What do you guys think? I heavily dislike that China banned gene editing. That is a very exiting field with potentially world transformational consequences. Very risk averse from China and this risk averse behaviour had enormous negative impact in the past.
Gonna see how closely the law is written and if there's a change in the future. Right now, there's not really any value in trying to create "designer babies" - we just don't have the know-how. Any attempt is probably brute-force and experimental, and legitimately unethical.
However, research into genetics and human genetics is incredibly valuable, and if they banned that... that would be an own-goal. If they're still allowing stem-cell research, human cell research, genome mapping and testing, then it might not be a bad thing, preventing the sort of mad-scientist and wasteful research that you can find in the Soviet Union and the United States at the height of the cold war.
Dunno about crypto, don't know enough about it. But yea, "designer baby" and "human genetics" research aren't the same thing. There's some space between them. How and where the law comes down is going to be pretty important.
The UNZ article is... pretty crank. At least the very short "bio-singularity" bit... The "gene-edited baby" he mentions is just looking at the genes of embryos and choosing what "seems" to be the healthiest... which even then is imperfect. There's a lot more that can be improved and epigenetics is a growing field which has a lot of potential on people's health as well.
That said, it is with genetic research that we can recognize the genetic markers for various diseases and there will be a day when having the genes for various diseases will be edited out of an embryo. In fact today there are abortions happening because the fetus has genetic markers for a whole host of diseases, so what they're doing is just shifting the choice earlier in the baby-making process. This is probably going to be the next step and is a good thing - and if China's law stops this then yea, thats a bad thing.
But reading the language of the law, it just seems they've stopped human embryo gene-editing research, not animal research. Which is good, because we're still not nearly close to being able to do that safely.
This gene-selection thing should be ok since there's no gene-editing going on.
Overall, I don't see any useful research (that I know of, but I'm not in that field) being stopped with this new law.
