Dunno. It seems it became a non-problem, cheap pills, and even them almost unnecessary with a decent fresh diet. My gut instinct would be to fix only those problems that don’t have such easy convenient external solutions. For example I would not want to be able to run 30 km/h for two hours so that I can save the cost of bicycle. I don’t have very rational arguments for it, just the basic instict to conserve as much about our humanity as we know it as we can unless the cost is too high. Getting vitamin pills / eating fresh food or buying a bike is not a too high cost. Perhaps it can be justified on the basis of not trading something that works without side effects for something that may have them.
Our ancestors did produce their own vitamin C. But there are a bunch of deletions in our copy of the gene so it doesn’t work anymore. Fixing it up wouldn’t mean to move that far away from what it means to be humans.
Also if we decide that we don’t need the gene, why not get rid of it completely? Why carry around a broken vitamin C gene? It seems stupid from a design perspective.
Vitamin C is just one example that’s nice, because it’s an ability that we lost in evolution but there are many small issues. For a lot of enzymes different species have an enzyme that serves the same function. Some of them however have better enzymes that work more efficiently. Yeast has had a lot more evolutionary cycles then us and might be simply better at a lot of housekeeping genes.
For every gene we could search for the best one that’s out there and exchange the human version with it.
Of course we will first do it on pigs that we want to eat. But if the pigs are much better when you gave them the best version of every housekeeping gene that’s out there, some humans will also want to have the best ones.
I don’t have very rational arguments for it, just the basic instict to conserve as much about our humanity as we know it as we can unless the cost is too high.
Then it sounds like you don’t really want designer babies.
There’s no 30 km/h running gene that you could possibly put somewhere. To get that outcome you would need to modify a bunch of genes and as a result have more fit people.
It’s contextual but that doesn’t mean that “best” doesn’t exist.
At the beginning it’s unlikely to be tried on humans, but when it comes to farm animals I would expect that people do experiment with it. Maybe a pig with yeast mitrochondria does better than a regular pig because the yeast mitrochondria had more time to be highly optimized by evolution. It might be that you need to do a few additional changes to have the pig deal with the yeast mitochondria, but people will experiment.
If you get an enzyme that’s twice as efficient in catalyzing some reaction, you have to down regulate it’s expression.
Dunno. It seems it became a non-problem, cheap pills, and even them almost unnecessary with a decent fresh diet. My gut instinct would be to fix only those problems that don’t have such easy convenient external solutions. For example I would not want to be able to run 30 km/h for two hours so that I can save the cost of bicycle. I don’t have very rational arguments for it, just the basic instict to conserve as much about our humanity as we know it as we can unless the cost is too high. Getting vitamin pills / eating fresh food or buying a bike is not a too high cost. Perhaps it can be justified on the basis of not trading something that works without side effects for something that may have them.
Our ancestors did produce their own vitamin C. But there are a bunch of deletions in our copy of the gene so it doesn’t work anymore. Fixing it up wouldn’t mean to move that far away from what it means to be humans.
Also if we decide that we don’t need the gene, why not get rid of it completely? Why carry around a broken vitamin C gene? It seems stupid from a design perspective.
Vitamin C is just one example that’s nice, because it’s an ability that we lost in evolution but there are many small issues. For a lot of enzymes different species have an enzyme that serves the same function. Some of them however have better enzymes that work more efficiently. Yeast has had a lot more evolutionary cycles then us and might be simply better at a lot of housekeeping genes. For every gene we could search for the best one that’s out there and exchange the human version with it.
Of course we will first do it on pigs that we want to eat. But if the pigs are much better when you gave them the best version of every housekeeping gene that’s out there, some humans will also want to have the best ones.
Then it sounds like you don’t really want designer babies.
There’s no 30 km/h running gene that you could possibly put somewhere. To get that outcome you would need to modify a bunch of genes and as a result have more fit people.
This would be an extraordinarily bad idea especially from yeast in particular. ‘Best’ is contextual.
It’s contextual but that doesn’t mean that “best” doesn’t exist.
At the beginning it’s unlikely to be tried on humans, but when it comes to farm animals I would expect that people do experiment with it. Maybe a pig with yeast mitrochondria does better than a regular pig because the yeast mitrochondria had more time to be highly optimized by evolution. It might be that you need to do a few additional changes to have the pig deal with the yeast mitochondria, but people will experiment.
If you get an enzyme that’s twice as efficient in catalyzing some reaction, you have to down regulate it’s expression.