There is definitely a bizarre social taboo surrounding the pursuit of some of these projects. Another constraint is that even if someone is doing the work, they can’t exactly be public especially in germline because the privacy of the child is of utmost importance.
Researchers in academia are mostly focused on grants for curing various diseases because that’s what appeals to the appetite of federal funding agencies and the philanthropic organizations. The academic biologists tend to be extremely sensitive to public opinion because the public controls much of the federal funding. As a result, they have felt the burn from the anti-GMO people and the attempts at stopping embryonic stem cell research. They absolutely do not want further prohibitions on research and they worry about people outside of academia doing things that cause a backlash on federal funding of researchers.
Thankfully, you don’t need to do this work inside of academia.
Focusing on diseases will never lead to extremely cheap interventions; there’s simply not enough sick people with the same problem. Nobody really focuses on enhancements. As a result, costs are going to remain high because the market for a specific disease can be incredibly small. Meanwhile the market for general broad spectrum mass market enhancement has a potential population of almost 8 billion people.
I also think that biologists don’t paint that interesting of a future. They usually talk about curing diseases but don’t have any vision beyond that point. What are we going to do after we cure all diseases? The silicon people have visions of computronium painting the universe. The biologists don’t really promote visions of a flourishing biosphere across the entire cosmos or some other moral vision for progress.
There’s some good news though. Since not everyone is working on the ambitious projects, there’s lots of low-hanging fruit available. I think there’s enough people working on curing all diseases or ending aging/anti-aging/longevity. Other ambitious projects include intelligence/memory enhancement, protein engineering, molecular nanotechnology, the complete control over cellular morphological form, brain preservation, brain uploading, cryonic preservation and resuscitation, etc. (I will also note here that longevity is getting lots of attention, but not as much for young people or germline; older people in my opinion might already be aged and that might be irreversible with technology in the next 30-50 years for all I know). I think we should be very excited about the future and work on really hard, important technologies. I think sometimes people might get complacent because it’s hard to realize that just several hundred generations ago we were all completely destitute and barely picking ourselves up out of the mud. We aren’t that far from where we came from. We absolutely must accelerate.
I would also say that there isn’t really VC for ambitious biotech. The way that VC works in biotech is that it’s mostly about funding the professor and his 12 postdocs that invented something (call it X) and then they spin out of a university and you fund the company doing X. That’s basically the main model. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for biology projects that aren’t spin outs. “Techbio” has been a recent improvement but it seems to be a lot of software startups? I’m not sure.
On longevity, I should add that I think more people working on ending aging would be good. In the past 5-10 years a lot more companies and funds have formed around longevity so that’s very exciting to see. But admittedly we don’t have an over-abundance of people working on extreme aging interventions; maybe a few million more people would be good to work on that problem?
Why do you think we don’t have more people starting ambitious genetic engineering projects?
There is definitely a bizarre social taboo surrounding the pursuit of some of these projects. Another constraint is that even if someone is doing the work, they can’t exactly be public especially in germline because the privacy of the child is of utmost importance.
Researchers in academia are mostly focused on grants for curing various diseases because that’s what appeals to the appetite of federal funding agencies and the philanthropic organizations. The academic biologists tend to be extremely sensitive to public opinion because the public controls much of the federal funding. As a result, they have felt the burn from the anti-GMO people and the attempts at stopping embryonic stem cell research. They absolutely do not want further prohibitions on research and they worry about people outside of academia doing things that cause a backlash on federal funding of researchers.
Thankfully, you don’t need to do this work inside of academia.
Focusing on diseases will never lead to extremely cheap interventions; there’s simply not enough sick people with the same problem. Nobody really focuses on enhancements. As a result, costs are going to remain high because the market for a specific disease can be incredibly small. Meanwhile the market for general broad spectrum mass market enhancement has a potential population of almost 8 billion people.
I also think that biologists don’t paint that interesting of a future. They usually talk about curing diseases but don’t have any vision beyond that point. What are we going to do after we cure all diseases? The silicon people have visions of computronium painting the universe. The biologists don’t really promote visions of a flourishing biosphere across the entire cosmos or some other moral vision for progress.
There’s some good news though. Since not everyone is working on the ambitious projects, there’s lots of low-hanging fruit available. I think there’s enough people working on curing all diseases or ending aging/anti-aging/longevity. Other ambitious projects include intelligence/memory enhancement, protein engineering, molecular nanotechnology, the complete control over cellular morphological form, brain preservation, brain uploading, cryonic preservation and resuscitation, etc. (I will also note here that longevity is getting lots of attention, but not as much for young people or germline; older people in my opinion might already be aged and that might be irreversible with technology in the next 30-50 years for all I know). I think we should be very excited about the future and work on really hard, important technologies. I think sometimes people might get complacent because it’s hard to realize that just several hundred generations ago we were all completely destitute and barely picking ourselves up out of the mud. We aren’t that far from where we came from. We absolutely must accelerate.
I would also say that there isn’t really VC for ambitious biotech. The way that VC works in biotech is that it’s mostly about funding the professor and his 12 postdocs that invented something (call it X) and then they spin out of a university and you fund the company doing X. That’s basically the main model. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for biology projects that aren’t spin outs. “Techbio” has been a recent improvement but it seems to be a lot of software startups? I’m not sure.
On longevity, I should add that I think more people working on ending aging would be good. In the past 5-10 years a lot more companies and funds have formed around longevity so that’s very exciting to see. But admittedly we don’t have an over-abundance of people working on extreme aging interventions; maybe a few million more people would be good to work on that problem?