Good point, I didn’t address this at all in the post. Germline editing is indeed outside the current Overton window. One thing I’m curious about is whether there are any shreds of hope that we might be able to accelerate any of the relevant technical research: one thing this implies is not specifically focusing on the use case of enhancement, to avoid attracting condemnation (which would risk slowing existing research due to e.g. new regulations being levied).
For some techniques this seems harder than for others: iterated embryo selection is pretty clearly meant for enhancement (which could also mean animal enhancement, i.e. efficient livestock breeding). The Cas9 stuff has lots of potential uses, so it’s currently being heavily pursued despite norms. There’s also lots of ongoing work on the synthesis of simple genomes (e.g. for bacteria), with manycompaniesofferingsynthesisservices. Of course, the problems I identified as likely being on the critical path to creating modal human genomes are pretty enhancement specific (again, the only other application that comes to mind is making better livestock) which is unfortunate, given the massive (and quick!) upside of this approach if you can get it to work.
Good point, I didn’t address this at all in the post. Germline editing is indeed outside the current Overton window. One thing I’m curious about is whether there are any shreds of hope that we might be able to accelerate any of the relevant technical research: one thing this implies is not specifically focusing on the use case of enhancement, to avoid attracting condemnation (which would risk slowing existing research due to e.g. new regulations being levied).
For some techniques this seems harder than for others: iterated embryo selection is pretty clearly meant for enhancement (which could also mean animal enhancement, i.e. efficient livestock breeding). The Cas9 stuff has lots of potential uses, so it’s currently being heavily pursued despite norms. There’s also lots of ongoing work on the synthesis of simple genomes (e.g. for bacteria), with many companies offering synthesis services. Of course, the problems I identified as likely being on the critical path to creating modal human genomes are pretty enhancement specific (again, the only other application that comes to mind is making better livestock) which is unfortunate, given the massive (and quick!) upside of this approach if you can get it to work.