[ExI] crisper children

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 6:11 AM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 12 November 2015 at 06:45, Dan TheBookMan wrote:
> > The sooner, the better?
> >
>
> One obvious problem -  What are you going to do with all the 'faulty'
> children created?
>

### You mean children who are not genetically adjusted or children whose
crispering went wrong?

I would expect that good eugenicists would offer warranty on their
services. The zygotes would be redundantly sequenced and the developing
embryos would be prenatally followed with repeated sequencing, detailed
anatomical scans, maybe even intra-uterine brain fMRI. If something goes
wrong, you would abort before the faulty fetus became a sick child, and get
a free replacement.

Re-reading the above I realize it might sound creepy to some people.
However, I strongly believe that fetuses without a well-functioning cortex
are not children, and using such heartless terms as "faulty" (as opposed to
"sick") is appropriate.


> The other big problem is that in normal humans genes massively
> interact. You can get single genes that cause diseases, which CRISPR
> editing could cure. But for overall performance you need to analyse
> thousands of gene interactions.
> e.g. for high IQ there is no single gene responsible.
> ------------
>
> ### Indeed, and this is exactly why I wrote about the 100,000 gene
adjustments that might be needed to get outstanding children. This is
perhaps an exaggeration, the true number of adjustments needed to reliably
get perfectly healthy Olympic athletes with IQ 190 and a pleasant
disposition might be in the low thousands, but still it's a huge amount of
engineering by today's standards.


> The current hype about CRISPR gene editing is causing a lot of
> discussion among the ethics thinkers.
>

### I am an ethics thinker and I endorse CRISPER (if done with proper
liability insurance).

Rafał
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