On the use of genetic engineering for neuromodulation

The word neurotechnology implies electronic devices which integrate with the brain and modulate its electrical activity. Instead, what if we could substitute neural circuits – those with damaged responses to stimuli or effects we deem unfavorable – with our own, synthesized circuits? We could design the device to integrate with the biological circuit, either in parallel or as a replacement. But what if such integration with an electronic device never needed to occur? What if such modulation could be done during development, before the individual is born?

I am referring to embryonic genetic intervention. The work of developmental neurobiologists may one day allow us to re-engineer our neural circuits with no external intervention at all. What if we could render ourselves immune to diseases of the mind?  Although there is certainly some element of randomness in the structure and strength of the brain’s synaptic connections during development, there must be stereotypical consistencies which we can target for rewiring. There must be some genetic basis for common predispositions of desire and feeling, rendering these feelings genetically targetable. What if we could reprogram our offspring to no longer possess the human neurobiology that once was responsible for our addictive tendencies? The disease of addiction would be eradicated, and this would be a great success assuming we could preserve the beneficial functions of circuits which play a role in addiction? This approach would seem to essentially shorten the timespan of evolution, breaking us out of the local minimum of evolutionary optimization in which we are currently stuck, where addiction plagues the human species.

Actually, by modifying the genetic targets which have no influence on the possessor's reproductive function, we edit those genes which could not be weeded out of the gene pool by natural selection alone. In some ways, we descend evolution’s optimization function by departing from the surface of descent in a dimension not included in the original feature space. Of course, there is a risk of entering and becoming stuck in a far less optimal local minimum. But there is also the potential reward of approaching the global minimum far more quickly. Genetic reprogramming — self-evolution — may allow us to accomplish a re-engineering of our species which natural selection alone could never achieve.