In a podcast last April that I just listened to recently, James Metzl says,
I have absolute confidence that our species is moving in the direction of conceiving our children in laboratories and not through sex. I certainly believe that the scenarios that I describe are very real scenarios. Whether I’m off by a few years in one direction or another, even a decade, it’s important, but the real story is that after 3.8 billion years of evolving by one set of rules, which we call Darwinian evolution, random mutation, and natural selection, we are now beginning a future process of evolving by a very different set of rules.
About this process, he notes that it may soon be possible, using eggs created from stem cells, to conceive thousands of babies.
You grow these 10,000 now fertilized eggs for about five days, use a machine to extract a few cells from each one. You sequence them all, because the cost of genome sequencing has gone down from about a billion dollars in 2003 to about $800 now, to basic negligibility a decade from now. And now you have 10,000 choices.
His point is that this allows you to be highly selective about which egg or eggs to plant back into the womb.
My question is: what if you don’t need a womb? What if in vitro gestation becomes as viable as in vitro fertilization? And suppose a billionaire wants to bring thousands of his babies into the world?
Have a nice Valentine’s Day.
Although this dystopian future is plausible it is unlikely to be possible. Again we are falling for a false meme: the genome is like uncracked computer code. In a previous comment I outlined a simple yet complete model that highlights the circular feedback loop that underlies the emergent behavior of life. The movie Gattacca is not our future. DNA has limited predictive power. Clones are hard too. A Storm Trooper clone army is not our future either.
What is dystopian about it?
From the plot of Gattaca
You might not think eugenics is dystopian but I’m pretty sure that a large population survey would show your views fall outside say six or so standard deviations from the norm. I can only hope that the number of people that share my genome-is-not-a-computer-program view reaches six sigma in my lifetime.
The plot of Gattaca is absurd.
The “protagonist” commits massive fraud so that he can endanger the lives of the shuttle passengers when he is likely to become incapacitated and be unable to pilot the shuttle. He literally plays with others lives because his ego is hurt.
And the guy that gave him the hair samples. As Slate Star Codex put it, just try again at the next competition. Or do something else. Why the heck does narrowly coming in second have to turn him into such a whiner.
Let’s get this straight. If this is available, the vast majority will use it to improve the human race. People who refuse will be a tiny minority that I suppose can live off the welfare created by their superiors. If they get butt hurt over this, hopefully they don’t go and endanger the lives of others.
I think you don’t know much about public opinion either. The revealed preference of nearly everyone whose given a eugenic option is that take it.
You might be right. I wish I had the perfect recall of the statistics I’ve come across in various books I’ve read in the past. I faintly recall both Nicholas Wade in “A Troublesome Inheritance” and Matt Ridley in “The Agile Gene”/”Nature via Nurture” present the result of surveys/polls and how they changed over time on the issue of eugenics.
Fully cognizant of availability bias, you are like my own personal Coelacanth; a species assumed extinct but found swimming somewhere in the South China Sea. Your beliefs are often brought up by social justice activists as they warn about the evils of people like E.O. Wilson and Charles Murray but I always assumed these people were purely mythical boogeymen but here you are instead a walking, breathing, straw man. I’d be immensely disappointed if you were an AI competing in a Eugenic Turing Test. I’m fully convinced.
Nearly all Down Syndrome babies are aborted. If that doesn’t show the revealed preference on eugenics, I don’t know what does.
There is a gap between what people SAY they would do if their fetus has Downs Syndrome and what they DO when it happens. I make no claim to know the proportionality of people SAYING about such things at a given time. When thinking about how people will ACT when this technology is available, I primarily look at what they DO.
It may be that even as widespread usage of such eugenic technology becomes common people are still denouncing it in public. Much as well off people today live in non-diverse areas and decry a lack of diversity.
Beyond that, everything we do is eugenics. People wouldn’t use the phrase “he’s a catch” or “she’s out of his league” if they didn’t have an understanding of the relative value of mate options. We know people are talking about general desirability, of which things like attractiveness/earnings/intelligence/etc are big components. It’s not for nothing people tend to marry their “equals” in these matters.
I am completely puzzled by your lack of belief in support for eugenics. Even ignoring Western hypocrisy with this topic, such hold ups are completely absent in the East. How could you miss the opinions of over a billion people?
I find your view that those with bad genes should be forced to continue to have bad genes even if the technology is available to vastly improve their lives to be one of the most evil ideas in all of history.
If people were offered the following, and they knew it was true, how many would take it?
We will take samples of your and your spouse’s DNA. We will then cut it up, pick out the good parts, and put it back together so that you’ll have a the equivalent of a fertilized egg. That egg will grow up into a smart, tall, good looking person with a friendly disposition, not prone to physical or mental illness.
My guess is that after five or ten years (when the results of previous children can now be seen), the percentage would be somewhere between 10 and 90 percent. By twenty years out, over 50% would not surprise me.
I’m thinking about this as a dystopic novel, as in my comment below.
Suppose DNA is not predictive, but a rich person can grow many children in artificial wombs. What if they raise hundreds of children, but then have some kind of contest for who can inherit. Or, they have to prove themselves in some way by the age of 18 or they get killed?
Why do we need artificial wombs? Historically this was a normal occurrence, see Genghis Khan. This kind of arrangement for a modern wealthy male could be done legally and transparently (I think) using either artificial insemination or scenarios similar to the rare Mormon polygamous family arrangements found in Utah or British Columbia as long as their was not recognized marriage involved (see NBA celebrities).
1000’s of kids are still a drop in the bucket compared to millions of kids.
What if you give the millions the option to raise supermen by making super-embryos available to anyone who wanted one? “I’ll have a von Neumann, thanks.”
A nice step forward toward getting the species to a Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Eusociality has evolved independently evolved in various species 8 to 11 times and certainly appears that Homo sapiens could add to total. Ironically, progressives in Alabama may stand in the way of this evolution, having recently introduced a bill to require men to pay out of their own pocket to have a vasectomy when they have fathered three children or reach age 50, whichever occurs first. A John Roberts “tax” of sorts. Land of the free, home of the Brave.
Heh, that reminds me of the “Alabama vasectomy” joke where the doctors tell the guy to hold a firework to his ear for ten seconds. And now we have a second Alabama vasectomy joke, but not funny.
Sunkist Club: all juice, no seed.
That is the sum total of my vasectomy humor.
“I mean, the parents knew about it but they were not well educated and certainly not well consented.”
This seems misleading. I’ll copy what someone else wrote on this:
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The characterization of Dr. He is, I believe, misleading.
HIV is still a top ten cause of death in many countries. Living with HIV is also has significant downsides.
He Jianku lived in a village 30% of whose people have HIV. He saw parents giving up their children to relatives outside the village to avoid infecting them.
He Jianku’s conference presentation has the ethical issues mixed throughout the interview and question and answer period starting at about 1 hour and 28 minutes of the video.
He claims a 0.5–2% risk of fathers infecting HIV-free children: a small open cut or sore of some while handling food, washing dishes or in any other way handling the child.
Babies could end up swallowing various things or licking surfaces. This is a valid concern for the family unless the children are made HIV immune because otherwise they would be living with the risk of valid risk of HIV infection.
He Jianku clearly believes he is helping the 30 families who were brought into the trial program.
He does believe that he is helping the couple who are the parents of these children. He has compassion for these people and their situation. There was a situation which was improved by making the children potentially HIV Immune.
The educated and informed parents made an informed decision to proceed with implanting the edited eggs versus untreated eggs. The parents had a passionate belief that their children would be better and safer with HIV-immunity and that they were avoiding non-trivial health risks.
I suspect that much our our outrage stems from the fact that a Chinese doctor performed the procedure first, and not a Westerner.
Might make for a good dystopic sci-fi novel!
One way to think on it is if the parents decide they are willing to spend $Xmn a year on their breeding program. They could get an estimate of how much costs are per year per child and then choose a number of children a year such that the total costs are below that every year over the path. This becomes like a child breeding pipeline, rather than doing them all in one shot. Having N a year is likely better than 10N in one year and stopping. Also, the parents would trade off how much they spend raising the kids with the consideration of how many they have. Raising kids with a high lifestyle would cost more, reducing the number of kids within the budget. So do they want to maximize the number of children and put them in a cheaply made dorm and send them to public school or do they want to maximize some objective that includes number of children and quality of their lives and have a giant house with a bunch of nannies looking after them and send them to private school or private tutors or something?
For a novel, you could introduce a main character who is a natural biological child of a rich person, the parents get divorced, and then the rich father wants to start a breeding program like this. This would likely mean that the main character’s inheritance is going to be wiped out as the father both spends money on the program and the inheritance is split more ways. Does the main character try to kill the father to stop it?
Government ends up housing millions in aquariums fulls of unwanted fetuses which are now viable outside the womb. The Matrix.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/a-law-to-protect-abortion-survivors-shouldnt-be-necessary-but-it-is/
Russel Moore of National Review introduces the Matrix.
Critics say that the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act is unnecessary. I wish that it were. While it’s hard to imagine many Americans opposing a bill that would ensure that medical provision was administered to a struggling newborn child, many in Washington would prefer that it never be mentioned, because it would protect infants born alive after an attempted abortion.
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The system allows a pregnant women to drop the little fellow into an aquarium at up to two months after gestation. We thus begin deploying massive aquariums. Soon after deployment, it becomes clear that costs remain low if the fetus remains in the aquarium, and the Matrix is born. Implant the USB chip in the brains of the little tykes and we all have programming jobs for life.
It’s not actually clear that this will be possible. There are problems with Cloning we haven’t solved. Telamere length, etc…. Problems with an artificial womb, tend to be things like there is a symphony of interaction between mother and child in terms of hormone signaling, I’m not sure we can actually do this artificially, without much more knowledge.
That being said I wouldn’t bet against IVF plus PGD with closer to 10-20 embryos, being the normal way wealthy people conceive. No tech breakthroughs needed, just being able to show a big enough benefit, and the benefit exists and is growing.
While a lot of this reality feels in our grasp, this sounds a lot driverless cars which felt closer 5 years ago or better yet traveling to Mars which felt a closer to us in 1979 than it does today. (I still believe driverless will come but it is 15 – 20 years away or so. I suspect it be like the internet that spends a couple decades feeling like the next big thing and suddenly in 1994, it was.)
And sure a billionaire can work to get thousands of babies born but even with reduced rates of today there are still 3.79M babies born in the US today. (And as other people have noted there has variations throughout history of a dominant male having hundreds of kids over the centuries.)
That said, I do have a son with their DNA completely sequenced to 100K degree and the reality is:
1) We are still really scratching the DNA sequencing and the more than analyze this, the less they feel like they know. (We were lectured several times that the results showed no evidence of DNA causing his autism today but they could find something in 10 years.)
2) To impact births to a large degree, they really have to know DNA sequencing a lot more.
I recall the anthropology professor in the Introduction to Anthropology course stating that when women figure out how to have babies without men, they will do so and men won’t be around anymore. His point was that women were the stronger sex.
Sounds like just the silly sort of thing an Anthropology professor might say. No technical advances would be needed to create a world with very few men OR one with very few women. A small number of men, obviously, could provide enough sperm for a large number of women — subject to keeping enough males around to preserve genetic diversity. But the same is true of women, though not to quite the same degree. The replacement birth rate per woman is a little over 2. But under ‘optimal’ conditions, human females can bear 10-20 children in a lifetime. So in a suitably grim dystopian scenario, you could reduce the male population by 95-99% or the female population by 80-90% and still maintain the population. Fortunately hardly anybody of either sex wants to do anything like this (though I suspect you would be most likely to find those few radicals who’d consider it teaching in universities).
Progressive silliness yes, but mostly because it fails to understand the paradox of sexual reproduction as described in Matt Ridley’s 1993 book The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature:
I think Ridley is only partly right, sexual specialization is also important. As a Utopian/Dystopian thought experiment, it might be useful to think through a human oxen scenario where males are castrated shortly after reaching puberty and depositing to a sperm bank.
“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.”
Consider Yitta Schwartz.
The line, “Her funeral services were exclusively restricted to just her children and their families, so only two thousand people showed up,” will make you do a double-take. She’s another order of magnitude above the double-take level though.
What would that number be expected to be for the typical South Korean of the same age but with today’s total fertility rate of only 1.1? Ten people? Five?
Some studies estimate that the Ashkenazi Jewish population of around 8 million people prior to WWII emerged with very little admixture from several incredible small groups emerging from “bottleneck” events, including one claiming a group of just 350 individuals only 600 years prior, so an expansion over 20,000 fold.
That’s the equivalent of being able to reconstitute the entire population of the United States in 600 years with just 15,000 people, or just a 0.004% survival rate.
You are correct that it is virtually impossible to anticipate the consequences of particular DNA sequences. That’s the problem, not the solution.
It doesn’t mean it won’t be attempted. It doesn’t mean someone won’t be able to do this at scale relatively easily. Someone sooner or later won’t wait for a generation or more to find out the consequences of such attempts.
Like almost everything in life, it will all be about the pace of change. There have always been social forces at play that affect genetic change. In the next hundred years, its just going to happen way too fast.
I’m not sure that you are wrong, Tom, but I certainly hope you are. Widespread and irreversible actions based on a false premise are bad enough without the terrifying prospect of unintended catastrophic consequences.
And suppose a billionaire wants to bring thousands of his babies into the world?
Lois McMaster Bujold covers a lot of these topics in her science fiction works, especially her Vorkosigan saga. I think this particular plot point happens in A Civil Campaign when one noble starts creating lots of daughters via uterine replicators in an effort to repopulate his district. The Emperor steps in and requires him to provide each of his daughters with a set dowry, which puts an end to that plan.
I think Bujold’s vision of how these reproductive technologies will be used and abused is pretty sensible, and is worth reading if you’re interested in this. It also helps that they’re excellent books, winning multiple Hugos and Nebulas.
So far, it seems far more likely that the problems we aren’t noticing with in vitro (basically because we aren’t allowed to look) would suddenly become too apparent to be avoided.