[EpicEng]

>If he wants to become more muscular, morbidly obese, or ten feet tall, that's his right.

Not necessarily. We as a society have come up with many activities which seem, on their surface, to only harm the individual, but are illegal. This shares many concerns with drug use, gambling, etc.

Killing yourself harms others, and society has a vested interest in the population being healthy and productive. If you harm yourself an ER has to treat you regardless of whether or not you can foot the bill. Perhaps most importantly, you can procreate and pass on defective generic material.

This is far from an issue which only concerns the individual in question.

[MiddleEndian]

You can purchase tons of things with which you can kill or severely injure yourself today, and you will still receive medical care.

If you can edit your genes in a bizarre way for cheap, I imagine it wouldn't be very expensive to reverse such a modification.

[jchallis]

As anyone can attest who has seen a $300 M building burn to the ground, very simple permanent changes can be extremely expensive to reverse.

[MiddleEndian]

Buildings do burn to the ground periodically, but the costs of fire men and fire property insurance aren't particularly outlandish.

[EpicEng]

You addressed zero of the concerns I mentioned. You seem to believe that any problem which occurs will be easily reversible and have no side effects. I can't imagine that would ever be the case. You did not address death (possible) or passing on genetics which have negative, perhaps unforseen consequences.

Alerting the human genome is not as simple as pushing a patch to a website.

[MiddleEndian]

Currently it doesn't work at all, and AFAIK only this one guy is trying it. If he gets an infection in an area covered by my insurance, I won't be too stressed about it.

If, in the future it is as easy as a $20 modification, I'd wager two things. One is that most people would use it for mundane things like resistance to the flu, stronger bones, and other things that would ultimately lower the cost of medical insurance on average. The other is that the mechanism will be so well known that changes will be rewritable.