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Positive and Negatives to Genetic Engineering:

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Positive and Negatives to Genetic Engineering:

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The website discusses whether modifying your baby is morally permissible. It discusses possibilities like people becoming too tall and using all Earths resources or make better scientific discoveries because people have more intelligence. The website makes a moral and emotional connection to the reader making them think that designer babies can either be a positive or a negative thing. Ideological support would be a red flag in this article because its pushing a belief it has on a future for genetic alteration.

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I support both, because they're inevitible. Better to be ahead of the times then be one of those old fogies who are like "oh no, let nature take care of what kind of person is born, dont be playin god". No matter what happens, there will always be an underclass in human society; in the past it was those who didn't belong to the in-group, who look or behave differently, which caused irrational racisim, now at least mindless predjudice will at least make a little more sense.

What i'm really concerned about is our loss of what makes us humans (altrusim) and any social trends that move us away from the emotional beings we are. I'm also afraid of skynet.

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Bio Ethics: Is Genetic Engineering Morally Permissible? : Philosophy * Rational Skepticism Forum

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I support both, because they're inevitible. Better to be ahead of the times then be one of those old fogies who are like "oh no, let nature take care of what kind of person is born, dont be playin god".

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The picture below just shows what the CRISPR advancements can do. The CRSIPR is supposed to cut certain parts of DNA out of a DNA strand. A red flag that could be present in this picture would be "all natural". They portray this to be a normal process and "natural" but it could be dangerous for future generations.

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The video discusses advancements that technologists have made in the US with lowering the ricks of disease with genetic alteration. I think this causes people to believe it because of the emotional connection. Many people have lost loved ones because of diseases or cancer which would cause them to believe in advancements in science such as genetic alteration in spite of hope for the future.  I think this is also a motivation for money because the more they interest people on the developments the more investments there are for genetic diversity and advancements.

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The video discusses the pros and cons of genetic engineering. I liked this video because it was the first to mention side affects that the modification of genes could have on future generations. I feel appeal to authority could be a red flag in this video because they show a lot of bio-chemists in a laboratory which displays authoritative imagery and the appearance of credibility. The video did not discuss specific bad effects from genetic alterations but said that the scientists could replace a valuable gene in human health which could have major impacts.

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Altering Embryos to Combat Climate Change

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Altering Embryos to Combat Climate Change

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This article discusses ways that altering human biology would affect climate change. Ideas such as night vision, increasing an allergy to meat and creating more empathy in humans. I think people would believe this because it creates an emotional connection with our future beings and the Earth. I think proof by verbosity could be a red flag in this article because it overloads the reader with a lot of information and then they think that the information given is true such as altering our genetic codes would be the answer for slowing climate change.

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A lot of researchers are thinking about how to genetically engineer crops and food animals to help them withstand post-climate change heat and parched conditions. But what about genetically engineering humans to slow our constant carbon contributions?

In 2012 a philosopher named Matthew Liao co-authored a paper that proposed altering human biology to combat climate change. In the paper, Liao and his colleagues propose a number of possible changes to human biology to help us combat climate change. When the paper came out, it got a lot of attention. Some people thought that Liao and his colleagues were trolling the academic community or that it was some sort of early April Fools joke. Bill McKibbon, a prominent environmental advocate Tweeted that the suggestions in the paper were the "worst climate change solutions of all time." And, of course, climate skeptics thought it was totally insane to alter human genetics in response to a problem they do not believe in.

In the paper and in subsequent interviews Liao and his co-authors said that they're not necessarily advocating for any one of these modifications in particular. Instead, they just think scientists should look into how feasible changing certain aspects of human biology might be. Co-author Rebecca Roache (who we talked to for the Eternal Life in Prison episode) told Leo Hickman of the Guardian that "human engineering may ultimately be unworkable; but this should be because it is impossible to implement, or because its costs outweigh its benefits."

Here on Meanwhile in the Future, however, we are all about taking on specific future possibilities. So I decided to go through the suggestions in the paper and figure out if they would work. To help sort through whether or not these changes are possible, I called Amy Maxmen. Maxmen recently wrote a cover-story for Wired magazine about CRISPR, the new gene editing technique that has a lot of people talking about the crazy future possibilities for genetic engineering.

The first proposal we cover is night vision - the idea that we could genetically engineer humans to have more rods so we could better see at night, and thus reduce our dependence on electric lights. The problem here is that there are only so many spots for rods and cones in our eyeballs, and our particular balance of the two is a tradeoff. Humans are day creatures, so they have more cone cells. Animals like cats are night creatures, so they have more rods. So during the day, humans can actually see motion about 10 to 12 times better than a cat. And many experts think that cats don't see the same number of colors we do, although they're divided over whether cats see in mostly blues and grays, or whether they see more like dogs where everything is less saturated. So if we want night vision, we might have to compromise some of our day vision to get it.

Another modification that Liao proposed was an induced allergy to meat, to help people reduce their consumption of animals. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States 14.5% of all greenhouse gas pollution comes from livestock. So the idea here is to make people allergic to eating meat. The problem is that there's no real way to control the severity of the allergy, and the two proteins that Liao talks about targeting (BSA and alpha-gal) are both found in all kinds of places like milk, eggs, dogs, cats and pork. People allergic to alpha-gal seem to be able to eat poultry and fish, but if they were to eat pork or lamb or beef the allergic reaction includes everything from hives to gastrointestinal upset, to anaphylactic shock. Not something most people would want to sign up for.

Next we talk about breeding people to be shorter, something Liao says could reduce our carbon footprint. Smaller people require less energy and use fewer resources, Liao argues. But selecting for height genetically would be a nightmare, according to the most recent paper that Maxmen found there are 697 genes involved in height. Since there's not a good way to select for height genetically, another method Liao talks about in his paper is using treatments that cause babies to be born light - to have a low "birth weight." But that comes with a set of very real dangers to the baby, and few mothers would opt to take that risk. Not to mention set their kid up for society's bias against people (particularly men) who are shorter.

But what about less physical ways of decreasing someone's impact on the climate? The next method Liao talks about is using cognitive enhancement to decrease the number of babies each person has. He proposes giving people access to things like Ritalin and Modafinil to increase their cognitive ability because there are some links between cognitive ability and having fewer children. The problem is that some of the most robust connections between those two are caused by unequal access to education, healthcare and economic opportunity. Giving someone Modafinil won't give them access to an education or a place to live or access to contraception.

And if we zoom out for a second and look around our world, do we truly think that being smarter means having less of an impact on the environment? There are a whole lot of very smart people who do un-environmentally friendly things.

And this brings us to the last modification that Liao talks about: empathy. You might remember that just a few weeks ago we talked about empathy on this very podcast! And you might remember that empathy is actually a really hard thing to define. Liao's idea is to give hormones like oxytocin and seratonin to people, and to perhaps decrease someone's testosterone. But those hormones have all kinds of effects, and can change people in really profound ways beyond making them a little more amenable to negotiating.

So there are a few problems with these specific proposals. But Liao says that these were just meant to be thought experiments, ideas put out there so that other people can run with them. So let's back up and talk about this idea more broadly - the idea that we should genetically engineer, or breed ourselves to be better. Which sounds like a great idea, and is also the same language that was used at the beginning of the eugenics movement.

Liao is very clear that he has no plans to force anybody to be shorter or to take Modafinil. But eugenics actually didn't start out as something that was forced on people - many of the early eugenics proponents were all about choice. Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin, saw the idea of selective breeding as something that would become a "civil religion." As Allen Buchanan, Dan W. Brock, Norman Daniels, and Daniel Wikler write in the book From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice:

If there was a core belief common to all eugenicists, it would have to be expressed in the most general terms: concern for human betterment through selection-that is, by taking measures to ensure that the humans who do come into existence will be capable of enjoying better lives and of contributing to the betterment of lives for others.

I'm not saying we're one step away from Nazi-style eugenics here. But this is a road we've been down before, and it didn't end well for us. So we should think carefully about this possible future. Climate change is a really tough problem. It's going to require a whole lot of different (and even weird) solutions to make the future livable and just. But we can't forget history as we forge into the future.

As usual, this is just a summary of what we talk about on the podcast. To hear more from Liao and Maxmen, have a listen.

If you have thoughts about futures we should explore on the podcast, leave us a note in the comments, on Twitter, or email us at overthinkingit@gizmodo.com. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud or via whatever RSS reading app you chose.
Illustration by Jim Cooke

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Meanwhile in the Future: To Stop Climate Change, We Must Genetically Engineer Humans

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A lot of researchers are thinking about how to genetically engineer crops and food animals to help them withstand post-climate change heat and parched conditions. But what about genetically engineering humans to slow our constant carbon contributions? In 2012 a philosopher named Matthew Liao co-authored a paper that proposed altering human biology to combat climate change.

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The picture below shows characteristics that the parent could have chosen their baby to have. I think people believe in genetic engineering because it hasn't been explained or proven yet. One red flag would be ideological support. The scientific development has a set of goals and expectations for the future which have not been proven in labs yet, more than just belief.

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The video is about the genetic engineering of babies and the future advancements that the scientific development will eventually take. The video discusses the history of genetic development and how far we have got with vitro fertilization and freezing eggs. I think the red flag proof by verbosity could be applied because in the beginning of the video, they overload you with information about genetic diversity and the history behind it, and then briefly touch on genetic engineering. I believe that people believe genetic engineering will one day be an advancement because we have already come very far with the science of embryos.

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Genetic Engineering Will Change Everything Forever – CRISPR

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Vitro Fertilization is a process in which an egg is taken from a woman and sperm is taken from a man and are combined in a lab then once the embryo has developed, it is implanted in a donor. I feel this scientific development was made because of an emotional connection. Woman sometimes have a hard time having a baby and now they can by using a womb donor. The only red flag that could possibly be applied here is "all natural". All natural can apply to this picture because it normalizes the procedure even though it could be unsafe or unhealthy for the baby.

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The following website describes scientific developments for fetuses in the womb. Embryonic transfer is a process in which an egg from a woman is transferred to another woman. This technique has been used for domestic animals and they use this technique on endangered species. Vitro fertilization is another embryo development. It allows an egg from a woman and sperm from a man to combine in a lab and be inserted into a donor, which will then have the baby and have no genetic relationship with. Finding genetic disorders with a fetus is a new development as well which allows disorders such as down syndrome, edward syndrome, etc. to be found. I think the red flag red herring could be applied to this article because it overloads the reader with positive information about the up coming developments but it does not display any negative side affects that it could possibly have.

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Embryo and Embryonic Development - humans, body, used, water, process, life, plants, type

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During week two of embryonic development, embryonic cells have begun the process of differentiation. The identical cells formed by the early divisions of the zygote are beginning to take on the different characteristic of muscle, blood, nerve, bone, and other kinds of cells.