I'm going to piggyback on your comment by saying that preimplantation polygenetic testing is only the start of what I feel is broader impending reproductive revolution.
Not only are we going to be able to start modifying zygotes like you've mentioned, we're going to be able to start generating them from any genetic material available[0], and bringing them to term in an artificial womb[1].
This is going to fundamentally alter society (for the wealthy at first as you mention) because we will be able to do away with the health burdens that are placed on women who go through pregnancy and we will be able to eliminate huge swaths of genetic abnormalities.
Imagine the shock to paternity law once some unscrupulous individual obtains a celebrities DNA through some discarded water bottle and generates children from it to demand child support payments with.
How will organized sports handle genetically modified players being vastly superior to ungenetically modified?
It's going to be huge, it'll make the pill seem quaint and I feel it's just around the corner, like 2030's sort of thing and no one is talking about.
To provide a counterpoint to a couple of the examples you provided:
> Imagine the shock to paternity law once some unscrupulous individual obtains a celebrities DNA through some discarded water bottle and generates children from it to demand child support payments with.
This already happens with women who try to sabotage condoms and/or collect the specimen after the fact. The rapper Drake has put the phenomena in the spotlight. If this becomes an actual problem, court systems will likely adjust to the times and require a higher burden of proof for paternity claims.
> This already happens
How will organized sports handle genetically modified players being vastly superior to ungenetically modified?
China already does extensive genetic modification by way of selective reproduction. Basketball player Yao Ming was the product of a forced marriage between two tall, Chinese basketball players. He was a truly great player until he became plagued by injuries, likely due to overwork. I don’t think that anybody raised any objections due to the (un)fairness of his provenance. In the future, I think that social stigmas will provide an effective barrier to excessive over screening.
> Not only are we going to be able to start modifying zygotes like you've mentioned, we're going to be able to start generating them from any genetic material available[0], and bringing them to term in an artificial womb[1].
And then you can bypass the entire “we don’t know which genes do what” problem because we can just clone people who have whatever qualities we want.
Well, maybe. It turns out your first citation has been validated in mice, and if that was the gold standard, we’d be able to put people into suspended animation (this totally works with mice but not larger mammals) among 1000 other things that never panned out.
If you go back a little bit, there are a ton of things (like suspended animation) that briefly seemed extremely promising and never panned out, and they outnumber the things that actually panned out by about 10:1.
I honestly think that even if this sort of thing was possible, it might be politically regulated out of existence or even out of being developed. We cloned a sheep in the 1990’s, but still no human.
Not only are we going to be able to start modifying zygotes like you've mentioned, we're going to be able to start generating them from any genetic material available[0], and bringing them to term in an artificial womb[1].
This is going to fundamentally alter society (for the wealthy at first as you mention) because we will be able to do away with the health burdens that are placed on women who go through pregnancy and we will be able to eliminate huge swaths of genetic abnormalities.
Imagine the shock to paternity law once some unscrupulous individual obtains a celebrities DNA through some discarded water bottle and generates children from it to demand child support payments with.
How will organized sports handle genetically modified players being vastly superior to ungenetically modified?
It's going to be huge, it'll make the pill seem quaint and I feel it's just around the corner, like 2030's sort of thing and no one is talking about.
[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/from-just-skin-cells-israeli-l...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/27/parents...