= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ChristianKl comments on Thoughts on minimizing designer baby drama - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (194)
Has anybody a guess of when the technology will reach a stage where a human designer baby with has genes added to a single chromosome will costs 20.000$ or less and there aren't meaningful medical problems with the procedure?
When? At least ten years ago.
The dairy industry routinely carries out genomic selection on cow embryos resulting in vastly modified individuals showing traits that would rarely, if ever, be expressed in the wild: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022030209703479
If carried out in humans this type of radical genetic engineering would be considered 'designer baby' technology in every meaningful sense. How much does it cost? Not $20,000. More like $20. By the way, in-vitro-fertilization is done as well, and that's also cheap (and no, this isn't because of lowered safety or hygiene standards - the labs in which these procedures are carried out are as modern, safe, and sterile as any human-oriented lab; and they'd have to be since cattle are fairly expensive assets).
If you're just talking about designer babies, then we can already do that. If you're talking about the specific issue of splicing genes, we might still be a ways off, depending how you define 'meaningful.'
In mice, of course, gene splicing is commonplace and pretty cheap, although in the case of laboratory mice there is the freedom that you can abort the fetus at any stage if it shows signs of improper development, and in gene splicing experiments you typically have to abort a lot of fetuses.
I don't think of selection as genetic design. Sperm banks do selection based since their inception. It would surprise me if there isn't a sperm bank out there that already does 23andMe type genetic screening.
Still $20 dollar doesn't buy you an hour of qualified physician time, so the price of the procedure is likely higher.
Around five years ago I heard from a professor that the cost of getting a new gene manipulated mouse is roughly a PHD project and there are mouses dying in the process.
I suggest reading the link I posted plus other material on genomic selection. The type of genomic selection used in the dairy industry is very different from simple 23andMe type genetic screening.
I read the abstract. The link says they do 50,000 SNP's with their chip in the dairy industry. 23andMe does hundred thousands of SNPs according to their website.
They do some statistics with that data because to see which SNPs are important but otherwise I don't see what they do much different.
High SNP numbers are misleading and have little predictive value. But that's not the important bit; the important bit is how this information is actually used.
Thanks for including a "just want to see the results" option, though a question for that might have been better. I assume the 9999's are screwing up the means.
Would anyone who thought the tech would be available in the fairly near future be willing to explain their line of thought?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/m6b/thoughts_on_minimizing_designer_baby_drama/cd1x
I thought about that - but then some value still would be needed for the numeric result.
The mean you mean I guess.
I recommend looking at the raw numbers - it is easy.
You're right. I meant the mean-- I've corrected it.
Some results after looking at the data (29 votes):