Genetically Engineered Babies Are Banned in the US. But Tech Titans Are Trying to Make One Anyway (msn.com) 91
"For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby," reports the Wall Street Journal:
Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup — called Preventive — has been quietly preparing what would amount to a biological first. They are working toward creating a child born from an embryo edited to prevent a hereditary disease.... Editing genes in embryos with the intention of creating babies from them is banned in the U.S. and many countries. Preventive has been searching for places to experiment where embryo editing is allowed, including the United Arab Emirates, according to correspondence reviewed by The Wall Street Journal...
Preventive is in the vanguard of a growing number of startups, funded by some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, that are pushing the boundaries of fertility and working to commercialize reproductive genetic technologies. Some are working on embryo editing, while others are already selling genetic screening tools that seek to account for the influence of dozens or hundreds of genes on a trait. They say their ultimate goal is to produce babies who are free of genetic disease and resilient against illnesses. Some say they can also give parents the ability to choose embryos that will have higher IQs and preferred traits such as height and eye color. Armstrong, the cryptocurrency billionaire, is leading the charge to make embryo editing a reality. He has told people that gene-editing technology could produce children who are less prone to heart disease, with lower cholesterol and stronger bones to prevent osteoporosis. According to documents and people briefed on his plans, he is already an investor or in talks with embryo editing ventures...
After the Journal approached people close to the company last month to ask about its work, Preventive announced on its website that it had raised $30 million in investment to explore embryo editing. The statement pledged not to advance to human trials "if safety cannot be established through extensive research..." Other embryo editing startups are Manhattan Genomics, co-founded by Thiel Fellow Cathy Tie, and Bootstrap Bio, which plans to conduct tests in Honduras. Both companies are in early stages.
The article notes the only known instance of children born from edited embryos was in 2018, when Chinese scientist He Jiankui "shocked the world with news that he had produced three children genetically altered as embryos to be immune to HIV. He was sentenced to prison in China for three years for the illegal practice of medicine.
"He hasn't publicly shared the children's identities but says they are healthy.
Preventive is in the vanguard of a growing number of startups, funded by some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, that are pushing the boundaries of fertility and working to commercialize reproductive genetic technologies. Some are working on embryo editing, while others are already selling genetic screening tools that seek to account for the influence of dozens or hundreds of genes on a trait. They say their ultimate goal is to produce babies who are free of genetic disease and resilient against illnesses. Some say they can also give parents the ability to choose embryos that will have higher IQs and preferred traits such as height and eye color. Armstrong, the cryptocurrency billionaire, is leading the charge to make embryo editing a reality. He has told people that gene-editing technology could produce children who are less prone to heart disease, with lower cholesterol and stronger bones to prevent osteoporosis. According to documents and people briefed on his plans, he is already an investor or in talks with embryo editing ventures...
After the Journal approached people close to the company last month to ask about its work, Preventive announced on its website that it had raised $30 million in investment to explore embryo editing. The statement pledged not to advance to human trials "if safety cannot be established through extensive research..." Other embryo editing startups are Manhattan Genomics, co-founded by Thiel Fellow Cathy Tie, and Bootstrap Bio, which plans to conduct tests in Honduras. Both companies are in early stages.
The article notes the only known instance of children born from edited embryos was in 2018, when Chinese scientist He Jiankui "shocked the world with news that he had produced three children genetically altered as embryos to be immune to HIV. He was sentenced to prison in China for three years for the illegal practice of medicine.
"He hasn't publicly shared the children's identities but says they are healthy.
KHANNNNNN!!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah why didn't they give them wings or gigantic brains or forehead lasers or something useful???
Re: KHANNNNNN!!!!! (Score:2)
I think Jonathan Coulton made a song about Elon Musk's venture on this area
Bring in the clones? (Score:2)
Funny deserved, but I think the real problem is with human clones. I'm "pert' shure" some of those rich puppeteers have cloned themselves already. The first clone to take over will claim to be a son who just looks unusually like his father, but after he has a string of clones in the pipeline he'll just start swapping in a fresh one every year or two. The rest of them will be hiding on an island somewhere...
Bet they didn't watch The X-Files (Score:1)
Otherwise they'd know what happens when you experiment with human embryos and genetics. Super soldiers and all.
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Re:Bet they didn't watch The X-Files (Score:4, Interesting)
Hell, its a major part of Star Trek Lore. Khan and his band of genetically engineered evil super soldiers. All of which lead to the federation banning genetic engineering (something the show has been trying to walk back ever since Roddenberry passed away since, well ... there actually IS medically useful non eugenic uses for gene therapy, and it seems a bit arse backwards if the federation is letting people die of trivially solveable diseases (trivial for a civilization thats racing around space on warp ships, that is).
A good example of Trek realising they kind of cocked that one up is the Julian Bashir arc where its realised he's so damn smart because his parents had secretly gotten him illegal medical treatment after he was born with significant cognitive impairment from shady space doctors. The end result being he ends up a super genius. But a good one, not a khan!. In the most recent series its realised that "Number 1" is heavily genetically engineered, because she's from a species that practices it routinely, and the show then wrestles with the fact it'd basically be biggoted discrimination to punish her for something she didnt choose and is part of her species native culture.
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Don't forget about the Borg... that's what happens when you take genetic engineering to the extremes!
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But Star Wars says clones are way better than robots!
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Breeding issues (Score:5, Insightful)
Monsanto has been able to enforce a provision in its licensing agreements with farmers buying their seeds that prevents farmers from collecting seeds from their crops and replanting new crops, without paying additional royalty.
When genetically enhanced humans become a reality (and they will), will they be allowed to breed with normal humans to create hybrids, without paying someone a royalty?
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Re: Breeding issues (Score:3)
Slavery or feudalism is often their end goal. Everything and everyone is property when money is the primary metric in your society (if it can even be called a society at that point)
I think they're looking to get rid of money (Score:1)
Billionaires don't like being dependent on consumers and employees. They want a more complete and more absolute power.
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So the solution to modern plutocratic corporate feudalists is . . . capitalism!
Re: I think they're looking to get rid of money (Score:2)
Talk about fighting fire with gasoline
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Because money can be a great equalizer. Remember the Kings lost to the merchants.
Whereupon the Kings retaliated by inventing antisemitism.
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They believe they are superior humans, proven by the fact that they are rich or at the forefront of the latest tech bubble. Never mind dad's emerald mine...
Re:Breeding issues (Score:5, Interesting)
Monsanto was able to patent the seeds. It is illegal to patent "a human organism". From https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2105.html [uspto.gov],
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no patent may issue on a claim directed to or encompassing a human organism.
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Sure, but there are other enforcement mechanisms besides patenting.
Plus, when there is that kind of money involved, you can generally have a good shot of getting the laws tailored to your liking.
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Sure, but there are other enforcement mechanisms besides patenting.
Don't just wave your hands, what enforcement mechanism are you talking about?
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Well, I'm just guessing. But for example, simple contractual agreement. The parents of the altered child could agree to make payment of $X if their child procreates with a "normal" human. Say, $50K.
Does not create any obligations on the "altered child", only the parents who signed the contract.
Now, whether that contract will be eventually upheld in courts is an unknown. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But just the threat could be enough to induce payment, especially in the light of court expenses. Plus, I'm
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Alternative enforcement mechanism (which would rule out Musk as an investor) would be to hardwire the editing so that any breeding results with "wild type" humans would be both female and profoundly haemophiliac. (Or that all male offspring have some lethal failure of oxygen metabolism. Whether that would be acceptable to Musk ... who cares?)
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Or other DNA "lock" mechanisms that need to be unlocked with fee payment before a successful breeding.
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If they control the DNA they could do a lot of things built in. Built in organic DRM. Need a subtance, say Ketracel White, for your gonads to produce sperm for a short while. Or an upgrade package, your mitochondria work only half as well without it
Re:Breeding issues (Score:4, Insightful)
Monsanto was able to patent the seeds. It is illegal to patent "a human organism". From https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2105.html [uspto.gov],
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no patent may issue on a claim directed to or encompassing a human organism.
It is illegal to patent a human organism *today*. All it'll take to change that is a $1M donation to the Epstein Ballroom Fund and a gold-plated double-helix peace prize for Trump.
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By that standard they could make any law including one requiring everyone to pay $1,000,000 for breathing air.
Re:Breeding issues (Score:4)
OMG don't give them ideas!
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If air could be owned, then air pollution is the destruction of property. I'm not sure they actually want that.
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Sure. Clean Air Tax. Consider it done.
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How long until those wealthy asshats with something to gain from it patent the "design" of the gene and get the patent that way?
How long until those wealthy asshats with something to gain from it patent the gene "installed via CRISPR" and get the patent that way?
How long until those wealthy asshats with something to gain from it start pushing their junk la
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In the specific instance of not being able to patent genetically modified humans, I doubt the law will change, if only because the idea is just so goddamned creepy to a vast majority of people.
To answer what I take to be your point,
- The patent system is already very broken and favors the wealthy, as does the legal system writ large.
- If the goal is owning people, wage slavery is already pretty effective. Decreasing affordability of living, making student loans larger and hard
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How about using Copyright laws? You are compying the gene I created! You are guilty!
I seem to remember a TV show with a girl that was a genetically created clone. And at one point they discover an ascii text in her DNA which is a copyright notice...
Now, could you enforce a contract signed by a "parent" on the child once adult? Probably not...
Cyrille
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Existing genetically modified organisms fall under the patent category rather than the copyright category. See https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/basics/trademark-patent-copyright [uspto.gov].
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Monsanto was able to patent the seeds. It is illegal to patent "a human organism". From https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2105.html [uspto.gov],
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no patent may issue on a claim directed to or encompassing a human organism.
It doesn't work like that most of the times in practice. Take for instance what is happening in the seed sector. Companies that identify a useful trait in a traditional crop and use it in a genetically modified version, are supposed to share their benefits (for example through the ITPGRFA Treaty) with the communities that have evolved this trait in a species through hundreds of years of breeding by farmers. Otherwise it would be unfair to use "our" collective research and patent the outcome of yours without
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I think the words "directed to" in the quoted part make the law broader than the entire organism. I think a genetic sequence conferring HIV resistance in humans would count as "directed to" a human organism.
If there's some useful sequence patented for use in another animal that is later used in humans, maybe. Even if the first use would require a royalty payment, I have a hard time believing the courts would allow such a patent to cover subsequent generations in humans. Largely because the people ruling
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The Supreme Court would consider them less human than corporations.
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Re: Breeding issues (Score:2)
Why 'used'? AFAIK there are more slaves in the world today than there was just before the American civil war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Limiting slavery to a small part of american history is not making justice to the millions of modern slaves. It does not make that American part any less horrendous.
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Reminds me of "The Moat" (Score:2)
The short sci-fi story The Moat by Greg Egan is a real head trip of a read along these lines.
Too much money, no accountability (Score:4, Informative)
And then any semblance of morality and integrity goes out the window. Does not happen for everybody, but most people cannot handle that situation.
Begin The Eugenics Wars Has (Score:1)
Re:Gods I hate babies (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably better to edit out genetic defects after birth than trying to eliminate them completely from the genome. Sometimes we have unfavorable traits that played a role in our survival in the past. Getting rid of them entirely may have undesirable future consequences.
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How much is "extensive"? (Score:1)
The statement pledged not to advance to human trials "if safety cannot be established through extensive research..."
It took a couple of thousand years for something simple like talcum powder to be banned for human use due to the risk of it containing asbestos.
What exactly does that mean? (Score:2)
Does the baby not get citizenship? Is the baby killed?
Or do all the penalties form on the doctors and parents that did it.
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Does the baby not get citizenship? Is the baby killed?
Are you sure you're really this stupid? Seems performative.
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The word you are looking for is "Sarcastic", not performative.
In general, whenever you think "performative" on the internet, replace with sarcastic. They are almost identical, except for the intended insult.
But I do understand that sarcasm is hard to express on the internet. You did not see my massive eye roll while typing.
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Don't give Kristi Noem ideas! Look what she does to dogs.
Gotta isolate the sociopath gene (Score:2)
Almost all the billionaires have strong sociopath genes. They'll isolate for these genes then breed a bunch more monsters like themselves.
Re: Gotta isolate the sociopath gene (Score:2)
We need to encourage them to move to a Martian colony or Venusian balloon city. There's not room on this Earth for the mega wealthy and the rest of humanity.
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But they can't stay mega wealthy without billions of rubes to steal money from! Oh, and suppress them from just pressing delete on all those stolen numbers.
"We were trying to make the world's best athlete." (Score:2)
CEO: "How did they turn out?"
Scientist: "All were born with CTE and beat their spouses."
NFL: "Good enough for me!"
Take a a wild guess (Score:2)
If something goes wrong and the child needs expensive lifelong medical care for an unanticipated problem, guess who will be first to shout "NOT IT!"
Re:Take a a wild guess (Score:4, Insightful)
>"If something goes wrong and the child needs expensive lifelong medical care for an unanticipated problem, guess who will be first to shout "NOT IT!"
And much worse if the unintended issues go undiscovered and procreation happens and then those meddled genes get scattered throughout the population. Then what? Oh, we can fix that too?
I am surprised nobody has brought up GATTACA yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Even if there are no immediate physiological or psychological downsides for the "designer babies" (and that is a tall claim), what does it mean for those who are not?
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I'd worry more about the risk from random mutation than targeted changes.
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I'd worry more about the risk from random mutation than targeted changes.
This. There seems to be a widespread assumption that random genetic changes are somehow less problematic than carefully-selected ones because they're "natural" or something. It's not like cosmic rays, mutagenic chemicals, transcription errors and other sources of random genetic mutation are somehow careful not to make harmful changes. Engineered changes might not be better than random mutations, but they're clearly not worse.
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Given the current state of the art, there's not even a guarantee that the real harm won't show up in the 2nd or even 3rd generation. Not all state of the art modifications prove to be stable.
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In Stargate, that's pretty much how Asgard ended up dying out. Genetic engineering/cloning, at some point made them unable to reproduce completely many generations down the line. Even being super advanced technologically, still couldn't solve that problem.
Tech Titans to make Teen Titans (Score:2)
No flying cars, no vacations to the moon, no energy too cheap to meter. But god damn, at least we'll have superheroes running (or flying) around and delivering public service messages.
Good (Score:1)
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Docility. Don't forget the docility genes.
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Prove that. IQ is so complex we've not even begun to find a genetic link. It's been tried forever; still no progress. How about we just make heads and brains larger? nope. Elephants have about twice the brain we do. Brain development is by far the biggest factor once you rule out major defects which do impact IQ - but a normal brain is capable of anything... including relearning to function with huge portions blown away... just imagine what an undamaged brain can learn... if we can figure out how to teac
A moment of silence please ... (Score:2)
For the the species "Homo Sapiens".
How much Human DNA can we change before we are a different species?
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When you can no longer interbreed and produce offspring that can replicate.
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The shareholders are immoral, not the company. It's time shareholders are made accountable.
Inevitable, can only slow it, not stop it (Score:1)
Zillionaires on private islands or shady countries will work on this, and rich will want designer babies with double-dee's, 180 IQ's, and tall. Complain all you want, it ain't going away. I'm just the messenger.
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They can pay for the IQ, that's snake oil without nurture, which doesn't happen without loving parents. They are more likely to select selfishness as a trait too, which bothers me more as there's less chance of society lasting if everyone picks that, and the few who don't are penalised.
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They just need normal penises... then we will eliminate insecure mental cases like Musk (botched surgery) or Trump (tiny freak.)
Get the plastic surgery industry involved, they will kill it off in no time.
The real nightmare is "a human" who can't get a mental illness. For starters, anybody actually smart has to cope with depression.
Jawohl, mein Führer! (Score:2)
> their ultimate goal is to produce babies who are free of genetic disease and resilient against illnesses.
Lebensborn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn) is back!
Echos from the past (Score:2)
These kids need a lesson from the past
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt066... [imdb.com]
Replicats. Nice. Where can I apply ... (Score:2)
... to become a Bladerunner? I sooo what that cool coat, gun and one of those flying police cars. Awesome!
And can I have an Ana de Armas clone in flesh an blood? OMG that would be so awesome. ... She'd have to be engineered to find me irresistible of course, but that should be a problem, or?
Ooooh, I'm so excited!
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The hubris... (Score:3)
Just because you can make $$ by manipulating people psychologically through a social media site or shopping site doesn't mean you have the expertise to do something difficult, like edit DNA.
Exactly The Kind of Thing I Expect From... (Score:2)
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I can see this (Score:2)