By Jamie Metzl
The lecturer feels we are coming to the moment where humans turn the evolutionary corner and begin directing their own evolutionary path - biology is being turned into Information Technology.
Take a baby from 1000 years in the past and bring it to today, it would be indistinguishable from a modern day baby; but take a baby from 1000 years in the future and bring it to today, it would grow up to be a super human being with built in immunities and genetic capabilities that may not even exist today in any species.
The technologies that are required to bring us to this level of enhancements exist today:
IVF and Genetic screening: PGD/PGS is a process of screening fertilized eggs prior to reinsertion. On day 5 after fertilization you can take 2 cells from each egg and sequence it for single gene diseases, skin color, eye color and hair color. With time, more data will be available as genome sequencing gets cheaper and more features will be available to screen for: height, intelligence, etc. Research indicates that between 50-80% of people's traits can be attributed to genetics, and all of those will eventually be screenable. One side effect of such screening ability will be the reduction of sex for procreation - as compared to screening capabilities of IVF, procreation by sex is just rolling the dice with your child's future.
Creating stem cells out of adult cells: there is already first success in taking regular adult cells (such as blood cells) and converting them into stem cells, from which you can make any type of cell. So it will eventually be possible to take 1000 blood cells, convert them into stem cells, and convert those into egg cells, which can be fertilized. If today a doctor can withdraw ~10 eggs from a woman, this technique will allow increasing the number of fertilized eggs by two orders of magnitude, therefore allowing for much better screening and a higher range of options to chose from than is possible today.
CRISPR: while embrio selection will be more important for accelerated evolution than CRISPR, CRISPR, the technology that allows editing the human genome can still be used to edit non-viable embrios. The first application on humans - fixing the anomaly that causes sickle cell disease - will be available in a few years.
Beyond enhancements in procreation, there will be a strong medical impact to genetic sequencing: the foundation for medical treatment will be your personal sequenced genome.
Once the door is opened to these types of capabilities, additional pressures will come in to play, such as cultural pressures and competitive pressures between countries. Some cultures are more open to these types of changes than others - Chinese culture, for example. There will also be financial impact - insurance companies will want to eliminate diseases that cost them a lot of money to treat, so they will apply their own pressure in this field.
Ethics problems will also appear, as the science in this topic moves exponentially fast, while regulation moves very slowly. In addition, on the popular level, people don't understand genetic manipulation and are inherently fearful of it. For example, genetically modified crops, which were designed to bring substantial value to people, received a very negative reaction against them, primarily based on fear (as per the lecturer).
Another concern as we advance in research of genetic features is the possible making of bad inferences or links between genetic data and traits or race.
Will we be creating two classes of citizens - those who can afford and have access to these types of biological enhancements, and those who don't (such as displayed in the movie Gattica)? Possibly, but that's not something that's different than today - even today we have people who have access to better resources than others, without genetic enhancements; so whatever we do to address current inequality can be used to address that as well.
What is the impact on life expectancy? There's no inevitability to a particular lifespan; it should be hackable as well. The lecturer posits that the first person to live to be 150 is already alive today.
No comments:
Post a Comment