From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Aug 04 1999 - 04:24:00 MDT
> Eliezer wrote:
> I'd love to work on neurohacking but unfortunately I expect enough
> public and governmental interference to make the point moot. Nobody's
> going to let me experiment on 11-year-olds, which is where the most good
> could be done. I doubt it'll even be possible to hack around with
> adults except on some offshore hospital-boat. And I certainly can't run
> the effort via PGP.
>
I think you may be wrong. As soon as the genes responsible for intelligence
are identified (~50% +/- (some disputable amount) of intelligence is
inherited) we are going to have to face up to the facts that
(a) parents are going to want to genotype and select "intelligent"
children (after all you are "investing" ~$500K in raising them).
(b) engineer them directly for intelligence.
The writing is on the wall. There is an article to be published
this fall by Finch & Sapolsky (leading aging researchers) that
discusses the evolution of the Apo E4/E3/E2 alleles in humans.
It primarily focuses on the effect these genes have on longevity
but may also mention some relationship to intelligence. There
is another study, mentioned by Finch at the June '99 "AGE"
conference, that finds that E4 (I think) has a lower probability
of being found among college students than in the general
population. [This makes some sense because E4 is the original
primate gene.]
Once this information leaks out and cheap genotyping is available
(a few $$ in your Doctor's office), then the "neurohacking"
discussion (at the genetic level) is going to make the GM-Crop
discussion seem like a warm-up run. Once GM-neurohacking
becomes accepted in creating children, the problem of
retrofitting all of us "handicapped" oldies is going to
raise its ugly head.
You may be right about not getting a chance to neurohack the
kids (for ethical reasons), but I'll give you better than
even money by ~2010-2015 you'll be given the opportunity
to do it with adults.
Robert
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