrong about how something like this works - nature cannot be blamed, but humans can and that feels bad. But the alternative is pretty clear and is not going away on its own. I'm pretty sure at least that just like how genetic traits can be evolved multiple times independently, genetic defects can be too. This is also why I think to characterize this as eugenics is extremely and fundamentally wrong. Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on - a concept that flagrantly flies in the face of this independent recurrence effect, for one.
> We've come far enough to see and manipulate individual atoms, emit and count individual photons
The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.
> Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on
Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“. They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason. And that’s because on Balance They are not bad, but for some they are very bad. Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral. It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.
I do not understand why you reposted your comment. I've already replied to this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44618552
> We've come far enough to see and manipulate individual atoms, emit and count individual photons
The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.
> Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on
Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“. They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason. And that’s because on Balance. They are not bad, but for some they are very bad. Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral. It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.
I've posted a reply to this in haste, but it was a bit more emotionally charged than ideal. This is a reworded version that I believe reflects my thoughts more accurately.
> The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.
That is a very far removed interpretation of what I wrote. As I'm sure you're aware, nuclear bombs operate on fission (or in rarer cases, fission and fusion). These are atomic-scale processes, but do not involve atomic-scale control (or in some cases, even control at all - natural fission sites exist). A more faithful example for what I said would be semiconductor manufacturing, where the state of the art is 40-atoms wide tracks of patterning resolution. The atomic pick-and-place I describe was demonstrated, but has no practical implementations that I'm aware of (would be way too slow). But even if we go back to fission, nuclear plants are providing stable, relatively clean baseline power at reasonable costs, and for better or for worse, the world didn't yet descend into WW3 either, and it's more than fair to speculate that this is due to the temporary checkmate nuclear bombs provide us. So as far as I'm concerned, no, I think we're pretty alright still.
> Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“.
But your position doesn't seem to care much for if this assumption is correct or not. Even if it's bang-on perfectly correct, you stated that this is eugenics period, therefore it's bad. Was that not what you meant to suggest then?
> They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason.
How would you know? What if I disagree that reason and purpose are ontologically real?
> Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral.
I disagree that human genetics would be a conscious process, and that it can thus care about things. I also disagree that it can know anything about morals - morals are a human concept, and they're not even universally shared across us. Very clearly just the two of us seem to hold ourselves to very different definitions of what's moral, for example.
> It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.
I don't suppose you're claiming that this treatment (or other genetic treatments) result(s) in the vast majority of the patients dying?
I think FollowingTheDao has a point worth exploring and it's easy to be afraid of it because it sounds cruel and against modern individualistic thinking.
Genetic diseases that have survived a long time in our population may well have some positive selection pressure and may be good to the population overall. He gave the example of sickle cell, but I also recently read about a similar idea with schizophrenia. Suppose we eliminate the schizophrenia genes from the gene pool? We would also lose the benefit they provide - probably to people who don't quite become schizophrenic.
> I don't suppose you're claiming that this treatment (or other genetic treatments) result(s) in the vast majority of the patients dying?
I think he is claiming that but the vast majority is future generations who die from some other problems that this "bad" mitochondrial DNA was protecting the rest of the population against.
I'm not sure if he meant "a moral" or "amoral" but genes evolve to ensure their own survival and that might be done more effectively by killing a few babies with mitochondrial disease as a side effect of something else.
These unknown benefits of genetic diseases might simply be keeping mutations out. Mutations are going to happen anyway and maybe it's useful to the species for them to be fatal instead of just degrading performance in life which might accumulate over generations. Consider a program stopping with segfault vs silently continuing with corrupt memory.
I do not think they have a point that can be explored much, or that they're suggesting an exploration of anything to begin with. I further think that the fear is on their side: fear from being associated with a historically malicious movement (eugenics), fear from being the possible culprit of unintended suffering (gene editing going wrong downstream) and thus having that responsibility, and fear of the disruption of some higher balance they believe exists (religion).
For example,
> may well have some positive selection pressure and may be good to the population overall
How will we find this out if we espouse gene editing in general as bad?
From my perspective, like religious folks in general, they wish for leaving unknowns remain unknown and just being passive; unfortunately, I think this goes against the very essence of life, and our very fundamental biases that come from being alive and perceiving ourselves as sentient.
If I took their worldview to the extreme, I wouldn't be able to do anything: the smallest things would require a full and complete understanding of the entire state of the world, lest I might cause some unintended effect that may hurt me greatly, and so when I do do anything, I'm exhibiting hubris. This is also why I brought up healthcare in general being a best effort, because all active actions in life are at most a best effort due to the impenetrable wall between our perception of the world, and the world in its actuality.
To tie it back to your example:
> Consider a program stopping with segfault vs silently continuing with corrupt memory.
Think about how you can reset your graphics driver by pressing Win+Ctrl+Shift+B without having to restart your entire system. Or how you continue to write programs, despite not being able to guarantee that the code you write for those programs is actually what's going to execute, on the state you expect them to be executed on, in the environment you expect it to execute in, in a way you expect it to execute. You might get other programs inject themselves into your program, other programs manipulate the memory of your program, the system libraries you call into do something unexpected because 20 years have passed and now things are different, or simply being scheduled out and your program not even receiving CPU time, meaning if your program powered a real time experience, that now ceases to be that way.
Yeah, I find it pretty telling that the person arguing against eugenics is in its distilled essence telling me to not reproduce, because I might have an undesirable trait I do not wish my children to inherit.
It's like he managed to be against eugenics, because it's eugenics, but not be against any of the negative consequences that eugenics brought in the past. For me this reeks of someone putting on a facade.
> Yeah, I find it pretty telling that the person arguing against eugenics is in its distilled essence telling me to not reproduce, because I might have an undesirable trait I do not wish my children to inherit.
I did not say that at all. Mitochondrial diseases are not transmitted 100% to the children so I am saying go ahead and reproduce and accept the results.
They should not mess with genes where the sciences is not 100% settled but that still leaves a lot's of mutations known to be 100% deleterious. There are no benefits in having hereditary blindness, deafness or schizophrenia!
> How can you argue otherwise?
Because I know more about how integrated and complicated genetics is than you?
Now you’re talking about editing out polymorphisms, not even mutations? Did you know the COMT is only a minor risk for schizophrenia, right? And that it not only metabolize is catecholamines, but also estrogens? How did you know the COMT enzyme is stimulated by magnesium and SAMe? Maybe the person needs just more of those than needing to have genetic therapy.
You didn't argue for anything! Assuming science had the ability to cleanly edit that variant (which is not the case today), the ethical choice is to remove that small risk factor.
That variant of the COMT gene have a mountain of evidence against it and no evidence showing any benefit whatsoever. The fact that the COMT enzyme is also implicated in estrogen metabolism is not an argument for or against editing out the known defective variant of the COMT gene.
There is an argument to be made that we should wait until medical science has the means to cleanly and reliably do a single gene edit but I don't buy the argument that removing a gene variant from the humans genes pool is eugenics therefore it's bad and should be forever forbidden.
> That variant of the COMT gene have a mountain of evidence against it and no evidence showing any benefit whatsoever
When you look at a single gene, you can see there’s no benefit. But when you look at the gene in contacts of the whole genome, there could certainly be a benefit to having a slower COMT enzyme.
For example, in someone with higher homocysteine, this would be an advantage.
So you see the problem, you see the gene is bad because of looking at the gene as an individual, but I see it as probably beneficial when I look at the whole genome. And this is why I am against gene editing. Unless you take the gene, you wanna edit in the full context of the whole genome you don’t see the bad effects it might have in the long run. And who is doing that? nobody.
Eugenics gets a bad rap for good reason. But like everything in life, it's not black-and-white. It's one of those scary words people are afraid of because some assholes used it for evil. But avoiding having children because you don't want to pass on genetic diseases doesn't make you Hitler. So let's leave the charged language in the trash where it belongs.
I've got a genetic disease. I decided not to have kids because I didn't want to pass it on. Ended up with one anyway, and I hope for his sake he didn't inherit it, because I don't want him to have to deal with the problems I have. You might say that's not natural, but humans have evolved to care about our offspring. What can be more natural to a human than not wanting to watch your child suffer?
Your argument could be used to justify abandoning health care altogether. I should have died of gangrene when I was 12, but I had ingrown toenail surgery that saved my life. I wear glasses, surely that goes against natural selection since I wouldn't be as fit a mate as someone with 20/20 vision. My girlfriend had breast cancer, should her children have grown up without a mother for the sake of the species? Should I abandon her because her breasts and ovaries were removed and she's no longer a fit mate?
Evolution is just a process, and one we've been opting out of for thousands of years, ever since the first human helped another human survive something that should have killed them. Don't make Darwin your god. The irony would spin his coffin right out of the ground.
When applied to non-human life, the alleged benefits of eugenics goes by the names domestication, husbandry, and similar.
Correct me if I am wrong because I am absolutely not a historian. Eugenics was horrible not because we understand Mendellian genetics but because it was forced on people in the intent to allegedly "improve" a (political boundary placeholder)'s population in some way that was outright obscene, including use by Nazi Germany and many other places and regimes. US courts, etc.
I think the difference here is that the technology is not forced to be used.
Not all eugenicists had what they thought were Negative intentions. In the 30s the plan was to send Native Americans to the cities to to interbreed breed with white people to make white people more communal.
And besides, aren’t we forcing these genetic changes onto the children without their consent?
We force life itself on them without their consent, so ensuring they actually live past childhood seems like a package deal...
Improving the genetic quality of a human population seems like a good cause.
What got"eugenics" in disrepute was the evil things done to people with "bad" traits:
- Killing them
- Forced sterilizing of them
- Forced abortion of their fetuses
That's awful, but because of the means, not because the goal of a healthier population.
Eugenics is any choice that influences the genetic makeup of your descendants in a way that you believe to be desirable. Choosing a tall partner because you want your kids to be tall is eugenics. Eugenics happens every day, in every country. The bad rap comes from historical attempts to apply it coercively. Parents choosing to eliminate their genetic diseases is not the same.
> we are acting like we know everything. Humanity needs to stop thinking we are god
These activities are in no way evidence for people thinking (too?) highly of themselves or "as gods". Just a completely made up accusation.
I also don't see why the scary labels are relevant necessarily. To be afraid of whether this qualifies as eugenics or if you qualify as an eugenicist is sitting backwards on the horse completely. But maybe I just misinterpreted your catious wording and there's no being afraid here - in other comments you outright state you consider this eugenics, for example.
> [As] Humanity[, we need to] accept our fates.
No, we really don't. Though if you and people of the same opinion just accept fate, you also accept this research and similar continuing on, so maybe this is not even a point of debate in practice.
Unfortunately, the stupid state of public conversation is that you can't talk about these things without couching it in "I'm not a racist but..." type language. People will see the smallest hint of wrongthink and reactionarily conclude you're a Nazi in disguise.
It doesn't matter if something or someone qualifies as eugenics or not. What matters is the outcomes of the actions. FollowingTheDao seems to be concerned about long term consequences on the overall population which may be best served by individuals accepting their babies will die. Or it may not - but it's worth discussing without going into pedantry about the meaning of words.
By this logic all gene therapy is eugenics.
Presumably all of medicine too since it keeps us from "accepting our fates" and lets us procreate worse genes instead of letting billions of people die sacrificially due to their genes which is a "huge loss for evolution".
Kinda funny to attack TFA by associating it with a naughty word while tracking in such awful ideas as if we're unable to evaluate the ideas ourselves.
Indeed. My understanding is that eugenics is typically something where the choice is not allowed by the person or, before birth, parents of the person affected by the procedure.
No, it is only eugenics when it when gene therapy controls the genetic makeup of a child before it is born. Gene therapy for cancer is not eugenics.
> controls the genetic makeup of a child before it is born
Selective breeding in livestock, mate selection in wild animals and humans...
I do understand your point. I struggle with whether it is cause for (more than theoretical) concern.
The ethical quandaries don't seem that important when it's isolated to expression of personal choice.
State-driven decisions are ugly of course. And perhaps the insanity that we see in dog breeding is very bad.
But we don't see the dog breeding problems in human parents (aside from the initial mate selection, which can be vicious!).
So where does that leave us? Using blunt tools is OK but precise tools are bad?
But gene therapy can fix the genetic makeup of the living child, then enable it to pass on its defective material. That seems patently worse for evolution?
If you take the case of sickle cell anemia, you’ll find this is not the case. You need to understand more about genetics and why these mutation survive over generations. They don’t survive by accident they survive because when they are heterogeneous, they are beneficial to the population. It’s only the unlucky child that ends homozygous that will suffer from illness. But that is the balance and sacrifice nature makes to keep a population alive. It’s indifferent and amoral, it’s utilitarian. And it’s way beyond the comprehension of human knowledge.
> And it’s way beyond the comprehension of human knowledge.
Are you fairly religious, if you don't mind my asking?
No, not religious, I just am averse to human hubris, so maybe since that theme that echos in all the religious texts which is why you might think so. God told Even not to get knowledge by eating the Apple, Them he dispersed the people of Babel because they were trying to become like God.
I see Daoism as a scientific, observational life view. To know everything is impossible, and all the God stories say that God knows everything. No one can even know the Dao, all you can do is feel it in a sense. You can get an idea of the laws and let it take you. In other words, acceptance. The Dao (law of nature) controls evolution and why a baby is needed to live or die. We we try to change that we go against the Dao, and that leads to imbalance, and then problems.
> I just am averse to human hubris
For someone averse to human hubris, you repeatedly speak as if you were the voice of the world (nature, "Dao"?), merely spreading the will of the world (nature, "Dao"?). This is also why you were asked if you're religious, I assume.
Eugenics has always been a technological problem, not an ideological one.
If there was a cheap and cost effective way to edit your genes as an adult in a 100% safe way, then everyone would be doing it.
The reason why eugenics has a bad reputation is that there are incredibly low tech solutions that require an authoritarian surveillance state and such states have indeed existed and abused their powers in the past. I'm talking about forced sterilisation.
The first problem with these low tech approaches is that their models suck and aren't founded by actual genetics research. E.g. fascists defining their own ethnic group as superior over other ethnic groups.
The second problem is that they didn't just think that they were helping the people born through eugenics avoid diseases or become better people, they were thinking that people with the wrong genes shouldn't procreate or exist at all, because they are a waste of resources and therefore should be killed even if they somehow manage to deal with their complications.
But if we take a step back and start off with a higher level of technology and scientific progress, these concerns turn out to be meaningless.
If there is a gene that objectively causes a disease or harm and it can be identified reliably, then having children with that disease becomes morally questionable. This means some people are prevented from having children that they would otherwise want. However, if there is a technology that allows people to have children without the disease, then suddenly the opposite happens. It becomes a moral imperative to give them access to the treatment so that they can have children. In the extreme limit, no matter how bigoted an eugenicist is, he must always allow even the most "inferior" people (in his eyes) to have children and procreate. The discriminatory part of eugenics collapses into itself as if it never existed.
This then leaves the actual problems with eugenics: lack of genetic diversity and unforeseen consequences of unrestricted gene editing.
The solution to this problem would be to never implement precise genetic editing in the first place. Instead, whole chromosomes should be swapped out. This will increase genetic diversity by allowing a single child to have the combined genes of multiple fathers and mothers.
Generally the reason we think of Eugenicists as "bad guys" is because they've been characterized by being happy to sterilize or kill people to prevent their "subhuman genes" from being passed down to the next generations.
This is different, another step in the erasure of genes that harm humans. This is not a genocide.
It seems like your argument boils down to we should continue to have horrible suffering and early death because diversity of DNA is good and we shouldn't edit out potentially helpful mutations (that also cause horrible suffering) - if we can beat malaria, why would we need sickle cell?
So I think this person is wrong, but the one little nugget in there that is partially right is that I do think it's important that, before we start modifying genomes on a wide scale, we should have a pretty comprehensive database (100's of thousands to millions) of whole-genome sequences (alongside mitochondrial DNA) stored.
To my understanding that's still super expensive. We can do short SNPs (snippets? Not my field, I'm armchairing) for cheap like good ole 23andme but not full genome cheaply.
As of 2023, it was apparently <$1000/sequence [0], which means it would be a few hundred million to maybe a billion dollars. Which is a lot, but it really only needs to be done once, and is a global project. That seems pretty reasonable all things considered. But also, we can probably wait a little while since it's not super crucial until artificial genetic modification starts to get widespread, which is still probably a decade off or so. We could probably start just collecting samples now, and as long as they are appropriately preserved, the actual sequencing could be done later when it gets even cheaper.
[0] https://3billion.io/blog/whole-genome-sequencing-cost-2023
It occurs to me that the sequencing itself probably wouldn't be the main cost. Collecting the samples, and the manpower needed to do it, would be far, far more expensive. Probably at least 10x the cost, especially if you were really serious about getting the full range of diversity.
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This is just the beginning of all that. "Designer babies" will obviously be a big business in the future, and one can take that logic VERY far, even for an entire nation where all babies will be mandated to have certain genes or characteristics... or worst, mandated specializations...
Of course, science fictions authors,scientists and philosophers have written plenty of material on the matter and the danger of such societies... and it might blow up in our face one way or another, but nothing aside of our demise can stop scientific progress...
I mean click-bait par excellence. No shit it would come from0.1% of someone else. Give me something like three headed baby, you know that enquirer stuff, just class it up. Theres like 10,000 research articles published every year, there’s gotta be some damn interesting speck in this business.
In the US would this be considered abortion by pro-life activists?
I'm prolife. Perhaps. You're destroying one human in this process.
Some of us are a bit more comfortable with IVF-like processes because the intent is to foster human life rather than take it, just as it's acceptable to cause an abortion in the process of saving a mother.
Afaik it's a misconception that MRT necessarily involves the destruction of an embryo. The spindle transfer method transplants the mother's egg's DNA into the donor's egg before fertilization, so only one embryo is ever created. The UK trials exclusively used the older pronuclear transfer method, where two embryos are created and the donor's is destroyed, because the journey to full regulatory approval took about a decade and embryos are currently safer to freeze and thaw than eggs. In a hypothetical scenario where MRT became as widely available as IVF, this would not need to be the case for new patients.
> Some of us are a bit more comfortable with IVF-like processes because the intent is to foster human life rather than take it, just as it's acceptable to cause an abortion in the process of saving a mother.
But that (fostering human life) is also not a settled debate if the laws in some states are any indication. But debate is hard in jurisdictions where minority opinion can hold sway (like in Florida where a referendum hit 57% for enshrining a right to abortion).
While I'm resolutely pro-choice and don't consider a fertilized cell to be "human", (before I continue I want to be clear, I 100% support these types of procedures in the article) there is eventually going to be a grey area where debate needs to happen before we hit Gattaca-style dystopian editing.
PS This is not meant to argue against your view per se, which I disagree with but respect. I mean to illustrate how very quickly this gets messy and rational debate flies out the window. But that's the same with anything political in today's climate... :-/
> You're destroying one human in this process.
How so? They're removing the pro-nuclei before they fuse (which is when a new human, specifically their first sovereign cell and their DNA, would be formed). So even if you consider life to start at conception, this is precisely just before that still, meaning there's no human being destroyed here - unless I misunderstand the biology going on (or the article is not correct).
> The eggs from both the mother and the donor are fertilised in the lab with the dad's sperm.
The article seems clear. Another comment [1] suggested it should be possible to do as you suggested but I certainly do not know the science in this space.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617740
> The spindle transfer method transplants the mother's egg's DNA into the donor's egg before fertilization
The article uses the colloquial definition of fertilization, i.e. that fertilization is a moment, specifically the moment the sperm enters the egg. In literature, fertilization is a ~24 hour long process instead, which kicks off when sperm meets egg, and finishes when a zygote is successfully created [0] inside. The sperm entering the egg is relatively early on during that.
The article further refers to "donor" and "parent" embryos. This is also not correct as far as I undestand, eggs turn embryos once the fertilization process completes, and a zygote is present. [1] Even this could be considered misleading as there's also an "embryo proper" which forms about a week later still, but I wanted to keep to the reference frame of the GP.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_fertilization
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryo
That's very interesting, thank you for the context. I imagine I learned some amount of this long ago and have lost it to disuse. I also think I agree with the majority of your analysis after reading your references as well as [1] and [2]. And I apologize for my uninformed quoting of a line from the article and appreciate the education.
I found [2] particularly informative because it outlines a multi-stage process through which an embryo goes, the earliest of which is fertilization as you described. My reading in the article, and perhaps relying too much on the artwork, seems to put the process described there at stage 1b-1c since the pronuclei looks to be in the process of fusing. My conclusion in cross-referencing [1] is that your "embryo proper" is around stage 4-5 and would have been implanted?
> They're removing the pro-nuclei before they fuse (which is when a new human, specifically their first sovereign cell and their DNA, would be formed).
I wish I'd had the context to appreciate this before my earlier reply. :)
I also enjoyed reading parts of [3] and imagine there is probably better information nearly 60 years later.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_embryonic_development
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_stages
[3] https://publicationsonline.carnegiescience.edu/publications_...
> My conclusion in cross-referencing [1] is that your "embryo proper" is around stage 4-5 and would have been implanted?
No, I believe what happened is that they made their mitochondrial changes before the pronuclei fusion, and inserted this modified egg into the womb. There it the continued on with the fertilization process, finishing up, creating the zygote, etc.
The embryo-proper bit was only relevant to the "from what point is it a human life" part of this, it is not relevant to the procedure specifically. That comes a whole week after fertilization I believe.
Being anti-abortion (what you call pro-life) doesn’t also automatically mean that you share the belief that human life and the associated rights thereof begin at the instant of fertilization.
It seems you mean to imply that you are against the destruction of a fertilized viable embryo, but then the rest of your message seems to suggest that it isn’t that important.
There is a gamut of what is pro-life, pro-lifers themselves don't agree with each other on IVF.
(the same as with pro-choicers and third trimester abortions for example)
Only the extreme fringe is willing to go to bat against IVF. Maybe 10%.
I think it's higher than that. The Catholic Church is against IVF. Although not all its followers will stick to all its teachings a significant number will.
It's not dogma, it's just advice. And I think the vast majority of people would just ignore it.
Frankly, advice on having children from celibate men doesn't need special consideration from women.
I say this as someone who was at least raised Catholic and still has an affection for the faith.
It is in fact dogma that IVF is forbidden to Catholics (see Humanae Vitae #12 and the Catechism #2376)
https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/docume...
https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_three/secti...
Neither of those are dogma.
Strictly speaking no, dogma has a very specific definition and refers to things of a theological nature like the dogma of the Immaculate Conception which 90% of American Catholics wouldn't get right (most would answer that it refers to the virgin conception of Jesus).
That doesn't mean the Church's teaching isn't final and binding.
It absolutely means that. If you are a Catholic and believe that a church teaching is wrong, you have a duty to speak up and dispute it.
Teachings can be reversed and they are absolutely not binding. These disputes are supposed to be done in humility with the assumption that the church is probably right, but that's pretty much the same as arguing with Linux kernel devs...
Given the discarding of some embryos it would seem pretty clearly against Catholic teaching no?
Where I came from (rural and very conservative) everyone is 100% against IVF and frankly, religion aside, I'm not sure it's good. There are certainly ways to abuse it and there's a certain kind of person it's popular with.
> there's a certain kind of person it's popular with.
People who have trouble naturally conceiving a child?
People who want a particular type of child.
Yeah, this is throwing the baby with the bathwater. I am with you, if you are talking about "designer babies" etc. A basic Google search will tell us about studies where vast majority of Americans are okay with even gene editing, to prevent diseases, but not for performance enhancements.
It is a tool, like guns, bombs and medicine.
Most Americans are OK with many things, that doesn't make them right or wrong.
I'm OK with being alone, that doesn't make me right or wrong.
It does mean I have courage of conviction though.
Social norms are made when most people are okay with something.
It's got nothing to do with right or wrong.
Not agreeing with something maybe because of courage, cowardice, nonchalance or anything else.
Social norms are not objective truths. Social norms include racism, sexism, antisemitism, etc.
Openly disagreeing with the in-group cannot be nonchalance, almost by definition (if you don't care, why bother having an opinion?), and it can't be cowardice if the issue matters.
Like what and like who? You don't think people who cannot naturally conceive deserve to have kids? Or something else?
No one deserves kids. Kids are not goods to buy off a shelf.
Rather kids deserve parents.
It's literally an inversion.
If you are equating conceiving children with IVF to goods to be bought off the shelf, there is really nothing to talk about.
Having biological kids is a hard-wired instinct, and one of the very basic survival-of-the-genes things. I have no idea what you mean by kids deserving parents. There are no kids without parents to begin with.
A lot of things are "hard wired" and yet we expect people to control themselves.
Men's sexual drive, for example, is tuned to fairly rapey if not for a "patriarchal" society that crushes this drive through the threat of a girls father beating a boy to a pulp. Stats are pretty clear here too wrt sex workers and their relationship to their fathers.
And IVF is a tragedy of rented wombs, unfulfilled motherhood dreams, expensive and painful surgeries almost exclusively brunt by women whilst profited by men.
But I'm not worried. A society that inverts the child-parent merit is one whose open loop gain is less than one. It's pretty obvious why: those who think children are deserved are unlikely to have the ability of self-sacrifice to want more than the one, maybe two kids.
I don't believe you.
Where did you come from?
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Please don't post flamewar comments. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44615758.
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"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we unbanned you because you promised you wouldn't do this kind of thing, and your account seems to have reverted to the earlier pattern. I'm not just talking about the current comment—I mean the pattern of using HN primarily to comment on political/national/religious/ideological topics. If you would please fix this so we don't have to ban you again, that would be good.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35505325
But this is fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44619241
Of course it's not fine.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Wouldn't it be significantly easier to just use the donor's egg here ?
Or adopt?
This feels a bit narcissistic. If you and your partner determine you have genetic traits you'd rather not have, you have the option of not having biological children.
This just feels like it's going to open Pandora's box. You and your partner are short and near sighted, edit in some height and vision.
You're partner has ethnic traits they don't want to pass on ? Just edit those out.
This feels like something that's going to start well intentioned, but snowball into very strange outcomes.
God forbid this ever comes to America's profit driven health system. The rich would have the option to edit in "better" traits. Gattica here we come
Humanity has discarded natural selection thanks to modern medicine. Gene mutations that would have meant someone didn't survive now can be treated.
The cold truth is that it is thus inevitable that in the future humanity will need gene modification to avoid the spreading of harmful mutations. This is what they are doing here, especially since mitochondrial DNA is inherited directly from the mother means that any problems will be propagated to all future generation unlike normal genes.
>Humanity has discarded natural selection thanks to modern medicine. Gene mutations that would have meant someone didn't survive now can be treated.
There is still selection going on and it is difficult to argue that it is not natural. The pressures we are exposed to are just not consistent with some idealized natural state and thus seem "unnatural".
Be careful, "natural selection" is a specific descriptor that describes a selection process that is contrasted by "artificial selection". The second one comes up from time to time in human context; we call it "eugenics".
It's not really a "cold" truth: eugenics isn't inherently bad, it's just us humans have an annoying cultural problem where we do horrible horrible things (including, but not limited to, genocide) whenever anyone tries to attempt eugenics. (It might be "human nature" preventing us from ever doing eugenics ethically, but all the evil eugenicists have a shared cultural background, so it's hard to tell.)
From this perspective, techniques that are technically eugenics, but can't feasibly be used in evil ways, are unambiguous progress. I'm wary of gene editing, but the technique described in the article doesn't seem like a slippery slope to me.
I just think people are going to heavily disagree what is moral and immoral eugenics. Like there was an article here recently about how there was drama with gene editing to remove blindness in one's children in the blind community
Can you link to that? This is particularly interesting to me because, as I've commented in the past, I've never encountered this feeling in the blind community, while it's relatively common in the deaf community,
When I've investigated why there's drama (though there isn't actually much for blindness, afaik: HN comments by sighted people are not primary sources), I've found that it's mainly concerns about the eradication of culture – which are understandable: the way the world's currently organised, all non-normative cultural expression is penalised.
There is no _we_.
There are people who have a deep emotional need to control other people's lives and use all available tools to do that.
There are also people who don't have that need at all and would very much like to use the same tools to improve themselves or their children.
These are two separate groups but "we" are limiting the second group's access to tools in order to prevent the first group from misusing it.
In fact, some people tabooize the tools and intentionally attack even the second group for using them because they either afraid of the first group or, more often, because they are not even aware there are different types of people with different motivations and driving needs.
Mate selection is, consciously or otherwise, based on these considerations already.
Why is any of that a bad thing?
> Or adopt?
Adopt who? There is almost no children available for adoption, only highly handicapped children who needs an auxiliary family.
Might be easier with a donor egg, but where are you going to get that? Egg donation is highly regulated and many would find it hard to get a donor. Of course this solution also requires a donor egg, so you'd already need to have that available.
> There is almost no children available for adoption
This is not true, at least in the United States. For one thing, there are many children in foster care who want to be adopted. It is also possible, though difficult and expensive, to adopt infants from mothers giving up their children for adoption as well. I am not saying it's an easy option or that everyone should do it, but it is an option.
Sick kids need parents too.
And there's plenty of foster kids, like Dave Thomas who was adopted as a foster kid.
So was my friend D. D's adopted parents asked the state of NJ for the kid that needed parents the most. And boy did the state of NJ deliver.
D had a foster home raided by the FBI. Another foster house beat him. He didn't know how to read until grade 5.
Now he has masters in microbiology from a top 20 program, a job as a data scientist and he's making the better part of $200k to take care of his wife and three kids.
As annoying as he is (he is from Jersey), I know he's a guy I can call who will show up to help.
All because a couple of God fearing parents asked NJ for the most messed up kid in the system. For me, D's parents are saints.
It's sick that our society thinks people deserve children instead of the other way around.
One of my uncles adopted a kid.
He's now a well paid classical musician. He's just like any other cousin. If anything he's MORE successful than the rest of us!
Once I spoke with a woman who was annoyed she wasn't able to adopt a child from a specific country that matches her ethic/cultural background.
Like she's shopping or something.
She's too good to adopt from the community she actually lives in.
>It's sick that our society thinks people deserve children instead of the other way around.
My feelings exactly. Their are absolutely no shortage of kids who very much need good homes.
They aren't perfect, a lot of them are going to need a bit of help like your friend.
The issue where I am is that all adoption agencies facilitating adoptions from other countries have shutdown. All of them because of massive scandals where the adopted children was more or less sold or the parents where lied to. Adoption from abroad is tricky at best, and now it's no longer possible.
As for children within the country, the majority is multi-handicapped children, most of which cannot say at a normal home full time. So the adopted family basically become a place to put the children during the odd weekend or vacations. This isn't a family life, this is you helping the government at your own cost with no benefit to you. As harsh as that sounds, it's not something most people can do. It's incredibly taxing mentally, and you're still not getting your wish of a family.
That's not to say that there aren't children being adopted, but the waiting list is 10+ years. Most children are placed in foster care, which is very different.
"The issue where I am is that all adoption agencies facilitating adoptions from other countries have shutdown. All of them because of massive scandals where the adopted children was more or less sold or the parents where lied to."
Specifically, American parents tried to return to sender a kid they didnt like. Ie they thought they deserved a kid.
"Adoption from abroad is tricky at best, and now it's no longer possible. [...] That's not to say that there aren't children being adopted, but the waiting list is 10+ years."
Being a parent is a about giving yourself away. If you cant do that you're not ready or suitable for a kid.
"Most children are placed in foster care, which is very different."
Who deserve loving families.
Look, I haven't adopted a foster kid: because Im scared Im not good enough; I admit it. But let's not pretend that there aren't a plethora of kids in need of families that we must have IVF for those who are not capable of conceiving their own.
Oh, sorry if that wasn't clear. Foster children here aren't up for adoption, only in very rare cases. The two systems are for different purposes. The foster children typically have needs that require foster parents with special training. Often the foster children still have some contact with their biological parents, so again, specifically not up for adoption. Adopting is difficult, you'd have more success as a foster parent, but it's harder to be approved as a foster family, e.g. you need special training.
I get that systems are different around the world, but solutions like this is still required or at least wanted in countries where adoption is pretty much not an option. It is a pretty fortunate situation to have a society where adoption is so rarely needed, but it's also massively hurtful to would be parents to suggest that they should simply adopt, when they want to, but does have that option.
And yet my friend's parents managed to pick three up.
Btw, his birth mother was alive until five years ago. He found her through 23 and me just months after she'd passed.
That's beautiful about your uncle. Becoming a well paid classical musician is very rare, he must be very good; your grandparents did well.
When I was in undergrad there was this 16 year old street urchin (for that's what he'd become) who'd hang out with us. He was a foster kid, and his was a life long story of abuse and neglect.
He was a nice kid too and, despite all the drugs he took, he could have been very smart.
What contrast good parents make.
My cousin started as a foster kid, which there are no shortage of.
Most foster kids have complicated situations, which I suspect a lot of people wish to avoid. But ultimately it’s going to be work either way.
I’m not opposed to IVF, but this story is just strange. They have to create a healthy embryo from the donor egg, instead of just using that healthy embryo, they rip its DNA out to shove into another embryo.
Feels like a story of just because you could doesn’t mean you should. I’ll take all the downvotes, I’d wholeheartedly vote to ban splicing multiple embryos together like this.
I doubt problems would be unique to America, many parts Asia are more aggressive with selective births and distorting sex ratios already, I suspect this will be readily embraced and with the much larger populations will be more an impact.
I think Fisher's Principle will assert itself in those cases where the balance is disturbed currently. People will see how "excess males" don't have as good outcomes as "scarce females".
It's definitely not unique to America, in fact America is in some ways only catching up to other countries. What is considered legal and ethical in say Mexico or Brazil if you have money is a lot looser than in the USA. IVF clinics happily advertise that they let you do sex selection.
"near sighted, edit in some vision"
And? I suspect that when the first glasses were made, someone complained about people playing God, too: why do you want to correct your eyesight when you were not intended to see well by the Almighty?
Correction of genetic problems early on seems a lot better than various complicated treatments down the line.
"Strange" often means just "we are not used to it", but the next generations will take such things for absolutely granted.
It is no less strange that I, a Central European, am talking to an American in almost real time and free of charge, and can read his replies. That would be indeed very strange to anyone prior to 1995 or so.
And yeah, this connectedness has downsides as well, but we may work on them.
What's a genetic "problem" ?
In some Asian countries modifying your eyes to look white is a common practice. You could easily end up with biracial people editing out some of their more ethnic features for the next generation.
Not to mention their might be some mistakes along the way. You can't git reset --hard a human.
As imperfect as humans are, that's what makes us human.
Now if as a consenting adult you want to modify yourself, laser eye surgery, etc, go ahead.
What about leaving this to the parents? Does the rest of the society (in practice: busibodies who have enough time to care) have a standing to stop them? Why should anyone worship their ethnic features? That strikes me as extra dystopian.
Obviously there are degrees to what is considered a problem.
Few people would argue for leaving Huntington's or ALS-related code in. That is just cruel.
There are deaf activists who protest any attempts to cure deafness, but I would say most people won't agree with them either.
Eye color may not be a problem per se, but does not strike me as particularly important either - unless the state is based on some neo-racist ideology, it probably should not regulate this.
IMHO the real zone of shadows begins at outright enhancements, especially those that will have downsides. Maybe a certain gene sequence taken from bats or whales will confer high resistance to cancer, but at the cost of XXX or YYY. This is the sort of decision that will be really hard.
Honestly it's probably a better idea to ban this before it becomes a problem.
You're talking about experimenting on non consenting subjects. Why stop at 3 parents. Why not 300. Splice in all the DNA you want.
Then 20 years later when the test subject has horrific side effects due to processes we don't understand, ohh well that's the cost of progress.
This is too much safetyism for me.
Very young kids cannot consent to any treatment, and if we said "no treatments without personal consent of the patient", we wouldn't be able to treat sick newborns at all.
"ohh well that's the cost of progress"
Yes, it is. We can be a bit more careful, but progress is ultimately risky, because you are entering an unknown terrain. A lot of modern products that you now safely use, including electricity, air travel and banal over-the-counter medications, has a nontrivial body count. If your attitudes prevailed, we would have none of those.
Experimental procedures to save those already here != Experimental reproductive technology.
Before trying to play God and manipulating the very fabric of life itself you can be a foster parent or have a very frank conversation with your partner on your options.
No one’s going to know the long term effects of this until 20 or 30 years later.
“Sorry Billy , you have painful incurable diseases because we created you with experimental procedures that required merging multiple embryos together, good luck.”
What if this creates completely new genetic illnesses? Might not happen this generation, might happen 2 or 3 generations down to the line.
If most diseases are caused by errors in DNA, cannot we make mandatory DNA screening, detect such errors, and warn potential parents not to make children? Eventually this could lead to these diseases simply disappearing, and studying invalid DNA sequences seems to be much cheaper than researching the treatment for the disease.
I guess you’ve never met teenagers.
The mapping from DNA to health outcome is unbelievably chaotic/high-cardinality, then mixed in with various environmental/social/cultural factors that don’t show up in DNA at all.
Drugs are in fact how we come to understand this chain of causality, piece by piece.
So yeah, what you describe is obviously the dream (hand waving through some ethical considerations) but we just don’t know anywhere close to enough about the biology.