It’s already happening. •The cost of a full genome analysis is moving towards negligibility. It may take five years to get there. It may take ten. Everyone in the world wanting access to modern personalized medicine will need to have their genome sequenced as the foundation for their lifetime of healthcare. The genomic readings will tell us more and more about us, a process that will continue ad infinitum. Genetics are not the sole determinant of our identities and capabilities, but they are irrefutably central. •All fetuses (with the possible exception of the extremely poor and religious zealots) will be screened genetically as early as in their third day during the in vitro process and a little later for the increasingly smaller percentage of those to be born through what we today consider the “natural” process. As more parents choose to have children through IVF and screen their multiple embryos through Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) to decide which embryos should be implanted in the mother or surrogate, people will decide to not implant embryos carrying genetic diseases, high probabilities for undesirable futures involving Parkinsons and Alzheimer’s, etc. When the same genetic screens can give probabilistic predictions of intelligence, strength, charisma, and other desirable traits, people will choose them. At this stage, already in its infancy today, parents will be choosing from among their own “natural” embryos, bringing a level of consciousness to the far more random traditional process. Although we as humans are designed to love our children however they are, most parents, when given a choice and believe it is safe, will choose to screen out genetic disorders and screen in “natural” desirable traits. At this point, health providers, whether insurance companies or states, will insist on such screening because the cost to the insurance company or state to provide this service will be far less than the cost of providing a lifetime of care to the children born with what will be seen increasingly as avoidable genetic disorders resulting directly from non-screening. •The next stage will likely be the expansion of the “natural” choice process. John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka received the 2012 Nobel for discovering how to reprogram mature cells into Induced Pluripotent Stem (IPS) cells. While calling male sperm a dime a dozen in an insult to FDR (hundreds of millions of sperm cells are in each ejaculation), eggs are traditionally far more difficult to extract. The IPS process has the potential, at some point in the future to transform an easily extractable and essentially unlimited cell, say a skin cell, into a stem cell. We’ll then be able to grow this stem cell into an egg cell and then into an egg. Again, this will be a “natural” egg for the mother, very likely indistinguishable from any other egg she could have inside her body, but it will be available outside of her body and in unlimited quantities. Instead of considering twenty embryos in the PGD process, parents will be able to choose from among thousands if they wish and can afford it. Some parents may opt out but the offspring of those who opt in will likely have, on average, significant advantages over their peers not born through this process. •A next (or even possibly concurrent) stage will be to use the recombinant DNA techniques already engaged successfully in plants and animals to alter the genetics of fetal cells. DNA fragments in a single cell would be spliced and replaces with gene markers from other humans, from animals, or created synthetically. (To see how far we have come in gene splicing, see this recent NPR story on the CRISPR process.) If, for example, two parents were dominant carriers of harmful mutations that showed up in all of their preimplantation embryos, the marker for this mutation could be replaced by genetic markers taken from somebody else’s genome. It will then only likely be a matter of time before people start adding extra capabilities to our genes from the animal world. Like AquAdvantage salmon in which a small number of genetic constructs are transferred from one salmon breed to another to speed growth, some humans will acquire small genetic constructs that will give them the vision of eagles or the hearing of dogs. Next will come synthetically created gene constructs that will accomplish the same purpose with greater predictability and scalability.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 22:33:10 +0000
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