promethea.incorporated

argumate:

My wife and I went through several IVF rounds, and our doctor even indicated that we could have our embryos genotyped to select for certain traits. We didn’t, but we could have. The phrase, “Their doing some very interested research in China right now” was said during one of our consultations.

I have no illusions that in 10-20 years, I could have an embryo not only selected for traits I’m interested in, but the embryo edited using CRISPR if necessary to express the traits wanted if not already present.

Interesting, and exciting, times.

(from Hacker News)

highly relevant to a recent dialogue on Veracities!

I imagine most people will find these scenarios grotesque.

n_arguments_against_popular_rule += 1

By contrast, the liberal yet strict regulatory environment of the UK, administered by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has made ours a widely envied model of how to foster a productive and responsible research climate that can supply valuable benefits for human health.

Pls no

If we want to avoid this, we had better renegotiate, rather urgently, the priorities of childrearing, so that parents cease to feel a duty (whether they like it or not) to wring every presumed ounce of potential from their offspring.

…wait, perhaps this isn’t so terrible after all. This doesn’t sound like bioethics, this sounds like a reasonable attempt to make the culture less horrible to people.

Beyond the valuable ability to avoid certain severely debilitating illnesses, genetic selection of embryos for a “better child” is no more likely to deliver than is the fantasy that cloning will somehow make us immortal. But what it would do is distract from the value of love and nurture, and of making the most of what you have, in favour of crude biological determinism. Which is why I hope that, in the end, most folks will look at themselves and think: “Well, sex never did me much harm.”

Okay nevermind it’s bioethics all right. I feel violated by not having had “crude biological determinism” and instead I’m stuck (YGM) with shitty apoes and a decisively sub-optimal morph. I didn’t order a Flat, I want a Hyperbright or a Sage Eidolon Infomorph or a heavily customized Remade or something