With tales of Crispr babies in the news, I've been pondering the implications of programming human beings. This may or may not have been spurred by...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
It's a tough call. I am a huge fan of the movie Gattaca precisely for the exploration of some of these questions. I could be on board with it for treating harsh diseases, but not for making designer children or "enhanced" humans. Such goals seem to align with very evil figures from history. And that's before we even get into the downsides. There's always a trade-off.
We've already seen it happen to food... not through direct editing but through generations of selective breeding. At this point, many of our commercially grown foods have a severe lack of genetic diversity. For example, wheat rust became a big problem in recent history. Growers were understandably focused on bigger yields. Selective breeding for that goal had inadvertently filtered out strains of wheat that had genetic resistance to the fungus.
Yes, we don't need to edit genomes to create problems, it can however accelerate the timeline compared to selective breeding.
There are a lot of questions here, but it's inevitable that we will edit our genome. I also think that designer babies are inevitable -- prohibition rarely works. :/
Oh, for sure gene editing is already happening in humans (see below). But I was speaking to your specific question of whether I would accept a position in "human programming". For disease treatment I probably would but beyond that, no way.
Check out this annual biotech guidebook, which highlights various advancements in biotech for the year. One of the articles (page 14) highlights human gene editing to combat Hunter syndrome. Much like the feeling I get after attending a computer security conference, upon reading this guide I feel both more knowledgeable and terrified at the future.
Edit: Also relevant, and I think generally a good foundation for ethics in biotech. UNESCO - Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights
Okay, so you'd accept a position in disease treatment... here comes that annoying part where I present uncomfortable options.
What if your company is treating diseases, but you're working on something more fundamental, a framework, or process, that will enable it. You know full well it'll also enable undesirable changes to the genome. Are you okay open-sourcing that foundation?
But by the same token, what if I do something as benign as discover some breakthrough in app dev. So that solid apps can be made rapidly and cheaply. Maybe that also means resilient malware/ransomware can be made faster and more cheaply. Would it be unethical to do then?
Technology is neither good nor bad. It's a tool that is used for good or bad, depending on how the person wields it. So the answer is that I don't know. It would depend on the situation, including the people involved and the specific limitations of the tech.
I'm going to have to side with technology is neither good nor bad. Thus it'd be ethical to develop tools that make malware easy, or make horrific genome edits easy.
I don't trust everybody, but the people I trust the least are those that do things in secret. Thus given the option between trying to keep a lid on technology, or making it open, I'm choosing open every time.
I really doubt that software engineers would do this job. Yeah, we can help build programs/simulations that can make modifying DNK a bit easier for the bioengineers (I guess) but that would be it.
On the other hand, this position would be so responsible that many people (me included) will just move past and do something else, because, you know, some human beings' life would depend on the changes you did to his DNK.
Btw, I don't really see what this (ridiculous) user story and Indian QA companies are doing in the same post mentioning CRISPR at the beginning, I guess that I don't have much sense of humor, but I've found this a bit distasteful...
The reason I allude to programmers is because essentially that's what would be happening. You're quite right, the current generation of programmers would not likely fit this role. However, if we look at a lot of near-future sci-fi, the idea of programming human implants and genes by hackers is not uncommon.
Medical researches will likely take on this role. Which could be as scary, if not scarier. They don't exactly have open and well defined processes.
To your second note, I also fear that reasonable people will pass on the position. That would leave a second class of people willing to do the position. But we really need the reasonable people working in this area.
Black humour is my way of dealing with harsh subjects.
киселина
The first thing that come to my mind was "Open source".
I, personally, would not take a job for messing with DNA. On the other hand, I would play with this hypothetical API on open-source.
In my opinion, having a plethora of solutions available "freely" online would hinder the possibility to have one bad solution doing damage. Much like it's better to have a diversified genes pool.
It's a debate we could probably have, but not the intent of this blog post. I've replaced the affiliate links with direct links.
Why did you? What compelled you to do so?