- A proposal was floated to convene a Cambridge, UK event on the ethics of human germline modification and “designer babies,” with nsh volunteering to moderate; kanzure counter-proposed instead hosting a conference explicitly for people who want to *proceed* with germline engineering, arguing that technical progress deserves spaces free of politics.  
- Participants debated whether any mainstream ethics forum would inevitably condemn practitioners, and whether “politics-free” spaces are even possible when the act of engineering human genomes is itself a political statement.  
- nmz787 circulated the NEJM cautionary-tale paper on the tp53 cancer-resistance/early-aging trade-off in mice (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1506446) to illustrate the difficulty of predicting downstream suffering from germline edits.  
- Discussion of equity concerns: the NEJM paper warns that “best genomes” could concentrate among the privileged; participants rebut that biology is intrinsically copyable and piracy will rapidly democratize any successful modification, just as happened with Monsanto’s Bt-cotton in India (https://www.epw.in/engage/article/monsantos-loss-patent-bt-cotton-victory-farmers-indian-seed-companies).  
- yashgaroth noted that labor-intensive, large-scale genome synthesis could still create price tiers, while outright bans would simply push the technology into expensive black-market clinics, preserving stratification.  
- jrayhawk linked a fresh NPR report on newly approved U.S. experiments that aim to create gene-edited human embryos (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/02/01/689623550/new-u-s-experiments-aim-to-create-gene-edited-human-embryos).  
- kanzure shared a 2018 Ars Technica piece on pocket-sized Oxford Nanopore sequencers being used to scan entire human genomes (https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/01/pocket-sized-dna-reader-used-to-scan-entire-human-genome-sequence/) and revisited the 2017 “DNA-borne malware” story (https://www.wired.com/story/malware-dna-hack).  
- nmz787 highlighted a Science article describing AI that decodes cortical activity into intelligible speech (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/artificial-intelligence-turns-brain-activity-speech).  
- nmz787 also explored the molecular basis of pungency: chickens lack capsaicin sensitivity due to amino-acid changes in the VR1 receptor, tomatoes already possess the full capsaicinoid pathway but lack transcriptional activation—raising the prospect of engineering “hot tomatoes.”