Human Genome project 2.0 assessment
Table of Contents
Introduction
We have lived, up until this point, with very small mutations (1.1*10-8/generation) to our genomes. About 6 billion basepairs long, our DNA sequences are far from perfectly understood. What we do understand, however, is that we're far from perfect. Our genome codes for everything from autoimmune disorders to schizophrenia, and we're scratching the surface of techniques to to amend that. Of course, it's not an easy process, and in building tools to modify DNA, we open ourselves up to social and genetic risks.
Advantages
If we embrace not only removal of negative attributes, but amplification of positive ones as well, we can look forward to longer lives and stronger immune systems, and perhaps even greater intelligence. Increases in average general intelligence will have profound effects on human society as a whole, creating a feedback loop of more accurate analysis. "Intelligence" is tricky to define and even trickier to modify, but even freezing embryos yields an increase in IQ– we could do even better through genetic modification, especially if there are genes linked with intelligence (cranium size is, at least).
We might even create a new sort of cell, cell culture, or organ that lives in our bodies, maintaining a list of changes, allowing us to revert to a previous working state and beta-testing new genetic modifications against an ever-improving battery of tests. A sort of git+development tools system for the human body.
Rewriting the human genome may also liberate us completely from scale limits on reproduction. Instead of finding a mate, mating, and rearing a kid, rearing children could be done in large batches, where everyone has a slightly different computer-generated lab-mutated genome. These children might be adopted at any point, or simply raised to adulthood. This alternative family system could be run as a co-op by individuals interested in IVF and genetic modification, sponsored by a corporation interested in promoting their methodologies (either in childcare or genetics), or state-sponsored. Each of these have their own advantages and pitfalls, and would challenge conventional notions of family, but if happy, hardy, intelligent humans with increased lifespans are a result, tradition-based counterarguments become irrelevant.
Non-germline modifications are a sort of voluntary test of a given gene– if you live to 180 and you modified the right genes, you know which genes to give your children, even if you are making new children based on someone else's genes.
Risks
- Lack of simulation
There is no perfect test nor thorough field simulation of genetic modifications, so we must be cautious about improvement. As George Church mentioned in his lecture last week, the same modification which removes [whatever that was] had a nonzero chance of causing leukemia, and we learned that the hard way.
- Cross-species transfer
There is the risk of epigenetic transfer– if we created the afforementioned development-cycle cell/organ, its genes may contaminate others, get picked up by viruses, etc. We need to stay one step ahead of not just nature, but our own creations. Kill switches and limited feedstock are a must, however awkward and convenience-limiting they might be.
- Equality+Human Rights
There is some non-negligible risk that, as with any technology, if only rich and powerful people can use it, they'll increase their own wealth and power, and become a separate species and increase general disregard for democracy and human rights. I would hope that anyone interested in upgrading themselves biologically would make any such advances as widely available as possible, but I recognize the difficulty here. Population outstripping resources is also a risk, if the biotechnology we use to increase access to resources and efficiency doesn't increase in tandem with longer lives and more robust immune systems.
Implementation
Germline modifications are the easiest. When I have children, I will design for them a custom organ, interfacing with the brain, that gives them a readout of the genes in any of their cells and that history. It would replace their appendix, the gene for which starts [is there a gene for each organ damnit does this even make sense]
Personally, I would love to undergo gene therapy to replace my own cells, replacing/upgrading them. In practice, I would do this step by step, first changing some of my own skin cells outside my body, then some skin cells on my body, then doing a blood transfusion mixed with the cas9 protein (or equivalent).