For good or ill, eugenics is back

I predict that this will provoke a lot of responses. When it was done to avoid a child being born with a hereditary disabling condition - OK. But red hair? an aversion to work? Being a girl rather than a boy? A dislike of a certain part of the political spectrum?

What effect could narrowing the gene pool have on future generations? Gender imbalance in a community? The loss of a gene with good as well as bad effects? The rise of a class of "superhumans" who take control over the "unimproved"?

Brave New World?

What kind of screening is done for red hair? Red hair runs in both sides of my son's family, although he himself, his father and I have brown hair. He has a high chance of carrying a recessive gene for red hair. If I were running a sperm donor service, I could state with a degree of confidence that any offspring of his would stand a higher chance than average of having red hair. That would be screening, but it wouldn't have anything to do with gene editing.

Approval for a specific gene editing project was given in the UK at the end of January www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/01/human-embryo-genetic-modify-regulator-green-light-research

The Spectator article is sloppy, sensationalist journalism.

Hmm so who gets to decide? Many exceptional people over the millennia have been 'different' either from birth or due to genetic diseases that have appeared later in life. Its societies attitude to those conditions that need to change not the conditions themselves. If we can stop or reverse an illness/condition then that is a positive result but to 'remove' the person is not an option.
Times change and today people are recognising that conditions such as Asperger's or Autism should be viewed as a brain that is 'differently wired' and may have much to offer us all and not as just a problem that needs to be overcome.

It is a very complex issue and I find myself quite challenged by it. On the one hand, I feel it is a good thing that there is screening for things like Downs, cystic fibrosis, etc., to enable parents to decide whether they wish to, or feel equipped to, deal with the challenges involved. I can see, though, those who decide not to screen or to go ahead with pregnancies that indicate conditions such as Downs can so easily be labelled as "irresponsible". That is what I find worrying.

It is difficult to know at what point our interference with nature becomes undesirable or damaging. Many of the things we do could be interpreted as "meddling" but most people agree with surgical and drug interventions instead of just letting nature take its course.

My understanding is that intelligence is thought by many neuroscientists to be largely heritable but that extremely intelligent people do not continue to produce children who are even more intelligent than themselves. I believe there is what is called a "return to the mean" - so that at some point super-intelligent people start to produce less intelligent children until they return to a point of average intelligence. (I may be wrong - I think I read something like this when I was studying psychology but that was some time ago and things might have moved on since then). And there have been many examples of parents with average IQs producing children who are described as "geniuses".

I would be very concerned about screening for traits such as, "criminality", alcoholism, "employment resistance", etc. - and I can't understand how Perkins from King's College can estimate the figure of 94,040 "extra" people having been "created by the welfare state" due to a rise in welfare spending. Also how is criminal behaviour defined? I happen to think that some very undesirable behaviour - greed, lying for one's own benefit, etc. - would not necessarily be seen as "criminal" whereas stealing to feed one's own or others' children would be.

Isn't there a danger of creating a conveyer belt of characterless human beings - a bit like those people who have extensive plastic surgery and end up with the same bland, slightly wierd appearances? I think that creativity, innovation and discovery in the arts and sciences is often driven by intellectual, emotional and physical challenges and that it is also an important part of being human to accept difference and to behave with compassion. To "iron out" all the differences between people would lead to a sort of blank mediocrity. We might then just as well be robots.

I don't know how Perkins estimated that either. It sounds like scare-mongering to me. It seems Perkins has inherited some of the old eugenist ideas. I'd be interested in knowing more about his methods.

Hilda, In the UK the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) gets to decide and grants licences for specific research.

Gross idea. Cant see it getting very far for now though.

There's always a risk of letting the genie out of the bottle with any new knowledge, but you're not going to prevent eugenics by banning gene research any more than Roosevelt could have prevented nuclear war by ignoring Einstein's letter. If you ban your scientists from following up their ideas with research, you just leave yourself vulnerable to any enemy who gives his own scientists free reign.