Where is the line with eugenics being bad and it being good?
My uninformed guess is that even if you edit chromosomes it won’t change someone. Like if you edit someone’s DNA to give them DNA that makes blue eyes, their eyes won’t turn blue. I think they are just like turn signals that direct growth of a being during development.
That’s a dilemma. The kids and parents not having the challenges is great, but also people with Downs are often some of the best humans to exist.
It’s fine and not at all contradictory to care for existing people with Downs and also work to eliminate the condition.
I work with special needs adults. Your experiences, while valid, with many of those that arent so disabled that they actually can engage with society, do not represent those with more extreme versions of this disability.
Often they will never get to experience the fullness of life they could without. Basically, people with Downs who dont have caretakers with means are fucked pretty hard.
Of the 6 I interact with daily, I think they all would rather not have the disability, and 2 have said they would trade places with the guy in the wheel chair that has seizures sometimes, but is otherwise living a normal life.
I would agree with you on that as well. I do some volunteering with the special Olympics, have family members, etc. it’s like you said and in these cases they are able to interact with the general public, maybe have basic jobs, live in group homes, and so forth.
I also agree they are fucked without support. I am not advocating for more people to have the disease so much as I wish more people had the vibes of the population I’m referencing.
I think you have a super healthy view of this dilemma through your experience. As a person who has experienced the worst Down’s has to offer with a very close relative, i can’t imagine a happier thing they could have told my mother than, “your child doesn’t have to be born with down’s syndrome”.
Due to religion, terminating the pregnancy was never an option, so a set of cosmic dice was spun in how positive or negative this experience would be. Let me tell you right now, I wouldn’t wish my family’s experience on anyone, and that breaks me apart to say more than I’m willing to admit.
Sending love
This seems good initially.
I just really really hope they won’t try to “cure autism” with this next.
Autism is an important and fundamental part of me. The fact that it’s often classified as a disease is understandable, but nevertheless sickens me.
Don’t worry. Autism is more complicated.
I don’t want them to “cure autism” by erasing it, either. I’d rather they try to “cure autism” by improving on what it can help a human be capable of doing. That way, if we have a real-life “Butlerian Jihad” like from the lore of Dune, we have Mentats (human computers) to replace “thinking machines”(AI and computers).
This is what I favour too. Don’t cure autism, fix the environment instead. Look at what benefits autism can also have.
Please straight up cure my ADHD. I do NOT want it!
I genuinely wonder where the line is between curing defects and eugenics. It seems razor thin how it can swing easiy into dark territory.
I remember this was literally the question posed to us by an ethics professor 20 years ago. Now it’s a reality.
A person with Down’s can live a happy fulfilling life, but most parents would never choose to have a child with Down’s if it could be born ‘normal’ instead. So we’re essentially removing them from the gene pool and human race.
It’s eugenics for sure. I’m not sure if it’s unethical though. It’s pretty complex.
Stopping fetuses from developing Down’s Syndrome in my opinion isn’t unethical because it will genuinely improved their quality of life. They will live longer lives, have fewer health problems, etc. The slippery slope however was pretty well covered in the film Gattica in which people not only start requesting designer children but the world becomes a dystopian utopia where the genetically perfected are unfairly favored as the ruling class while the genetically unmodified become relegated to the worker/slave class.
we’re essentially removing them from the gene pool
I don’t think Downs works like that.
It’s already being removed, since people choose abortion over downs and since people with Downs don’t have children (normally).
It is not hereditary. It’s an error or mutation that can occur for anyone. The chances are higher the older the parents are.
Yeah this is scary. Down syndrome is definitely in the gray area too where it can be viewed negatively but plenty of people have it and lead fulfilling lives. Wipe cystic fibrosis out of a fetus and all but the most staunch biological purists would agree it was a good thing. Make your fetus white, blonde, and blue eyed and it’s obviously eugenics. I don’t know how I feel about this.
Completely apart from the ethics, I think this technology is really cool though.
They live fulfilling lives at the detriment of others who have to live less fulfilling lives, maybe they don’t see it that way, but its added responsibility
Actual Nazi rhetoric btw
This isn’t eugenics or close to it, it’s fixing actual problems before someone is born, not choosing who has rights to breed. If they announced a therapy to guarantee a child will grow up immune to corporate propaganda or be able to use their brain in a rational, well-planned and thoughtful way, and have exceptional language skills, we should voluntarily hand the world over to them. Because what’s happening right now is the opposite of that.
Right now capitalism is imposing eugenics on us. The system and the cost of life has created a very real system deciding who can have families. If tools emerged that could guarantee the kids we DO have aren’t subject to the same weaknesses and limitations, we need to capitalize on every advantage we can.
I agree. Eugenics is about harming the rights of the would-be parents. It means telling them, “You have traits we consider undesirable, so we will forcibly prevent you from having any child whatsoever.”
To me, that’s different from parents choosing to avoid having a child with certain traits. Or not having children at all.
If parents decide to cure a disorder in their future child, or decide to abort a pregnancy, nobody is stopping those parents from trying again. The parents themselves have not been deemed undesirable and unworthy to pass on their genes.
I’m fine with it at this point.
I have mixed feelings about this. At first it seems great, but the line between “genetic defect” and eugenics can get very blurry.
There are many people with what some would consider a “defect” to be fixed that live incredibly fulfilling lives and bring an irreplaceable uniqueness to the world.
EDIT: I guess this wasn’t clear from my original comment, but I’m not arguing against this particular use case. I understand very well the challenges that down’s presents to both the person and their caretakers. I’m saying that I’m weary about the precedent this can set while there is no legal boundary between curing crippling diseases and simply changing undesirable (in the parents’ subjective view) traits.
something that i’m also very worried about is humans making permanent genetic changes to people, that are hereditary, but have some sort of unexpected, poorly understood, downside. like, a modification might cure deafness, but cause a different, seemingly unrelated, defect in the process.
This is such a bad take. Eugenics and gene therapy are completely different things. It’s like the difference between developing a cure for HIV vs adopting a policy that people with HIV be killed. Eugenics is an evil pseudoscience from the 19th century, do not conflate it with actual genetics research that can improve the human condition.
There are many people with what some would consider a “defect” to be fixed that live incredibly fulfilling lives and bring an irreplaceable uniqueness to the world.
Sure but the same thing can be said of any illness. There are wonderful anxiety-riddled or depressed people in the world. Should we prevent them from getting anti-depressants because it would make them less unique?
I’m well aware of the difference.
First of all, HIV doesn’t make sense as an example because that’s a virus, not genetic.
I’m also not debating the scientific legitimacy of CRISPR. It’s obviously much more valid as a science than the eugenics of the past.
Sure but the same thing can be said of any illness.
No, it can’t. I’m not even talking about illnesses. There are plenty of examples of genetic diversity that and not intrinsically bad, but many would prefer to change because of stigma. What about sex? Height? ADHD? Skin/hair color? All of these could arguably make someone’s life more challenging. But we should make our society more accepting of this diversity, not altering our genes to remove it. That is eugenics. Period.
There are wonderful anxiety-riddled or depressed people in the world. Should we prevent them from getting anti-depressants because it would make them less unique?
This argument makes no sense. You’re comparing informed consent medication with editing an embryo’s DNA? Also, anxiety and depression, as an example, do have genetic predispositions, but are mostly triggered by environmental factors. Which again, brings us back to fixing our society, not our genes.
people with downs syndrome have a significantly shorter lifespan compared to the rest of society. these people would still be who they are even after treatment but would have the potential to live longer healthier lives.
get your philosophical moralistic bullshit out of here. if you were so concerned about this before why not complain about how you aren’t the same physical being after 10 years due to all your cells being in a constant state of death and rebirth.
Yeah, I’m not arguing against curing Down’s syndrome. I updated my post to be clearer.
However your “Ship of Theseus” argument makes no sense and is completely irrelevant.
This is the beginning of countless sci-fi stories. According to the TV and movies I’ve seen, this will lead to customizing fetuses, mostly for intelligence, and then the question becomes does society accept those people as their leaders (Brave New World) or criminalize their gene-enhanced intellect (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)?
Or enforce social hierarchies based on genetic traits? (Gattaca)
As I recall, the reason the Federation outlawed genetic manipulation is due to what happened with the Eugenics Wars, the details of which are murky due to temporal interference, but one of the root causes was clear. While the end results of genetic engineering (Khan Noonien-Singh and his Augments) were undoubtedly superior to normal humans in every way, they also incredibly aggressive and arrogant, a flaw their creators could not correct, as the science was still in its infancy. One of the scientists remarked that “Superior ability breeds superior ambition”.
Being raised in labs by dickheads may have also been a contributing factor in their personality flaws.
How many generations of inbreeding would be necessary before it returns again?
Down syndrome is a result of errors in DNA replication during the formation of gametes or early development. While there are genetic risk factors they’re not particularly linked to inbreeding.
By far the largest risk factor is the age of the parents.
I did not realize CRISPR was so powerful as to remove chromosomes entirely. Can CRISPR be used to change someone’s genetic sex? Republicans would freak out.
CRISPR on our gonads to produce estrogen instead of testosterone?
🤔 It’s pretty tempting, and as long as it’s not hereditary, I’m all up for it. 🏳️⚧️
By my limited understanding that might be feasible right now in utero, which obviously is not exactly what we want.
I think that maybe in the future we could change someone’s sex when they’re older. Honestly I think it’s maybe just the matter of research on this not being focused on genetic changes after the womb.
I’m fully expecting in our lifetimes for CRISPR to be able to flip the genome or whatever in the body that produces sex hormones such that testes and ovaries could swap functions and produce the opposite sex hormone.
Between this and using your own DNA to apply to scaffolding to grow an organ, the future is bright. I also expect to see sex organs of the opposite sex grown in a lab from your own DNA and then transplanted into you, and the body wouldn’t reject them.
I also expect to see sex organs of the opposite sex grown in a lab from your own DNA and then…
I’m kinda glad that didn’t go where I thought it was gonna go but you know it will.
The latter technology exists, but nobody seems to be interested in expanding it past this pilot.
Holy crap. The obvious use for this would be in vitro. However, I cannot wait to see how this affects those already born. Could it be used on someone who is a 7 year old to rid them of this? What if they’re 50? So cool. Can’t wait to see where this goes.
And in the US, religious assholes want to ban IVF for exactly this reason, because it’s “playing God”.
You are the genetics they want to remove.
While this is fabulous news I do worry that there could be similar done for other genetic conditions that are far more contentious as to whether they’re a disability not.
Neurodivergence is the one that springs to mind right away. The majority of people on the autism spectrum are at level 1. While it has negatives there are positives into thinking and seeing the world differently.
How many of those would have been ‘curered’ in the womb by scared parents who’ve just been told that their child will be born autistic? Scared parents who’s fear will mean when hearing that they think of someone at the far end of level 3.
Then what about for ADHD and dyslexia.
What about other physical conditions like dwarfism etc.
Pretty sure Autism is a lot more complex genetically and we don’t even know just how complex.
Very true. I’m not saying it’s something that would be soon. These are discussions that should be now, to help determine morally where we as societies want to go with the new technology.
Personally I see this rift in the trans community rather often (although not as much right now anymore, there isn’t much room for controversial arguments when being threatened from ‘outside’). On one hand the absolute majority will tell you that they “wished to be born in the right body”. On the other hand many dislike or even reject science into how being trans happens (like this study) out of the very reasonable fear that it will be used to, again, pathologize our existence or outright eradicate us. I’ve heard similar hard questions and controversial discussions from other communities over the years as well. They usually somewhat reach academic circles at best but are never really discussed in public.
In the end it boils down to what the ulterior motive behind the science or technology is; care for- or eradication of humans (or their natural expression). And of course where we out the line between the definition of diversity and illness, something society has a really bad track record for.
So…Remember the X-Men series of movies? I forget which of the films it was, I stopped giving a shit about superhero movies a decade before it was cool, but one of them involved a “mutant cure.” Most of Professor X’s mutants saw it as an existential threat, but Rogue–whose ‘powers’ utterly sucked–saw it as something she wanted to do.
Ultimately I think the key here is individual consent. Yes and No need to be equally valid answers otherwise it gets pretty fucked up.
Some folks make a pretty good living for themselves looking at the world slightly differently than everyone else, other folks would like to do something with their life other than drool. Surely we the civilization that can split the atom and splice the genome can help both of these people live their best lives? Otherwise what the fuck are we even doing here?
Yeah, on the one hand it isn’t fair to let someone be born with a condition that negatively effects their life when there’s a treatment to prevent it happening. On the other hand, as you say it’s good to have divergent people in society - there really is strength in diversity.
I don’t know if you personally have any disabilities, but generally, when I see this take, the person doesn’t.
I’d take a crispr treatment without hesitation. And everyone I know would do the same. My partner and I are doing IVF not for fertility reasons but to ensure certain genes don’t get passed down to our kids.
That whole disability-is-a-positive view is a very privileged thing to say.
Not the person you replied to, but this is a nuanced conversation, much beyond the simplicity of disabled or not.
Deafness is the one that comes to mind, there are others that do as well, but I grew up in a Deaf household so I know a bit more about it.
For a group of Deaf people, they quite like being Deaf, they have their own language and schools etc. Those schools arent particularly decent, but for the group that like being Deaf they dont care. They’d rather fix the schools then fix their kids.
The notion that disability is a social issue is true, but fixing society to cater towards most disabled groups is a far greater task in most cases. Obviously Deafness and others are the expection where it is felt that it is easier/better to fix society.
Deafness has been “curable” for a while, yet i was raised to see that cure as a form of genocide, trying to erradicate a linguistic minority, rather than fix them. As without deaf children, it was very unlikely anyone would pick up their language.
I frankly think that there is no downside to try to be positive about disablilty, i say this from the uk, where the rhetoric has been destructive beyond belief. That said it is all very case dependent.
I definitely wouldn’t take a CRISPR treatment, despite having disabilities. Through my own things I am who I am, and sometimes they also help me, actually. Why don’t you ask the people with disabilities themselves?
