[ExI] morals

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Wed Jan 23 00:47:24 UTC 2019


'The Gene' - great book!

I am puzzled by African countries - they seem to do what they want to
despite international disapproval.  So why haven't they used Gene Drive?

If you and your spouse were going to have a baby and had the sperm and ova
tested, would you agree to let the geneticists turn off a gene that would
produce, in almost any environment, a fatal disease?  Turning off a gene is
something that happens very often anyway; ditto turning on - presumably in
response to environmental conditions.  If U.S. law prohibited this, would
you go to Germany, say?  How about Haiti?

This is going to happen and may be happening now,and is going to get more
complex, such as inserting different genes from another person - or maybe
even, in the future, a synthetic gene.

We can dodge this question.  We don't have to get involved.  But fast
evolution is upon us.

I am only about halfway through it, but I am recommending this book:
Evolving Ourselves, by Enriquez and Gullans, copyright 2015.

bill w

On Tue, Jan 22, 2019 at 6:23 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 22, 2019 at 11:32 AM William Flynn Wallace <
> foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> > What unethical experiment would have the most positive impact on the
>> society as a whole?   (This is the question I was asked on Quora.  Here is
>> my answer:
>>
> Easy - genetic manipulation of ova and sperm to create designer babies.
>>
>
> I would tend to agree except if it has a positive impact, if it reduced
> the general level of misery in the world, how is it unethical? Well perhaps
> it is because I've notice whenever ethicists, that is to say experts who
> are far more moral than you or me, pontificate about what is right and what
> is wrong more often than not what they insist is the most ethical thing to
> do is whatever will cause the most suffering.
>
> I just finished Siddhartha Mukherjee's book "The Gene" and one chapter is
> about the death of Jesse Gelsinger during failed gene therapy in 1999. A
> company thought they had a cure for a rare disease called "ornithine
> transcarbamylase deficiency" and asked for approval of a test. It can be
> fatal but Gelsinger only had a mild form of the disease, so why was
> Gelsinger the first test patients in a procedure that was known to be
> risky? That was the brilliant idea of the ethicists, they maintained that
> if they offered it to somebody with a severe form of the disease they
> would, in their words "be pressured" to consent to this risky treatment
> because the only alternative was death. Therefore medical ethicists (aka
> nitwits) ordered that the therapy only be offered to somebody who had such
> a mild form of the illness it was just a nuisance and not a threat to life.
>
> On another list I mentioned that every single year that we DON'T use Gene
> Drive we are condemning 725,000 people to die from malaria. I was told it
> would be unethical to use it because if we did it would caused 40 malaria
> causing mosquito species to go extinct and even though there would still
> be 3500 mosquito species around it still might make a environmental
> catastrophe as great as the cane toad problem. The cane toad problem!
>
> If the net result of ethics is more death and human misery then what's the
> point of ethics?
>
> John K Clark
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20190122/5ec197ac/attachment.html>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list