a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
OftenBen  ·  2982 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Should you edit your children’s genes?

OK I'm responding to this first.

In your very first sentence we have fundamentally changed this discussion. The question this article poses is 'Should You Edit Your Children's Genes?' And by your own admission there are cases where genetic therapy should be used. So the actual question we are facing is 'When should genetic therapy be used?' Which is a very different debate, and a far more nuanced one.

    Things like schizophrenia run in families, ... ...I'm positive that in order to get rid of the disease, you have to get rid of the benefits that the genes that cause that disease also lead to.

And I'm just as positive that the truth of biology is more nuanced than that. Just as no single gene controls hair color or eye color, I highly doubt that a single switch flips causing both life-destroying schizophrenia and whatever benefits there may be. Which leads to the next point.

    The problem is that genetics is complex... ..... but there is a good reason that people who don't do those things are still alive, even if we don't know that reason yet.

I agree wholeheartedly that genetics is complex, but we have to start somewhere. There's no foreseeable reason why an expensive, labor intensive and time consuming medical procedure would ever become mandatory. I'm a huge pessimist by and large, but if we get to that point, we have bigger issues than everybodies musculature.

    We need to keep that attitude, the idea that all bad things are good, and good things bad, when it comes to human biology and traits.

I couldn't disagree more vehemently. But we've already agreed that the question at hand is "In what cases do you use genetic therapy? " or if you wanted to be cruel about it "In what cases do you NOT use genetic therapy? "