Stats for nerds
1recommend
2mentions
2people
2018–2019years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Every time I read about gene editing, I think of the short story Sisters by Greg Bear: https://www.baen.com/Chapters/ERBAEN0036/ERBAEN0036___1.htm
- For the reasons you suggest it's likely that any safe useful embyronic editing will make it to the global mainstream within a generation or so.
This will have some interesting consequences for the future of our species. Greg Bear's "Sisters" (collected in "Just Over the Horizon") took a compelling angle on a world with ubiquitous genetic editing of embryos. He made a few predictions:
(1) People whose parents opt out of the process will, indeed, have worse social lives, worse careers, and worse lives overall -- they will get sicker, die younger, and be less prepared for exceptional performances. Bear uses the lens of high school where everyone feels like they don't fit in but convincingly suggests that non-edited people would feel worse.
(2) Most "pre-planned children" (those subject to embyronic editing) will get a combination of a handful of known safe "packages" which will probably be iterated annually by the companies who offer them. This means in practice that most people born in the same year will have many similar traits and quirks.
(3) People will not, by and large, physically resemble their parents; desirable traits will include appearance. They will, however, all kind of look like one another.
(4) People who opt out of the practice despite having enough money will be seen as quirky anachronisms from another era.
(5) Inevitably someone will mess up and some trait will enter the mainstream which causes widespread calamity -- for example, 50% of people aged 15-16 who was built in a certain batch will suddenly die from a previously undiscovered anomaly. This will be treatable with CRISPR-style technologies and folks will rush to build a treatment the first time it happens. These mass deaths will come as a surprise because, while in some sense we know we are doing something different by imposing relatively few features on a relatively large population and by bypassing tens of generations of random mutation, we don't really understand what we're "losing" by skipping the normal process that selects for viable individuals.
Bear theorizes that it's going to be important in a few decades to remember that everyone, both the pre-planned people and the unedited people, is human and deserves equal dignity as a person. He tries to end the story in an upbeat way when his protagonist addresses the surviving half of her graduating high school class:
"" "This has been a bad time for all of us," she began, voice high and scratchy. She cleared her throat. "I've lost a lot of friends, and so have you. Maybe you've lost sons and daughters. I think, even from there, looking at me, you can tell I'm not ... designed. I'm natural. I don't have to wonder about whether I'll get sick and die. But I ..." She cleared her throat again. It wasn't getting easier. "I thought someone like me could tell you something important."
"People have made mistakes, bad mistakes. But you are not a mistake. I mean ... they weren't mistaken to make you. I can only dream about doing some of the things you'll do. Some of you are made to live in space for a long time, and I can't do that. Some of you will think things I can't, and go places I won't ... travel to see the stars. We're different in a lot of ways, but I just thought it was important to tell you..." She wasn't following the prepared speech. She couldn't. "I love you. I don't care what the others say. We love you. You are very important. Please don't forget that." ""
Not really sure what the broader lesson is, but the story stuck with me and there are a couple of specific predictions in there that will be interesting to see tested out in the next few decades.
