Huge genome study confronted by concerns over race analysis - Some geneticists say key figure falsely suggests genetic data support notion of distinct races
Huge genome study confronted by concerns over race analysis - Some geneticists say key figure falsely suggests genetic data support notion of distinct races
The field of genetics is going to become an incendiary mess as we learn more and more about it, challenging what we would like to believe. One thing that immediately comes to mind from my own education in genetics is that, apparently, there is a specific gene linked to populations which lived at extreme altitudes (thus had lower oxygen content in the air) which is hugely over represented in Olympic sprinters, iirc. How will society handle things if we start to find that certain genetic traits can be strongly linked to people's abilities? I feel that it will soon be more important than ever to recognize that equality under the law is critical to a just society.
This is when engineering begins.
Absolutely terrible solution though. We still know next to nothing about the full scope of what our genetic code contains, and have even found further layers of code stacked on top of code, called epigenetics, which we understand very little about. Current regulations for any novel genetic therapy require an extremely long and intensive trial regime, as a significant majority of attempts to deliberately alter the genome ultimately result in sterility or death for reasons unknown to us.