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Comment by aliasxneo | Hacker News Reader

> the generational effects there are still entirely unpredictable at this stage

Something I've always wondered about CRISPR. It seems the legal case for introducing it is the freedom to perform "body hacking" on yourself. But, at least in this case, isn't it more like "generational hacking?" Maybe I am fundamentally misunderstanding the technology, but it's strange to think about what sort of protections should be put in place to prevent someone being born with severe defects due to messing with the genome.

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> the freedom to perform "body hacking" on yourself. But, at least in this case, isn't it more like "generational hacking?"

The latter would certainly be much easier than the former. But especially people who don't work in bio dream about hand-wavy future biotech that does things like using a virus vector to spread a CRISP/CAS9 payload to all relevant cells in an adult body, and performs in vivo edits.

I'm extremely bearish on genetic tweaking as I think longterm unforseen consequences are essentially guaranteed, but I don't find this exact issue to be much of a problem. It's 100% legal to drink/smoke/etc to your heart's content while pregnant, so I think individual liberty still unambiguously wins here.

I'm not sure about that...

Isn't restricting people from reproducing based on their genetic material known as Eugenics?

This is the "ethically fraught" bit I was referencing. Once this genie is out of the bottle and into the gene pool, there's effectively no moral/ethical path to putting it back in.

This certainly highlights the problem. For context, I wasn't suggesting eugenics, although I suppose that's one way to enforce things (one I would never support, anyways).

Thought-experiment: Someone modifies their gametes for gene-drive extinction. [0]

Failure to disclose it to every potential partner and descendant would be a very serious kind of fraud or potentially child-abuse.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gene-drives-could...

> Isn't restricting people from reproducing based on their genetic material known as Eugenics?

We really need to stop being afraid of words. We don't have to use a neutral word to imply a whole range of ancillary things which we don't name.

There's nothing wrong, in principle, with eugenics. (Some bad guys many years ago were really into it for a specific use case, but so what?)

While humanity is in the learning phase of gene editing:

- High-trust societies can choose to say: "You can get whatever gene mods you want but you will be sterilized."

- In freedom societies you could simply ask your partner what modifications she has before you conceive kids with her. Screening and embryo selection would probably be available in such a world and individuals would make their choices.

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