[EpicEng]

Why do you believe that? The cost of medical care is proportional to the cost of treatment, not the cost incurred while performing the injurious act. I can down a cheap bottle of aspirin and rack up a large medical bill. I don't see the correlation.

[MiddleEndian]

For your aspirin example, you can already do that without breaking any laws, and you will still get medical care in pretty much any country. Not that many people do it, and medical costs haven't been ruined by people chugging aspirin.

For instance, if there were a way to make yourself extremely susceptible to becoming obese with $20 on-the-fly gene editing, presumably you (or medical staff) could reverse that. And I can't imagine many people doing the first thing.

[EpicEng]

All I asked is why you believe the price of altering your genetic material is proportional to fixing any mistakes which arise as a consequence. Legaility has nothing to do with it.

I don't imagine the only issues we'd face are the completely and easily reversible with no side effects kind.

[MiddleEndian]

I'd wager that more people would end up relieving conditions with gene editing than doing wackier shit as mentioned before. If you genetically cure a bunch of diseases and unhealthy susceptibilities across the population, the marginal cost of the handful of people who make themselves ten feet tall will be trivial.

[EpicEng]

>I'd wager that more people would end up relieving conditions with gene editing than doing wackier shit as mentioned before. If you genetically cure a bunch of diseases and unhealthy susceptibilities across the population, the marginal cost of the handful of people who make themselves ten feet tall will be trivial.

Ignoring the fact that you cannot make yourself taller, you're arguing for a completely unregulated ecosystem around gene editing. What you 'wager' is irrelevant; we protected people from themselves in numerous ways because people do dumb things. Are you now arguing that CRISPR and the like should be heavily regulated as to only be used for legitimate medical purposes?

[MiddleEndian]

Re:10 foot tall human

Obviously at this point, all we can do is speculate, and I'm not a medical professional. Perhaps there's some gene modification that will cause uncontrolled gigantism, and perhaps a handful of people will want that. If they do, that's their right.

Re:Regulation

If gene editing works as imagined, you could have a regulated market like doctors and pharmacies for legitimate medical reasons (such as disease resistance) which would definitely lower overall medical costs since it would be a fantastic form of preventative medicine. As such, people not looking for experimental shit would not come across it by accident. Basically treat it like regular medicine.

But if people want to home brew their own stuff and share mechanisms on the internet, or buy and sell "supplements" as they do today with next to no FDA regulation, they should have that right.