Thanks for this post! Without knowing much, genetic enhancement feels to me exactly like the kind of cause we should look into deeply.
The paper of Shulman and Bostrom is from 2013, and focused on policy. I guess that advances in biological techniques and the “crispr babies” story has decision makers take it more seriously. Is there anything close to an accepted global ethical conventions around it? Or major conferences/initiatives that do good work on the policy side?
Also, how mature is the concept of Iterated Embryo Selection?
Also, how mature is the concept of Iterated Embryo Selection?
The concept itself dates back to 1998 , as far as I can tell, based on similar ideas dating back at least a decade before that.
There has been enormous progress in various parts of the hypothetical process, like just yesterday Tian et al 2019 reported taking ovarian cells (not eggs) and converting them into mouse eggs and fertilizing and yielding live healthy fertile mice. This is a big step towards ‘massive embryo selection’ (do 1 egg harvesting cycle, create hundreds or thousands of eggs from the collected egg+non-egg cells, fertilize, and select, yielding >1SD gains), and of course, the more control you have over gametogenesis in general, the closer you are to a full IES process.
The animal geneticists are excited about IES, to the point of reinventing it like 3 times over the past few years, and are actively discussing implementing it for cattle. Humans, of course, who knows? But I wouldn’t want to bet against IES happening during the 2020s for some species, at least in lab demonstrations. (For comparison, think about the state of the art for GWASes, editing, gametogenesis, and cloning in 2010 vs now.)
So I would phrase it as, much more obscure an idea than it deserves to be, with lots of challenging technical & engineering work still to be done, but well within current foreseeability; and will likely happen quite soon on the scale of 1-3 decades (being highly conservative) even without any particularly focused research efforts or ‘Manhattan projects’, because the required technologies are either far too useful in general (stem cell creation, gametogenesis), or have constituencies who want it a lot (animal breeders/geneticists, wealthy gay couples).
Thanks for this post! Without knowing much, genetic enhancement feels to me exactly like the kind of cause we should look into deeply.
The paper of Shulman and Bostrom is from 2013, and focused on policy. I guess that advances in biological techniques and the “crispr babies” story has decision makers take it more seriously. Is there anything close to an accepted global ethical conventions around it? Or major conferences/initiatives that do good work on the policy side?
Also, how mature is the concept of Iterated Embryo Selection?
The concept itself dates back to 1998 , as far as I can tell, based on similar ideas dating back at least a decade before that.
There has been enormous progress in various parts of the hypothetical process, like just yesterday Tian et al 2019 reported taking ovarian cells (not eggs) and converting them into mouse eggs and fertilizing and yielding live healthy fertile mice. This is a big step towards ‘massive embryo selection’ (do 1 egg harvesting cycle, create hundreds or thousands of eggs from the collected egg+non-egg cells, fertilize, and select, yielding >1SD gains), and of course, the more control you have over gametogenesis in general, the closer you are to a full IES process.
The animal geneticists are excited about IES, to the point of reinventing it like 3 times over the past few years, and are actively discussing implementing it for cattle. Humans, of course, who knows? But I wouldn’t want to bet against IES happening during the 2020s for some species, at least in lab demonstrations. (For comparison, think about the state of the art for GWASes, editing, gametogenesis, and cloning in 2010 vs now.)
So I would phrase it as, much more obscure an idea than it deserves to be, with lots of challenging technical & engineering work still to be done, but well within current foreseeability; and will likely happen quite soon on the scale of 1-3 decades (being highly conservative) even without any particularly focused research efforts or ‘Manhattan projects’, because the required technologies are either far too useful in general (stem cell creation, gametogenesis), or have constituencies who want it a lot (animal breeders/geneticists, wealthy gay couples).