Designer Babies will be a Reality Soon

With the coming Biotech Age of humanity of which we are standing on the cusp of, the philosophical question of genetic modification of humans is suddenly a real question.  I am going to throw my two cents into the debate.  Patrick Cox has a fascinating article that raises scientific philosophical concerns.

I like the idea of genetic modification in humans, at least conceptually.

What, you say!?  Aren't you a devout Christian? 

Well, yes, I am, and there is nothing in the Bible about genetic modification, as much as I cannot find anything related to transgenderism either.  So, my judgments will be based on a scientifically informed Judeo-Christian viewpoint.

My first observation is that generational genetic changes are random.  Randomness is both good and bad, obviously.  Randomness is the source of creativity, among other intrinsically human things.  Designer babies mean limiting randomness to what we define as 'positive.'  Therein lies the rub.  What is actually positive both now and going into the future?  I am against genetically modified organism (GMO) food, because I believe it is having barely attributable, but distinct differences in our collective health, not all of which are positive.  I do not doubt humans view of what are 'positive' biological traits now, I doubt whether we will have the foresight as a species to avoid very decidedly bad aftereffects in the future.  Humans as a race are notoriously bad at predicting the future.  I am often no better --although I am often vindicated as time moves forward, sometimes to my great dismay-- but when you are dealing with revolutionary, civilization age-defining technologies a little self-doubt is a very healthy thing.

So, where is the balance?

Human genetics is random.

I think that pursuing genetic modifications to eliminate the decidedly negative things in genetics that we can see and know with fairly good certainty ahead of time is good.  Curing genetic diseases that cause death, good.  Preventing conditions that retard, incapacitate or otherwise, probably good.  Pursue an individual risk vs reward analysis.

Will this genetic disease kill this baby if left unaltered?  Yes?  Then fix it.
Will this genetic disease leave a baby retard or paralyzed?  If yes, then fix it.

Because even if we screw up their genetics in some initially imperceptible but hugely significant way, they were going to die or be physically or mentally retarded anyway, so the alternative was probably worse.

That is akin to trying to improve the average randomness like this.

You start small.  Watch these kids grow up, become productive adults.  Make sure we did not make some catastrophic error in genetics.  Wait 10-15 years and then try something more extreme.

Will this genetic modification make this person more resistant to common diseases? Yes?  Then do it.

 So, wait 10 to 15 years and see if these more extreme modifications don't result in any long term catastrophic consequences for these individuals.

By the time we have been doing genetic engineering of humans for fifteen years, hopefully fringe cases will pop up and the science will be fixed and tweaked to alleviate these cases before we engage in trying to actually positively modify our genetics.

So my thought is this.  Let's avoid the genetic enhancements and focus exclusively on curing diseases.  From that foundation we can begin enhancements that focus exclusively on reducing disease chances in the future.

If you start on enhancements and designer babies, you risk doing something very adverse inadvertently.  We want to take this genetic modifications thing slow to avoid the Asgard problem.

Jumping straight to designer babies is as likely to result in,

than in anything immensely positive to the human race as a whole.  Just ask the U.S. Federal Reserve about trying to control market prices...

So, caution is always good.  The only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.