From: Mark Walker (mail@markalanwalker.com)
Date: Sun Jun 16 2002 - 08:10:07 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Harvey Newstrom" <mail@HarveyNewstrom.com>
>
> Even if everybody decided to switch to genetically-engineered babies
> today, it would take a year to get these kids born, and another 21 years
> to get them to voting age. Even if the technology was ready today, it
> would be 22 years minimum before the first ones showed up.
>
> But the technology isn't ready today. It will take 5-10 years before we
> can completely rewrite the human genome. It will take another 5-10
> years to get through animal and human trials before we can even ask the
> FDA or governments of the world to allow it.
>
> We're talking 22 years minimum if the technology were ready today.
> We're talking 27-32 years if the technology is available today. We're
> talking 32-42 years if it has to go through FDA and government
> approvals. Who knows how many additional years to gain public
> preference over traditional mating.
>
> I doubt that the movie GATTACA could reasonably occur in real life until
> after 2050.
>
I don't know much about GATTACA other than what I have read here, but it
seems to me to be a very conservative extrapolation. We don't need to know
how to rewrite the human genome to have a profound impact. We have the
technology today to manipulate the homeobox genes that control the growth of
various regions of the brain. If our goal was to create a biological
singularity as soon as possible then we could line up (say) ten thousand
human zygotes today and attempt to tweak these homeobox genes. Some of these
you might try tweaking the homeobox genes that control large areas of brain
growth, so that you might end up with a creature with a 50% bigger brain
overall. Other experiments might attempt to just double the size of the
neocortex (not a bad bet given its plasticity), etc. If any of these
experiments work the members of this new species, Homo bigheadus, might not
reach their full potential for 40 years or more--but this is not to say that
they might not run intellectual circles around us when they reach their
teens. If any of our ten thousand experiments bears fruit we could
conceivably have made monkeys of ourselves in 15 to 20 years.
There is no extrapolation about technological advance in this scenario. We
have done the homeobox experiments on frog embryos and we know mammals have
analogues of these homeobox genes. Of course it would unethical to do these
experiments today, at least until we had done studies on higher animals. Of
course, so long as biotechnologists around the world are united in their
commitment to only do what is ethical (by our standards) we need not
consider this scenario.
Mark
Dr. Mark Walker
Research Associate (Philosophy), Trinity College, University of Toronto
Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Evolution and Technology,
(www.transhumanist.com)
Editor-in-Chief, Transhumanity, (www.transhumanism.com)
Home page: http://www.markalanwalker.com
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