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Notes -
When it comes to genetic fixes, I disagree. I've encountered too many people, both IRL and online, whose opinions on the topic are such that I fully expect them to join whatever real-life Blue Cosmos ends up forming once serious engineering comes along. There's the classically-religious sort, who already object to IVF and find the whole field "meddling in God's domain" (I don't know who else remembers Bush-era "bioethics" debates.) There's the environmentalist-leaning who are already protesting GMO crops as "Frankenfoods" — their opinions on potential "Frankenpeople" as the worst example yet about how human beings are a virus and everything we do corrupts or destroys nature. Or people like the guy living in Germany who used to show up in the Marginal Revolution comments to call Tyler Cowen a Nazi any time he brought up CRISPR, and would go on about human dignity and the un-amendable First Article of the German Constitution, how the "Nazi idea" is that one gene variant could ever be better or worse than another. Or the fellow who argued for preemptively nuking China should they fail to join us in banning it. Or the people who called for the UN to expand upon UNESCO's "Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights" and make the human genome part of the "common heritage of humanity" so that genetic engineering is legally equivalent to vandalizing the Parthenon or such. Or all the countries who have already banned germline modification. Or…
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