I think the comment you're replying to is pretty much just FNE expressing an aesthetical-moral distaste for the concept, not exactly a disagreement on the technical aspects.
Oh, the technology may work lovely. It's when it comes to "and the baby is gestated and delivered and growing up, and oopsy-daisy turns out we made a boo-boo and now this kid is stuck for life with a problem" that I am not sold on.
I can see the benefits of "this embryo has been selected to not have the genes for breast cancer that are in the maternal family". That reduces the risk greatly, but doesn't of course mean that the child produced isn't at risk for something else. But when it comes to the blue-sky visions of Better Babies, I am very damn dubious because it's all too redolent of past sunny forecasts of "well now we have psychiatry, we understand the impulses in the human subconscious, crime and mental illness will be a thing of the past!" That didn't happen, and I don't think polygenic selection as we currently have it is going to do any better when it comes to "and your kid will be healthier, smarter, more attractive, and be a Fortune 500 company owner, we guarantee it!"
We do not know enough and we're looking to run the equivalent of human testing doing this with current generation of pregnancies. Get enough of these done, over time, we'll see the pitfalls and "oh yeah, turns out that location wasn't the one we wanted after all". But the problem is that we are doing this to humans, and creating (if it goes through) a cohort of babies that are, to be blunt, lab rats. Babies and their families who will have to live with the consequences of "yeah, seems like picking X without Y to accompany it was a fuck-up, ah well we'll know better for the next batch of embryos!"
By this logic, all medicine is bad because sometimes we accidentally get thalidomide.
Thanks to modern antipsychotics, number of permanently instituionalized patients was reduced by 10-100 times.
crime
that was offset by governments and population not wanting to solve crime, it's not that science on it was useless.
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Notes -
That we can just pick out Better Babies as though we're comparison shopping between brands of cornflakes.
Which of aardvark2's four premises do you specifically disagree with?
I think the comment you're replying to is pretty much just FNE expressing an aesthetical-moral distaste for the concept, not exactly a disagreement on the technical aspects.
Oh, the technology may work lovely. It's when it comes to "and the baby is gestated and delivered and growing up, and oopsy-daisy turns out we made a boo-boo and now this kid is stuck for life with a problem" that I am not sold on.
I can see the benefits of "this embryo has been selected to not have the genes for breast cancer that are in the maternal family". That reduces the risk greatly, but doesn't of course mean that the child produced isn't at risk for something else. But when it comes to the blue-sky visions of Better Babies, I am very damn dubious because it's all too redolent of past sunny forecasts of "well now we have psychiatry, we understand the impulses in the human subconscious, crime and mental illness will be a thing of the past!" That didn't happen, and I don't think polygenic selection as we currently have it is going to do any better when it comes to "and your kid will be healthier, smarter, more attractive, and be a Fortune 500 company owner, we guarantee it!"
We do not know enough and we're looking to run the equivalent of human testing doing this with current generation of pregnancies. Get enough of these done, over time, we'll see the pitfalls and "oh yeah, turns out that location wasn't the one we wanted after all". But the problem is that we are doing this to humans, and creating (if it goes through) a cohort of babies that are, to be blunt, lab rats. Babies and their families who will have to live with the consequences of "yeah, seems like picking X without Y to accompany it was a fuck-up, ah well we'll know better for the next batch of embryos!"
By this logic, all medicine is bad because sometimes we accidentally get thalidomide. Thanks to modern antipsychotics, number of permanently instituionalized patients was reduced by 10-100 times.
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Honestly? Kids with horrible problems get born every day, in numbers I expect to absolutely dwarf any IVF polygenic experiments.
The only thing that's worse about the latter option is that now you have someone to blame.
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