Should we mix human and animal DNA?

boing
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Actually, thinking about it a bit more, the other – and given the state of the world, more obvious – concern would be the whole “What if something escapes from the lab?”

I’m not talking about Spider-Me ™ (or Fly-Me ™). Let’s assume, for the moment, that the result works out great for me personally. I can walk on the ceiling, etc. :wink: But now, I also am an incubator / carrier for a new spider-to-human / fly-to-human virus… Ruh-roh.

Or, like GMO corn from Monsanto, in some unintended and unpredicted way, the modification “escapes” the lab and starts affecting the non-consenting. (Unlikely, unless I’m engaging in a lot of unprotected sex, but still something to consider.)

All that said, I still vote “Yes” though. Just with a bit more caution.

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Is it OK to give your offspring enhanced vision by substituting an eagle’s eye DNA into the space where human eye DNA would normally go?

The main problem, assuming it actually worked and your child ended up with really good eyes instead of no eyes and awful facial tumors, would be the Red Queen’s Ratchet. Exactly how much of an advantage is really good eyesight? If enough people had eagle-eyes, would certain careers only be available to the eagle-eyed? If so, how much should we object to this?

Lots of people simply aren’t allowed to be a commercial airline pilot now by virtue of visual problems, hearing problems, balance problems, psychiatric disorders, epilepsy, heart disease, diabetes, or other things.

We can ask ourselves why we’re okay with people being excluded from some careers by virtue of genetic circumstance now, but if it were explicitly engineered we’d be bothered. The best reason would be one of distribution. That we’d get a genetic underclass. (You could potentially address this by having access be roughly universal and trying to arrange things so enhancements come out in ‘waves’ spaced such that people aren’t suddenly excluded from their careers during their working-lives.)

Is that child still human? Looks human, talks human, can probably even procreate like a human, but it’s got golden eyes that can see for miles. Should it have human rights?

Thinks like a human, so yes. I feel that if people’s definition of ‘human’ is bound up in someone’s genetic endowment, their eye-color, or variations in their visual acuity, then something has gone terribly wrong.

(Said the person with red eyes and horrible visual acuity.)

What do we do with the offspring if one is created despite the laws?

Treating people badly because of the acts of their parents or their genetics is, if I may use a bit of understatement, not a good thing to do.

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Most sci-fi cautionary tales about the dangers of mixing human and animal DNA are about the same level of thoughtful consideration as a story in which in vitro fertilization leads to a throng of savage monsters, half human and half glass, who go around eating people for no particularly good reason.

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Jennifer Lawrence Reaction GIF

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star trek spock GIF

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Eh? You need to up your sci-fi game. Take a few good novels, like these
Falling Free Lois McMaster Bujold
Dawn Octavia Butler
The Windup Girl Paolo Bacigalupi
Seveneves Neal Stephenson

Then add in the stupidity and hate we’ve seen on display in just the last two years with Qanon, anti-vaxxers, Terfs, the death cult of the GOP, white supremacist, etc. And that is just the US.

How can the idea of genetic engineering to combine human and non-human animal DNA not scare the shit out of you? We, as a species, cannot handle a pandemic, systemic racism, poverty, or even agree climate change is a thing. Mixing human and non-human DNA is a terrible idea

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Seveneves doesn’t really have much negative to say about genetic engineering. Having multiple human varieties is represented as pretty neutral. It’s more a cautionary tale against the dangers of Facebook.

The Windup Girl was a bit too laughably diabolus ex machina for me to take all that seriously. The most coherent ‘dangers of genetic engineering’ part was the Cheshires, where newly constructed animals have an ecological impact akin to invasive species in Australia. This is actually a reasonably good caution, though isn’t really relevant to questions like growing human-compatible organs inside nonhuman animals for transplant, or other scenarios likely within the next couple decades unless something really surprising happens. Windup Girl might work as a cautionary tale against capitalism, but it goes about it in such a ridiculous way it kind of undercuts itself.

We, as a species, cannot handle a pandemic, systemic racism, poverty, or even agree climate change is a thing.

That is an argument for “Humans are bad and should not have technology.” Unless you’re a Primitivist, it’s a bit arbitrary to apply it to genetics but not all the other stuff.

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When they talk about “wiping out a litany of debilitating diseases”, they typically don’t mean doing something to address the issues caused by the condition, they mean detecting the condition prenatally with the option of selective abortion, or else of engineering it out of the germ line.

When Autism Speaks (which is a hate group) devotes most of its resources (that are not devoted to its own aggrandisement) to genetic research, it is not to make the lives of autists better. It is not even to make the lives of the families of autistic people better. When Autism Speaks works to build a genetic database of autists, it is to achieve the goal of one of its predecessor organisations, Cure Autism Now: it wants to eliminate autism, and the only way it’s going to do that is by eliminating autists.

Genetic research is going to happen, and treatments for, even cures of some horrible and cruel diseases and conditions are possible. But I am somewhat ambivalent about it when some of the most intense research going on is towards the goal of making sure people like me don’t exist.

And we, autists, know it. So when anyone tries to build a DNA database of autistic people, they’d better have some damned good answers to the inevitable questions about whether it’s for eugenicsing us away.

“You see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense — they have hair, a nose and a mouth — but they are not people in the psychological sense. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person.”

— O. Ivar Lovaas, in interview, 1974.

There are people out there who think that people like me don’t think like a person, therefore we’re not people. We’re just person-shaped.

This discussion is not purely academic, much as we’d all like it to be nothing more than an interesting philosophical conundrum to drive a science fiction novel.

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I, for one, welcome our new overlords…

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I think it has already happened. I’m fairly certain that I’m at least 1/4 hairy-nosed wombat…

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You want ManBearPig? Cause that’s how you get ManBearPig!

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Do you poop cubes? That’s the give away

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Dodecahedron. But I am trying…

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  • Train an AI with a database of all DNA sequences found in vatied lifeforms, sorted as you wish. Tell AI to design an optimal lifeform. Stand back.

  • I really expect that before long, humans will be able to choose their race, gender, and even species. Don’t just wear eagle-eyes – become an eagle. Supporting your old human consciousness in a bird-size brain may be tough, alas. So, learn to enjoy carrion.

  • When animal-grown humanoid organs (priced high, of course) are shown to extend life, expect the ultra-rich to seek transplants. That’s better than having to deal with organ-leggers.

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Remember, genes are NOT blueprints. This means you can’t, for example, insert “the genes for an elephant’s trunk” into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There -are- no genes for trunks. What you CAN do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals.
– Academician Prokhor Zakharov, Nonlinear Genetics

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That kind of implies your grandmother was a “wombat enthusiast”. You sure you want say that kind of stuff in public? :smile:

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