Would you pay to give your child a genetic advantage, to make them smarter than their peers, taller, or more beautiful? This is a question that will become relevant within a few decades — if not sooner.
Gene sequencing will cost only a couple of dollars per human. A new generation of genetic editing tools, most notably CRISPR, have made it ridiculously easy to edit the human genome. Rapid advances in computing power will make it easier to understand the minute interplays between the dozens — if not hundreds — of genes that impact complex but valuable characteristics such as intelligence and patience. And, frankly, as artificial intelligence lets machines take on more and more complicated human tasks, we humans may need a genetic boost.
Unfortunately, the rich will likely be able to buy access to better genetics sooner than the rest of us — unless society intervenes. Do we really want a world where money can buy genetic superiority?
Granted, genetic manipulation has been a dream for decades. Here’s what is different now.
To start with, the cost of sequencing and mapping genes has plummeted. The initial Human Genome Project cost over $1 billion. It is presently below $1,000 for a human genome to be sequenced and should fall below $100 over the next few years. That cost will continue to drop rapidly. Within five years, having your genes sequenced will cost less than a fancy cup of coffee.
Also importantly, the available computing power to analyze these sequences has never been greater. The rise of cloud computing, pioneered by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, and increases in processing power have made it possible to build on-demand analytics systems that researchers can use to unravel the minute interactions of genes. In other words, they have access to supercomputing power but at a fraction of the cost of building a supercomputer — and without all the wires, cables, real estate, and technicians required.
The real breakthrough and missing piece, however, is CRISPR. The acronym is short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. CRISPR is actually an ancient self-defense mechanism of bacteria that modern scientists repurposed for laser-targeted gene editing. It is not a huge overstatement to say that CRISPR has made genetic manipulation a backyard hobby. In fact, DIY geneticists are using CRISPR to modify the genes of pure-bred dogs to try to improve their health. And a DIY CRISPR kit called the Odin is on sale online. In the very near future, CRISPR editing will be akin to cutting and pasting characters in a Microsoft Word document.
Combined, these three changes have ushered in an entirely new era of genomics, one where we move from traditional empiricism — informed guesswork, really — to engineered systems where design is intentional and the workings of genes are understood and known.
The initial stage of this will be ability to handicap the likelihood of which embryo will have which traits. Called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), this technique is practiced today to help couples identify embryos that might have high risks of major genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs disease. In the next few years, parents with access to cash will also be to use this technique to more accurately analyze the pluses and minuses of multiple embryos and select the one that has the best combination of probabilities for in vitro fertilization (IVF). PGD remains expensive and inaccurate, but it will become a more attractive option as it improves. Insurance companies at present don’t cover PGD or genetic improvement, only for disease prevention. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
In addition, ongoing improvements in computing power should help scientists better understand the complex interplay of genes. Determining the relationship of genetic makeup to traits like intelligence is a math problem that will probably never have an exact answer, but can be improved to provide more accurate probabilities. The impending arrival of powerful Quantum Computers could turbocharge this process by giving scientists new ways to analyze and simulate complex biological systems. That might make actual gene editing of humans or embryos viable and perhaps more economical than PGD.
CRISPR remains an experimental technique with many questions about the long-term safety of its editing process. Scientists and doctors fear that CRISPR may inadvertently impact non-target genes with unintended consequences. That said, scientists are growing more and more comfortable using CRISPR. Initially, a consensus of scientists advocated banning CRISPR editing on human embryos, even if they were not viable and would never become babies. Today, a growing number of research teams are testing how to use CRISPR more effectively on human embryos.
The initial goal is to modify single genes that cause serious illnesses. In these cases, fixing the mutant form of the gene will cure or reduce the impact of the illness. However, single-gene modification is just the start; many diseases result from the interplay of multiple genes.
For today, PGD carries no obvious risk because no modification of genetic matter occurs. Rather, the parents will be able to pick an embryo with a higher probability, based on the best research, of exhibiting desirable traits. This is less precise than CRISPR but could significantly increase chances of babies having desired traits. But PGD costs a lot of money. So will early stage gene editing of human embryos with CRISPR, albeit not for the tech as for the expertise and the service.
This all prompts challenging ethical questions. To date, many national governments have banned gene editing of live human embryos. Governments have also outlawed editing genes of the human germline — the genes we pass on to our children -— to carry advantageous traits such as height or intelligence.
IVF combined with PGD, or well-tuned CRISPR interventions, could become a highly-sought pre-birth treatment for wealthy folks seeking a leg up for their unborn offspring. This might further exacerbate the already documented trend of increased assortative mating — where people of like backgrounds and positions tend to marry each other. Assortative mating further concentrates wealth or other benefits further in a society, augmenting inequality. Genetics are not destiny but they do help; every extra point of IQ is associated with X dollars more in salary.
Individual rights advocates argue that the government should not possess the right to legislate how parents handle their children’s DNA. In their view, as long as these enhancements are safe and parents understand the risks, then the government should not regulate CRISPR editing on embryos any more than it should regulate whether the rich pay for pricey personal trainers to improve their physiques or expensive science and math tutors to improve chances that their children are accepted into Ivy League schools.
There is one key distinction in those analogies. Unlike personal trainers or tutors, genetic enhancements to embryos will confer benefits transferred from generation to generation. Over time, allowing subsequent generations to choose to gift their offspring with valuable traits via either CRISPR or PGD might generate even more inequality — driven by biology. Given the high current level of global inequality, selective biology generating more inequality will have strong political implications on fairness and the very foundational concept of modern democracy — that all humans are created equal.
While genetic manipulation to save lives makes perfect sense, the process shouldn’t be used to merely improve the chances of success of those already born with inherited socio-economic advantages. Designer babies must only be available if all in society can share the benefits. Equality of opportunity must extend to the realm of genetics and biology.
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Vivek Wadhwa is a distinguished fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering. He is a globally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post and the co-author of The Driver in the Driverless Car. You can follow him on Twitter @wadhwa.
Alex Salkever is the co-author of The Driver In The Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Can Change the Future. You can follow him on Twitter @AlexSalkever.
Winter in the Ural Mountains
In February 1959, a group of nine hikers crossed through Russia's Ural Mountains as part of a skiing expedition. The experienced trekkers, all employed at the Ural Polytechnical Institute, were led by Igor Dyatlov. On the evening of February 1, all nine appear to have fled their tents into the Arctic temperatures, for which they were unprepared. None survived.
Six of the members died of hypothermia; three suffered from physical trauma. Some members were missing body parts—a tongue here, a few eyes there, a pair of eyebrows for good measure. According to reports, no hiker appears to have struggled or panicked. They were likely too quickly overtaken by the hostile environment in Western Russia.
All the members were young, mostly in their early twenties; one member, Semyon Zolotaryov, was 38. Good health didn't matter. Given the uncertain circumstances—what made them flee into the bitter cold?—the incident known as Dyatlov Pass has long been the type of Area 51-conspiracy theory that some people love to speculate about. A vicious animal attack? Infrasound-induced panic? Was the Soviet military involved? Maybe it was the katabatic winds that did them in. Local tribesmen might not have liked the intrusion.
Or perhaps it was aliens. Or a Yeti. Have we talked about Yeti aliens yet?
These theories and more have been floated for decades.
a: Last picture of the Dyatlov group taken before sunset, while making a cut in the slope to install the tent. b: Broken tent covered with snow as it was found during the search 26 days after the event.
Photographs courtesy of the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation.
Finally, a new study, published in the Nature journal Communications Earth & Environment, has put the case to rest: it was a slab avalanche.
This theory isn't exactly new either. Researchers have long been skeptical about the avalanche notion, however, due to the grade of the hill. Slab avalanches don't need a steep slope to get started. Crown or flank fractures can quickly release as little as a few centimeters of earth (or snow) sliding down a hill (or mountain).
As researchers Johan Gaume (Switzerland's WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF) and Alexander Puzrin (Switzerland's Institute for Geotechnical Engineering) write, it was "a combination of irregular topography, a cut made in the slope to install the tent and the subsequent deposition of snow induced by strong katabatic winds contributed after a suitable time to the slab release, which caused severe non-fatal injuries, in agreement with the autopsy results."
Conspiracy theories abound when evidence is lacking. Twenty-six days after the incident, a team showed up to investigate. They didn't find any obvious sounds of an avalanche; the slope angle was below 30 degrees, ruling out (to them) the possibility of a landslide. Plus, the head injuries suffered were not typical of avalanche victims. Inject doubt and crazy theories will flourish.
Configuration of the Dyatlov tent installed on a flat surface after making a cut in the slope below a small shoulder. Snow deposition above the tent is due to wind transport of snow (with deposition flux Q).
Photo courtesy of Communications Earth & Environment.
Add to this Russian leadership's longstanding battle with (or against) the truth. In 2015 the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation decided to reopen this case. Four years later the agency concluded it was indeed a snow avalanche—an assertion immediately challenged within the Russian Federation. The oppositional agency eventually agreed as well. The problem was neither really provided conclusive scientific evidence.
Gaume and Puzrin went to work. They provided four critical factors that confirmed the avalanche:
- The location of the tent under a shoulder in a locally steeper slope to protect them from the wind
- A buried weak snow layer parallel to the locally steeper terrain, which resulted in an upward-thinning snow slab
- The cut in the snow slab made by the group to install the tent
- Strong katabatic winds that led to progressive snow accumulation due to the local topography (shoulder above the tent) causing a delayed failure
Case closed? It appears so, though don't expect conspiracy theories to abate. Good research takes time—sometimes generations. We're constantly learning about our environment and then applying those lessons to the past. While we can't expect every skeptic to accept the findings, from the looks of this study, a 62-year-old case is now closed.
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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His most recent book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."
If brute force doesn't work, then look into the peculiarities of nothingness. This may sound like a Zen koan, but it's actually the strategy that particle physicists are using to find physics beyond the Standard Model, the current registry of all known particles and their interactions. Instead of the usual colliding experiments that smash particles against one another, exciting new results indicate that new vistas into exotic kinds of matter may be glimpsed by carefully measuring the properties of the quantum vacuum. There's a lot to unpack here, so let's go piecemeal.
It is fitting that the first question asked in Western philosophy concerned the material composition of the world. Writing around 350 BCE, Aristotle credited Thales of Miletus (circa 600 BCE) with the honor of being the first Western philosopher when he asked the question, "What is the world made of?" What modern high energy physicists do, albeit with very different methodology and equipment, is to follow along the same philosophical tradition of trying to answer this question, assuming that there are indivisible bricks of matter called elementary particles.
Deficits in the Standard Model
Jumping thousands of years of spectacular discoveries, we now have a very neat understanding of the material composition of the world at the subatomic level: a total of 12 particles and the Higgs boson. The 12 particles of matter are divided into two groups, six leptons and six quarks. The six quarks comprise all particles that interact via the strong nuclear force, like protons and neutrons. The leptons include the familiar electron and its two heavier cousins, the muon and the tau. The muon is the star of the new experiments.
For all its glory, the Standard Model described above is incomplete. The goal of fundamental physics is to answer the most questions with the least number of assumptions. As it stands, the values of the masses of all particles are parameters that we measure in the laboratory, related to how strongly they interact with the Higgs. We don't know why some interact much stronger than others (and, as a consequence, have larger masses), why there is a prevalence of matter over antimatter, or why the universe seems to be dominated by dark matter — a kind of matter we know nothing about, apart from the fact that it's not part of the recipe included in the Standard Model. We know dark matter has mass since its gravitational effects are felt in familiar matter, the matter that makes up galaxies and stars. But we don't know what it is.
Whatever happens, new science will be learned.
Physicists had hoped that the powerful Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland would shed light on the nature of dark matter, but nothing has come up there or in many direct searches, where detectors were mounted to collect dark matter that presumably would rain down from the skies and hit particles of ordinary matter.
Could muons fill in the gaps?
Enter the muons. The hope that these particles can help solve the shortcomings of the Standard Model has two parts to it. The first is that every particle, like a muon, that has an electric charge can be pictured simplistically as a spinning sphere. Spinning spheres and disks of charge create a magnetic field perpendicular to the direction of the spin. Picture the muon as a tiny spinning top. If it's rotating counterclockwise, its magnetic field would point vertically up. (Grab a glass of water with your right hand and turn it counterclockwise. Your thumb will be pointing up, the direction of the magnetic field.) The spinning muons will be placed into a doughnut-shaped tunnel and forced to go around and around. The tunnel will have its own magnetic field that will interact with the tiny magnetic field of the muons. As the muons circle the doughnut, they will wobble about, just like spinning-tops wobble on the ground due to their interaction with Earth's gravity. The amount of wobbling depends on the magnetic properties of the muon which, in turn, depend on what's going on with the muon in space.
This is where the second idea comes in, the quantum vacuum. In physics, there is no empty space. The so-called vacuum is actually a bubbling soup of particles that appear and disappear in fractions of a second. Everything fluctuates, as encapsulated in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Energy fluctuates too, what we call zero-point energy. Since energy and mass are interconvertible (E=mc2, remember?), these tiny fluctuations of energy can be momentarily converted into particles that pop out and back into the busy nothingness of the quantum vacuum. Every particle of matter is cloaked with these particles emerging from vacuum fluctuations. Thus, a muon is not only a muon, but a muon dressed with these extra fleeting bits of stuff. That being the case, these extra particles affect a muon's magnetic field, and thus, its wobbling properties.
About 20 years ago, physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory detected anomalies in the muon's magnetic properties, larger than what theory predicted. This would mean that the quantum vacuum produces particles not accounted for by the Standard Model: new physics! Fast forward to 2017, and the experiment, at four times higher sensitivity, was repeated at the Fermi National Laboratory, where yours truly was a postdoctoral fellow a while back. The first results of the Muon g-2 experiment were unveiled on 7-April-2021 and not only confirmed the existence of a magnetic moment anomaly but greatly amplified it.
To most people, the official results, published recently, don't seem so exciting: a "tension between theory and experiment of 4.2 standard deviations." The gold standard for a new discovery in particle physics is a 5-sigma variation, or one part in 3.5 million. (That is, running the experiment 3.5 million times and only observing the anomaly once.) However, that's enough for plenty of excitement in the particle physics community, given the remarkable precision of the experimental measurements.
A time for excitement?
Now, results must be reanalyzed very carefully to make sure that (1) there are no hidden experimental errors; and (2) the theoretical calculations are not off. There will be a frenzy of calculations and papers in the coming months, all trying to make sense of the results, both on the experimental and theoretical fronts. And this is exactly how it should be. Science is a community-based effort, and the work of many compete with and complete each other.
Whatever happens, new science will be learned, even if less exciting than new particles. Or maybe, new particles have been there all along, blipping in and out of existence from the quantum vacuum, waiting to be pulled out of this busy nothingness by our tenacious efforts to find out what the world is made of.
Think of the nicest person you know. The person who would fit into any group configuration, who no one can dislike, or who makes a room warmer and happier just by being there.
What makes them this way? Why are they so amiable, likeable, or good-natured? What is it, you think, that makes a person good company?
There are really only two things that make someone likable.
This is the kind of advice that comes from one of history's most famously good-natured thinkers: Benjamin Franklin. His essay "On Conversation" is full of practical, surprisingly modern tips about how to be a nice person.
Franklin begins by arguing that there are really only two things that make someone likable. First, they have to be genuinely interested in what others say. Second, they have to be willing "to overlook or excuse Foibles." In other words, being good company means listening to people and ignoring their faults. Being witty, well-read, intelligent, or incredibly handsome can all make a good impression, but they're nothing without these two simple rules.
The sort of person nobody likes
From here, Franklin goes on to give a list of the common errors people tend to make while in company. These are the things people do that makes us dislike them. We might even find, with a sinking feeling in our stomach, that we do some of these ourselves.
1) Talking too much and becoming a "chaos of noise and nonsense." These people invariably talk about themselves, but even if "they speak beautifully," it's still ultimately more a soliloquy than a real conversation. Franklin mentions how funny it can be to see these kinds of people come together. They "neither hear nor care what the other says; but both talk on at any rate, and never fail to part highly disgusted with each other."
2) Asking too many questions. Interrogators are those people who have an "impertinent Inquisitiveness… of ten thousand questions," and it can feel like you're caught between a psychoanalyst and a lawyer. In itself, this might not be a bad thing, but Franklin notes it's usually just from a sense of nosiness and gossip. The questions are only designed to "discover secrets…and expose the mistakes of others."
3) Storytelling. You know those people who always have a scripted story they tell at every single gathering? Utterly painful. They'll either be entirely oblivious to how little others care for their story, or they'll be aware and carry on regardless. Franklin notes, "Old Folks are most subject to this Error," which we might think is perhaps harsh, or comically honest, depending on our age.
4) Debating. Some people are always itching for a fight or debate. The "Wrangling and Disputing" types inevitably make everyone else feel like they need to watch what they say. If you give even the lightest or most modest opinion on something, "you throw them into Rage and Passion." For them, the conversation is a boxing fight, and words are punches to be thrown.
5) Misjudging. Ribbing or mocking someone should be a careful business. We must never mock "Misfortunes, Defects, or Deformities of any kind", and should always be 100% sure we won't upset anyone. If there's any doubt about how a "joke" will be taken, don't say it. Offense is easily taken and hard to forget.
On practical philosophy
Franklin's essay is a trove of great advice, and this article only touches on the major themes. It really is worth your time to read it in its entirety. As you do, it's hard not to smile along or to think, "Yes! I've been in that situation." Though the world has changed dramatically in the 300 years since Franklin's essay, much is exactly the same. Basic etiquette doesn't change.
If there's only one thing to take away from Franklin's essay, it comes at the end, where he revises his simple recipe for being nice:
"Be ever ready to hear what others say… and do not censure others, nor expose their Failings, but kindly excuse or hide them"
So, all it takes to be good company is to listen and accept someone for who they are.
Philosophy doesn't always have to be about huge questions of truth, beauty, morality, art, or meaning. Sometimes it can teach us simply how to not be a jerk.
