Mad Scientist Wants To Engineer People To Not Like Meat And Make People Shorter To Reduce Carbon Emissions

Scientist Mattew Liao, Director of the Center for Bioethics and Arthur Zitrin Professor of Bioethics at the New York University School of Global Public Health, and Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Moral Philosophy, discussed in an open forum at the World Science Festival in 2016 the possibility of genetically engineering the population to reject eating meat in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The segment was called “Life in Our Image – The Ethics of Altering the Human Genome.” According to the organizers, the event discussed,

Powerful new genetic tools allow scientists to alter the DNA of any organism—with tests on human embryos already underway. Even more ambitious, synthetic biologists on the verge of creating the genetic material for a living organism from scratch are setting their long-term sites on fashioning a fully synthetic human genome. With bold promises of disease resistance and controlling human evolution, this explosive progress has ignited ethical debate. As we rewrite our code of life, how will we revise the code we live by? Join a panel of distinguished scientists and bioethicists wrestling with the moral challenges of altering the human genome.

Roughly a third of the way into the discussion, the question was asked, “How could we edit humans for climate change?” Mr. Liao took up the entire time to answer this question. Liao, a professed bioethicist and philosopher, contended that we (humans) are all equal no matter what and have “equal moral status,” and that gene-splicing ourselves and our future children with new traits is beneficial and needed.

He then argued that since people eat too much, and so through gene-editing it would be possible to get people to no longer tolerate meat and therefore would help fight climate change.

“People eat too much meat, right? If they were to cut down on their consumption of meat it would actually really help the planet. But people are not willing to give up their consumption of meat: some people will be willing to, but other people maybe willing to, but they have a weakness of will. They say, ‘Wow, this steak is too juicy, I can’t do it’ – I’m one of those people.

“But here’s the thought, right? It turns out – we have these intolerances to – like I have a milk intolerance, and some people are intolerant to crayfish, so possibly we can use human engineering to make it the case that we are intolerant to certain kinds of meat, to certain kinds of bovine proteins, and there’s actually analogs of this in life: there’s this thing called the Lonestar Tick where if it bites you, you’ll become allergic to meat.

“So, that’s something that we can do through human engineering. We can kinda possibly address really big world problems through human engineering.”

Liao did not stop there. After stating this, he went onto explain the benefits of engineering humanity to become smaller in height to reduce emissions as well.

“It turns out that the larger you are – think of the lifetime greenhouse gas emissions that require – the energy that’s required to transport larger people rather than smaller people.

“But, if we’re smaller just by 15 centimeters, right? – I did the math and it’s about mass reduction by about 25%, which is huge. And a hundred years ago we were all on average smaller, exactly 15 centimeters smaller, right?

“So think just of the lifetime greenhouse gas emissions if we had smaller children, right? And so that’s something we can do through human engineering.”

Near the end of the discussion, Liao also hinted at the idea that perhaps through gene-editing families could have several small children instead of just one child, as countries like China have done for many years.

This is not the first time Liao has suggested scientists selectively gene-splicing to make people smaller, as he lobbied for this on Australia’s Sunrise Weekend in 2015.

Source- thewinepress.substack.com