Ethics of CRISPR

Two questions for the genetic engineers -
What is the most unethical thing you can do with CRISPR Cas9?
Is this tech as powerful as the "science" media is claiming it is?

heres food for thought

its hard to do unethical things
they take a lot of money
they take a lot of time
they take a lot of dedication

So unless there is huge monetary/military/power incentive behind a goal, it aint gonna happen

My question is purely theoretical. I'm just curious what this tech is capable of.

it is powerful, technically (and extremely simplified) you can edit genes, create diseases, destroy them

You can't do anything new, it's just super fucking convenient.
Before you had very little choice of where to cut DNA, but you could still cut it and put whatever you want in there. So CRISPR/Cas9 just allows you to do what you can already do way more easily.

If you want to know what unethical shit you can do with genetic engineering then you could just waste a ton of time engineering mice that are extremely good at getting cancer and watch them grow huge tumors?

>its purely theoretical

heres something even more theoretical
all the answers to any possible question in the universe is just a special arrangement of 26 different squiggles on a piece of paper

>the "science" media

When mainstream media talk about science, it's bullshit. No exception.

Could you create an army of 20 foot tall gorillas that have highly elevated testosterone levels?

You obviously don't know what the fuck you are talking about.
Everytime you are doing research on human you have to deal with a myriad of rules law and regulation, specially in the US.

Im talking about "unethical" as in lets create super ninja mutant robots

and not, "hey lets take advantage of social-economic underprivileged people"

In which case, CRISPR doesnt really play a role in anyways and its more human nature

No, 20 foot tall is too much for today's oxygen levels, and its joints would be completely fucked.
Elevated testosterone levels is easy though. Just put a viral promoter in front of testosterone regulators. If you're lucky homeostasis will keep the testosterone levels in check long enough for it to develop properly, and lose the battle during prime gorilla life.

>Ethics
stopped reading there

also fuck off

>My question is purely theoretical
My question is purely theoretical. I'm just wondering why modern philosophers are trying to make themselves relevant by any means.

You can make almonds or apples that have harmful levels of cyanide in them, or pears with harmful levels of formaldehyde.

Therefore the technology itself is unethical according to envirotards, regardless of how many lives could be saved or improved by what companies actually want to use the technology for.

This even though you could do that before CRISPR/Cas9
You can also try making it cause testosterone knock-outs, engineer that into a reverse DNA virus like HIV or herpes, let that shit loose.
Obviously there's no evolutionary incentive for it to stay in these genomes but you could probably ruin a few men that way.

OP is either:

1. A socialist who is bitter about the fact that capitalism is going to end world hunger forever.

2. A /pol/ type who (incorrectly) thinks that starvation in the 3rd world is good in order to control the population (the reality is that birth rates fall only when people have enough food).

3. A Trump voter who believes literally any conspiracy theory and documentary that he is exposed to.

Could you use it to insert telemorase coding for biological immortality?

Everything in crispr is natural there are already ethics in research

I would use it to insert my penis in a catgirl desu

>Literally asking to deregulate telomerases
Kek, enjoy your cancer.

OP here. I'm none of those things. Literally just curious of what this shit is capable of. Usually the limits of a technology dip into what most scientists would consider unethical.
It says more about you that you would assume my original question is political in nature.

>parents paying doctors thousands of dollars to use CRISPR to make their sons 6'4 and have 8" dicks, blond hair+blue eyes, tom cruise-esque face, and super intelligence
>parents could pay someone to give their daughter godly looks, enormous titties, etc

I can't tell if this is unethical or not tbqh

You could do it in cycles, when your body starts degrading, deregulate, when you're back to youth, allow degradation

So you're an actual retard who think that plants have moral standing? Wow, Veeky Forums never ceases to amaze.

CRISPR is fucking dope, the shit is effective as fuck, and it's spreading over the world

As for ethics, eh, they're hardly different. CRISPR isn't strictly anything new, it's just letting making gene editing easier, so the same ethical issues still apply.

Big shouting about editing human embryos, which the chinese have been getting up too on non-functional embros, exciting shit

Pic is a map of where the first gene-edited baby, the biggest issue in G-Eng IMO, will be born. My bet is on Argentina or somewhere similar, which is developed enough to pull it off but not policed enough to stop it.

TL;DR
most unethical? - see any school bio txtbook
Is powerful? - yes

>Im talking about "unethical" as in lets create super ninja mutant robots
I know Veeky Forums isn't exactly an elite invitation-only science conference, but when somebody says "unethical", it's sad that's where your head goes, and pathetic that you think other people are going to understand that without you explaining it.

I don't understand how he thought we'd understand that after he explained it. Pretty sure this dip is lost.

Genetic engineering could lead to robots, which is unethical. How is this hard to understand?

>super ninja mutant robots
>super ninja
>implying ninja aren't by definition super.

CRISPR-based gene editing is a long way from perfect. They're just now getting the hang of doing some single-nucleotide replacements without causing random DNA damage all over the place.

So the most unethical thing you can do with CRISPR right now is pretty much anything in a living human who's not certainly going to die without it.

What the fuck are you talking about?

He's trolling you, and you keep taking the bait.

>"unethical" as in lets create super ninja mutant robots
I see you there, Professor of Genetics

>birth rates fall only when people have enough food

Why? I'm genuinely curious as to why this is. Any evidence for this?

More kids means more workers and more likelihood you've bread one resilient enough to survive the shitty living conditions (and usually malaria)

On low food availablity infant mortality is high then birth rate will be high to compensate. If you increase food availability birth rate will still be high but infant mortality will decrease. At least at the start?? Which would lead to an initial population boom?

It's total bullshit. In the past, the population was largely limited by the food supply. Starvation isn't much of an issue in the modern world, except when order has broken down so severely that food aid can't get to people. People don't stop having kids when they have enough food.

Increase of wealth is associated with reduction of fertility in the modern world, but it's not entirely clear which way the arrow of causality points. Obviously, something new is going on, since prosperity and fertility used to go hand in hand.

Wealthy countries are generally orderly ones with lots of people who are not stupid, value education, have some self control, and value respectability. They've pretty much all got high availability of birth control and information on its effective use, open or illicit availability of abortions, high cost of living, intense pressure to continue education well into the fertile years of adulthood, gender equality, rules against child labor, expensive standards of adequate childcare, ubiquitous advertising pushing constantly-available-but-costly goods and services as status symbols, lots of credit and debt, and highly urbanized populations.

Historically, cities have been population sinks, while most population renewal and growth came from the countryside, where food and living space were in surplus, people had the ability to directly produce the necessities of life with little reliance on trade, and there were lots of chores children could help with.

It's not at all clear that giving poor people more money or letting them into first world countries will reduce their fertility. It is perfectly clear that people who starve to death don't have any more children after that.

It's usually less about food and more about medicine, infrastructure, but yeah that's some basic shit.
Didn't they teach you about demographic transitions in school?