They shouldn't be banned, but regulators would regulate their own shadow if they could.
People are allowed to mutilate their babies, raise them in whatever destructive fashion they please, avoid vaccinating them in an environment where they will be exposed to deadly viruses.
But god forbid someone try to make their baby immune to AIDS, some other genetic disease, or reduce the likelihood of psychosis given family history.
There is no world in which regulators will let this happen. There is no way to test this in a manner that will satisfy them, because babies can't consent to a trial. If it was up to regulators, human evolution ends here. No group should have that power over our species.
It is the same problem as modern medicine being so prohibitively expensive to test, that most ideas go to the bin. We need a deregulated zone to allow for progress to actually happen.
Some things don’t need citation. Nuclear energy is a great example. You don’t need citations to explain why allowing every country to pursue it is a bad idea.
A huge chunk of the environmental disaster we are facing is because Europe and the US didn't go the nuclear route like France did in the 60. We could have had this crisis we're having now in a few hundred years instead.
> People aren’t allowed to mutilate babies what the hell are you going on about?
Circumcision is absolutely mutilation.
> Genetic tampering can lead to all kinds of unknowable nightmares.
You can "tamper with your kid's DNA" just by having kids with the wrong person and passing down a genetic disease.
There are plenty of unknowable things about life. You could die in a car crash. You certainly will die eventually.
Should we avoid taking risks entirely because they might result in bad outcomes? With this mindset, humanity would have never progressed. We would have never left our caves if we were paralyzed by our own fear.
Humanity is still early stage. We are not so different from those that once ventured out of their caves. To them, we owe everything. It is a disservice to all future humans that will ever live if we stop taking trajectory-changing bets because things could go wrong.
I agree on circumcision but you made it out that all kinds of mutilation are perfectly acceptable. But that one should definitely be banned, idk why (no -Jewish) Americans are so obsessed with it.
> There are plenty of unknowable things about life.
I agree but I know that I’m going to die someday.
As for where genetic engineering can lead I recommend the book “All Tomorrows”.
In any case i broadly agree with you - however there should still be guardrails and until we can safely and reliably manipulate the genetics of “less complex” animals we shouldn’t experiment with humans.
However you can probably do it if you really want! There are lots of countries that have less guardrails in place - but I would assume you don’t want to take the risk when it’s comes to your own life/offspring or am I wrong?
Take some trajectory-changing bets yourself and then I’ll believe that what you are saying is not just posturing
> I would assume you don’t want to take the risk when it’s comes to your own life/offspring or am I wrong?
I would, but that's mainly because of congenital psychosis that runs in my partner's family. Would gladly take the chance at editing that out of any embryo if there were targeted therapies.
If you know of any, please let me know - my understanding is that psychosis has not been isolated as well as Down's and blindness has, so you cannot genetically screen an embryo for it.
And just as a small aside, not really related to OPs points, I'd just like to point out that nature pretty consistently tampers with everyones kids DNA, which quite regularly leads to absolute nightmare fuel. Whatever those unknowable nightmares may be, they have to be pretty gruesome in order to compete.
People are allowed to mutilate their babies, raise them in whatever destructive fashion they please, avoid vaccinating them in an environment where they will be exposed to deadly viruses.
But god forbid someone try to make their baby immune to AIDS, some other genetic disease, or reduce the likelihood of psychosis given family history.
There is no world in which regulators will let this happen. There is no way to test this in a manner that will satisfy them, because babies can't consent to a trial. If it was up to regulators, human evolution ends here. No group should have that power over our species.
It is the same problem as modern medicine being so prohibitively expensive to test, that most ideas go to the bin. We need a deregulated zone to allow for progress to actually happen.