Unfortunately, the kind of ethics we would need --- the kind that entails treating human life per se as something sacred --- is something almost no society is willing to adopt.
This could be the end of us, but most of "us" will not realize it until the dehumanization process is too advanced to be stopped.
Docs also want ‘subhuman’ test cells that they can experiment on and since it “isn’t human” it must be okay
I think I now know why we have not discovered intelligent life in the universe.
Life grows until it becomes so intelligent that it destroys itself!
Humans have gone from the invention of radio to manipulating genes in just 100 years!
If it can be done, it will be done.
Meliorare society, here we come...
From “Jurrasic Park,” but apropos for this topic:
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Don’t you see the danger, John, inherent in what you’re doing here? Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet’s ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that’s found his dad’s gun.
Donald Gennaro: It’s hardly appropriate to start hurling generalizations...
Dr. Ian Malcolm: If I may... Um, I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here, it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now
[bangs on the table]
Dr. Ian Malcolm: you’re selling it, you wanna sell it. Well...
John Hammond: I don’t think you’re giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody’s ever done before...
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.
“Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced in November the births of the first genetically edited children”
I don’t believe it.
He provided zero documentation.
There’s been a lot of fake claims along these lines from East Asia.
Never going to happen.
Eventually we were destined to have widespread health problems from things like antibiotic resistance, and genes that nature intended should kill you before you could reproduce (like blue baby syndrome) but medical science saved you, and your defective genes along with you.
Gene editing saves us from ourselves.
“You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.”