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[Shadowlord]

And here I thought we were going to avoid the GATTACA future.

[TempAcc]

Sweet.

When can I go about designing my own babies?
I want my minitemp.

[forsaken1111]

Just hook up Sims 4 to one of those medical 3D organ printers right?

[Loud Whispers]

So, remember when I before have put an article that has said that we now can predict people's intelligence from DNA? There are already plans/suggestions to use it for mass scale genetic selection at an embryonic stage. For fuck's sake!

Why are you so shocked? This is without a doubt a great thing. IVF has a massive failure rate because as women age the incidence of chromosomal abnormalities increase, even using what scant eggs they have that have been donated by young women is not any high guarantee of success in the procedure or that a child will not be born with chromosomal disorders like down's syndrome.
Highly relevant:

It appears that around a third of embryos with the correct number of chromosomes still fail to lead to a successful pregnancy. Recent studies have shown that embryos with a higher concentration of mitochondrial DNA have a reduced chance of implantation. Mitochondria are the energy producing engines within our cells, but surprisingly, an abundance of mitochondria appears to be associated with lower implantation potential.
The engineering is intended to switch on the immune response to attack cancer. In the pharmaceutical industry, antibody drugs directly blocking the PD-1 protein including Merck & Co.’s Keytruda and Opdivo sold by Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. have become new growth engines for the companies.
A study from the University of Oxford, which was recently presented at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Helsinki, suggested that screening embryos for their levels of mitochondrial DNA could help doctors select those that are most likely to result in a healthy pregnancy.

With this screening the success rate is vastly increased for pregnancy via IVF. This means childless women who for whatever reason cannot naturally conceive don't have to spend absurd sums of money for the small possibility of a child.

And here I thought we were going to avoid the GATTACA future.

I always thought that GATTACA picked their examples poorly. It was absurd for example how the main character was whining that they weren't allowed to be an astronaut because his genetics indicated he was at high risk for heart problems; I would say then his issue was that they were judging his health based off of his genetics and not his health, however they did do health tests which he lied on, even going so far as to fake his own heartbeat whilst exercising. I couldn't tell whether he collapsed whilst jogging due to a heart condition or just emotional stress, however in that scene where he swims and reveals he was expending all his energy without regard for the return journey, I knew he was more human spirit than common sense. An astronaut who has a health condition that drastically increases the chance of their death drastically increases the chance of mission failure and the whole team dying. This is why astronauts are selected according to physical standards which are comparable to military pilot standards. Simply put the main character was a complete bellend

[Sergarr]

So, remember when I before have put an article that has said that we now can predict people's intelligence from DNA? There are already plans/suggestions to use it for mass scale genetic selection at an embryonic stage. For fuck's sake!

Why are you so shocked? This is without a doubt a great thing. IVF has a massive failure rate because as women age the incidence of chromosomal abnormalities increase, even using what scant eggs they have that have been donated by young women is not any high guarantee of success in the procedure or that a child will not be born with chromosomal disorders like down's syndrome.

I just expect to see it all go to hell at some point when some other "clever" scientists find a link between race and intelligence, at which point the already established institutions will be quickly used to erase the "lesser" races from existence.

[wierd]

Race is a nonsense argument.

saying "individuals from xyz demographic have foo% chance of carying factor BAR" does not say "all people in demographic xyz need to be sterilized"

this is especially true when things like CRISPR can be used to correct the specific factor, and leave all other characteristics intact, without aborting the embryo, since this is ivf.

also, not all factors that convey a positive effect are wholly desirable, and too much homogeneity is bad as it reduces immune fitness of the species. Take for instance, ccr5 delta32. this mutation makes it very hard for hiv to infect you. if all humans had this mutation, hiv would rapidly mutate to overcome the barrier, and now the benefit is gone, AND everyone now has the same genotype from the meddling, so everyone suffers, AND everyone now has one less functional signalling receptor that has important function. 

for things that are wholly deleterious but ride beside other benign ethnic traits, edition to correct the caual coding for the wholly deleterious trait seems beneficial.

trying to go full bore eugenics though? not scientifically sound.

trying to eliminate an entire ethnic group falls firmly in that latter group.

[Sergarr]

Race is a nonsense argument.

saying "individuals from xyz demographic have foo% chance of carying factor BAR" does not say "all people in demographic xyz need to be sterilized"

this is especially true when things like CRISPR can be used to correct the specific factor, and leave all other characteristics intact, without aborting the embryo, since this is ivf.

also, not all factors that convey a positive effect are wholly desirable, and too much homogeneity is bad as it reduces immune fitness of the species. Take for instance, ccr5 delta32. this mutation makes it very hard for hiv to infect you. if all humans had this mutation, hiv would rapidly mutate to overcome the barrier, and now the benefit is gone, AND everyone now has the same genotype from the meddling, so everyone suffers, AND everyone now has one less functional signalling receptor that has important function. 

for things that are wholly deleterious but ride beside other benign ethnic traits, edition to correct the caual coding for the wholly deleterious trait seems beneficial.

trying to go full bore eugenics though? not scientifically sound.

trying to eliminate an entire ethnic group falls firmly in that latter group.

If it was as simple as that... "not scientifically sound" has not stopped Nazis from trying to exterminate the Jews, and it sure as hell will not stop the people from trying this stuff out on in the future. Giving them instruments like that and a possibility of justification sounds pretty scary to me.

[iceball3]

Race is a nonsense argument.

saying "individuals from xyz demographic have foo% chance of carying factor BAR" does not say "all people in demographic xyz need to be sterilized"

this is especially true when things like CRISPR can be used to correct the specific factor, and leave all other characteristics intact, without aborting the embryo, since this is ivf.

also, not all factors that convey a positive effect are wholly desirable, and too much homogeneity is bad as it reduces immune fitness of the species. Take for instance, ccr5 delta32. this mutation makes it very hard for hiv to infect you. if all humans had this mutation, hiv would rapidly mutate to overcome the barrier, and now the benefit is gone, AND everyone now has the same genotype from the meddling, so everyone suffers, AND everyone now has one less functional signalling receptor that has important function. 

for things that are wholly deleterious but ride beside other benign ethnic traits, edition to correct the caual coding for the wholly deleterious trait seems beneficial.

trying to go full bore eugenics though? not scientifically sound.

trying to eliminate an entire ethnic group falls firmly in that latter group.

If it was as simple as that... "not scientifically sound" has not stopped Nazis from trying to exterminate the Jews, and it sure as hell will not stop the people from trying this stuff out on in the future. Giving them instruments like that and a possibility of justification sounds pretty scary to me.

Honestly, I'm more scared of general political environments driving such movements, rather than just a lone exploitable scientific tidbit driving it.
The instruments of genocide kind of exist already, the main goal should be preventing their use (Nuclear weapons, the diplomatic Game Of Chicken, ethnicism, nationalism, etc are all means that must be kept under strict scrutiny in this regard).

[ChairmanPoo]

Race is a nonsense argument.

saying "individuals from xyz demographic have foo% chance of carying factor BAR" does not say "all people in demographic xyz need to be sterilized"

this is especially true when things like CRISPR can be used to correct the specific factor, and leave all other characteristics intact, without aborting the embryo, since this is ivf.

also, not all factors that convey a positive effect are wholly desirable, and too much homogeneity is bad as it reduces immune fitness of the species. Take for instance, ccr5 delta32. this mutation makes it very hard for hiv to infect you. if all humans had this mutation, hiv would rapidly mutate to overcome the barrier, and now the benefit is gone, AND everyone now has the same genotype from the meddling, so everyone suffers, AND everyone now has one less functional signalling receptor that has important function. 

for things that are wholly deleterious but ride beside other benign ethnic traits, edition to correct the caual coding for the wholly deleterious trait seems beneficial.

trying to go full bore eugenics though? not scientifically sound.

trying to eliminate an entire ethnic group falls firmly in that latter group.

If it was as simple as that... "not scientifically sound" has not stopped Nazis from trying to exterminate the Jews, and it sure as hell will not stop the people from trying this stuff out on in the future. Giving them instruments like that and a possibility of justification sounds pretty scary to me.

Blah. People did this all the time without any pseudoscientific justification.

Really, your fears are suspiciously close to those born-again evangelical luddites.

[TempAcc]

Honestly I'm more afraid of people going full dweeb over a scientific advancement that may lead to "problematic" conclusions in regards to race, and thus ruining said efforts and banning that kind of research, than of said advancement somehow fueling a genocidal effort in plain view of the current global society.

I honestly think all the efforts against similarly controversial research, such as cloning, GMO and stem cell research, for example, have done far more harm than good.

[Reelya]

It's not going to be a big issue, because if some positive gene is less common in a sub-population, but you start selecting for that gene, it will spread faster in the sub-population than the overall population, because the selection pressure is higher. Also, the unit of selection is going to be either sperm, eggs, or embryos, not whole people. If racist selection is a problem now, it's not going to become more of a problem when the unit of selection is single cells.

Sperm selection would be the most practical and least intrusive method. Sperm also contains both X and Y chromosomes, so it's "complete" in terms of how much of the genome is revealed at this level. The average ejaculate has 200 million sperm. If you collect all those then select for the ones with positive traits, even "defective" people will have quite a few with beneficial mutations, that otherwise would be lost among the competition to fertilize that one egg. To get best effects, you'd want to screen millions of eggs and sperm separately, then get them to fertilize, and do a final screening of the resultant embryos. The fact is, if this process was widespread it would reduce racial-based differences in the traits your screening for in a fairly small number of generations.

[Reelya]

There's also an interesting point, in how genetics works. If there's a trait that is clearly beneficial, then it spreads to the whole community, given enough generations. So if there's some racial difference in IQ that could be explained by a few simple gene-flips then you'd have to explain why it didn't spread in the first place?

http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/12/predictions-of-human-intelligence.html
EDIT: Though if you look at the research, their DNA differences can account for about 2 IQ points, total. And it's not clear how much of that is from regular variation vs outliers such as genetic learning disabilities driving down some people's scores.

After all they fed 100,000 peoples DNA sequences and IQ scores into a computer and calculated a predictor, so outliers could have been a big factor, and they might in no way have found a way to make "regular" people any smarter at all. For example, thyroid problems in childhood (including from iodine deficiency) can account for a significant amount of IQ degradation. So someone with genes that negatively affect the thyroid's ability to process iodine could have an impact on IQ, and the learning algorithm is picking that up in those individuals, then the researchers can truly  claim they can "predict IQ from your DNA" at least that much.

There's also a problem that the difference seems to be smaller for the older children than the younger children. i.e. they've developed a measure for the kids who are mentally developing earliest. But the IQ point difference accountable from their generated metric already contracted sharply from age 11-13. And if you claim to have measured General Intelligence Factor "g", then the differences should be accelerating at that point, not closing together. The real problem is that they're only doing the correlational study for kids up to 13. It might have some predictive power of adult intelligence, but the current results suggest that will perhaps explain 1-2 IQ points difference, total, and even that can be attributed to known genetic-based learning disabilities (ADHD, Dyslexia) which are skewing things.

[Reelya]

I think the only difference is the buzzword "machine learning". Which sounds much more super whiz-bang than it really is. It's just regression analysis on large data sets. The problem is that while you can create a metric that predicts another metric, to some degree, that doesn't prove that you've measured what you claim to have measured.

I think the current articles can claim to have predicted about 10-15% of the variation in IQ according to genetics. e.g. the SD of IQ is 15, whereas one SD of this measure measures <2 IQ points different for an adult. But still, like I said that doesn't exclude known learning disabilities in some fraction of the population as being responsible for much of that difference.

[wierd]

Low signal, high noise. Hurrah.

They would need a significantly larger sample, with many different genetic and cultural/economic mobility levels to magnify a signal that low.

[hops]

So, remember when I before have put an article that has said that we now can predict people's intelligence from DNA? There are already plans/suggestions to use it for mass scale genetic selection at an embryonic stage. For fuck's sake!

Okay normally I'm all for human-controlled evolution, but this is bullshit.

Intelligence isn't defined that much by your genetic. We don't have any problems with intelligence, we have problems with EDUCATION.