Autism Eugenics attempt at MIT

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Neuroscientists reverse autism symptoms Turning on a gene later in life can restore typical behavior in mice.

They or you can deny this is eugenics all you want but the language of the scientists strongly suggest otherwise.

Sounds fine to me. They're not going "hey, let's force this on people!". I've had more than a few arguments with people around WP about this sort of thing, though.

So, someone finds a potential avenue for treating the symptoms of autism .. and this is a bad thing?

That seems to be the view of more than a few people around here.

All human certifiable gene therapies are innocuous.

Kinda reminds me of that mutant cure from The XMen.

It's really only applicable to a small number of autistic people with this particular mutation. One percent, I think it was. If those people choose to get this gene "turned on" in the future, should the treatment be available, then that's their choice.

Obviously parents with children who have the mutation may treat their children when they aren't old enough to make a decision themselves, but I don't think that can be controlled. Parents do things like that all the time.

Interesting that their splice can be triggered secondarily by tamoxifen (a breast cancer therapeutic), I'd have to ask my mom what estrogen does in mice though, believe it or not she's paid to know that.

Any gene edit that has no effect on the germ line cannot be meaningfully associated with the term "eugenics."

This is no more a threat to edit autism out of the human population than is taking Ibuprofen for a muscle ache.

Things to note from the article:

what part of this involves controlled breeding then if you're so sure it's eugenics.

The scientist involved said he expects it to have wider applications. Will it work?. How do I know, that is why I wrote attempt at eugenics. The idea is to get rid of key autistic traits. Another words using genes to make "better" humans. That is the definition of Eugenics. This is 2016 we need to stop thinking of the eugenics techinques of 100 years ago and start thinking what eugenics actually is. The relevence of Eugenics from 100 years ago is not the particular technique but that it is well established in the American DNA (metaphorical pun intended)

While a voluntary cure would be a good thing if it happens, as I have said previously I do not think any Autism cure be it eugenics or otherwise will be realistically voluntary. While I expect you will have the legal right to refuse a cure finiancial inducments and penalties will make your life much more difficult should you refuse. Employers won't hire you if you refuse the cure or insurence will be unavailable or unaffordable should you refuse, that type of thing.

I can understand Autistics wanting a cure. What I can not understand for the life of me why the neurodiverse movement part of the community is so caviar about the chance for a cure happening. The denial, the nitpicking etc is an autistic trait and understable I guess but people need to look at the big picture here. Do you really think all this time and effort and money is bieng spent on something they expect to fail and that few people will use?

Let assume I am wrong and that a cure cannot not be found, why be so caviar about all the damage that is going to be caused by quack cures be it eugenics or otherwise. Enough damage had been done by quack cures over the internet, I do not want to think about the damage that could be caused by quack cures backed by the goverment, the nations largest business and universities.

Eliminating even a single gene from a pool is eugenics-- we are nothing more than the genes we inherit, therefore killing off one entire line is in effect killing off an entire sub-type of person. That being said, who's to say the autistic gene isn't the one that wins out over the long run anyway? If life is a competition as current modes of cultural transmission tell us to believe, then cutting out a competitor in the middle of the race isn't exactly conducive to finding the strongest candidate-- it's more akin to a thrown fight.

I agree. It's a scary thing to think about.

Wasn't eugenics about reducing the possibility of an individual passing on their genes through sterilization?

I'm confused, the article says the gene Shank3 is missing, but then the article says the gene is "turned on" later in life. How can a missing gene be turned on?

Sterilization was a popular method to implement the philosophy of eugenics during the first half of the 20th Century. The idea behind eugenics is to make the quality of humans better through genetics by improving the human gene pool by making sure people with "defective" genes do not breed. Sterlization was a popular and blunt way of doing this. Genocide was a more blunt way of carrying out eugenics, it was so blunt eugenics fell out of favor and carries negative associations to this day. Gene editing is todays method. In the case autism if gene editing works it will turn off the autism and therefore when a person with the turned off gene breeds they will not pass on the "defective" genes which is a method to implement eugenics. But it will not be viewed as bad or scary eugenics but good disease elimination.