An embryo in a laboratory

The edit is done. The question is whether it was theirs to make.

An embryo in a laboratory. An edit is made before the first division. A gene corrected. A trait selected. A capacity installed.

The edit is done. The person the embryo becomes will carry it for life. The question is whether the edit was theirs to make.

Every reader was once an embryo. The body you are reading from grew from a starting point you had no part in choosing. Parents. Environment. Chance. The conditions of the larger structure around you. These wrote the person you are before your capacity to choose had begun. You inherited a body you did not consent to.

The chapter is not asking whether that is acceptable. You are here, reading. The body you inherited is the body you read from.

The chapter asks something else. What changes when the inheritance is no longer chance? When it is no longer just the way life is passed on? When it is a deliberate edit, made by one person on behalf of a future person who does not yet exist?

This is the chapter’s central question.

The book has a name for such an edit. Pre-agency editing: editing before the person can choose. It is the place where one person’s capacity to choose acts on the corridor of a future person whose capacity to choose has not yet begun. The corridor is the range of states a body can keep running in.

The answer is a test. Not a policy.

Editing that widens the future person’s corridor is maintenance. Editing that narrows it to serve someone else’s preference is what the book calls parasitic contraction. It shrinks the room of a person whose capacity to choose has not yet begun.

The test reads what is actually happening when the edit is made. Some cases are clear. Some are not. The chapter does not write regulation, and does not pretend to.

This is the second of five chapters about the body. The first, on medicine, set up the body as an operator with a budget and a corridor. This one reads the corridor of a body whose person has not yet begun. Three more follow. Authority over your own mind. Extending a body. The end of life. Each reads the same window at a further scale. A window, in this work, is one self-reading life: one person. The test set up in the chapter on medicine works here as it stands. It does not need to be derived again.

Source. Ø Applications, Chapter 6 — Genetic Engineering. The book in full: the420code.org/Applications.pdf. The short edition: the420code.org/models/applications/06-genetic-engineering/. The film, The room before the occupant: the420code.org/films/applications/. Its kill switches: APP-6.1 to APP-6.5.