From the journal Bioethics, July 22, 2025:
ABSTRACT
The bite of the lone star tick spreads alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), a condition whose only effect is the creation of a severe but nonfatal red meat allergy. Public health departments warn against lone star ticks and AGS, and scientists are working to develop an inoculation to AGS. Herein, we argue that if eating meat is morally impermissible, then efforts to prevent the spread of tickborne AGS are also morally impermissible. After explaining the symptoms of AGS and how they are transmitted via ticks, we argue that tickborne AGS is a moral bioenhancer if and when it motivates people to stop eating meat. We then defend what we call the Convergence Argument: If x-ing prevents the world from becoming a significantly worse place, doesn't violate anyone's rights, and promotes virtuous action or character, then x-ing is strongly pro tanto obligatory; promoting tickborne AGS satisfies each of these conditions. Therefore, promoting tickborne AGS is strongly pro tanto obligatory. It is presently feasible to genetically edit the disease-carrying capacity of ticks. If this practice can be applied to ticks carrying AGS, then promoting the proliferation of tickborne AGS is morally obligatory.
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Emphasis ours. Also by Crutchfield: "The Epistemology of Moral Bioenhancement"
Previously:
April 2022 - Beware The Alpha-Gal
August 2021 - Climate: Meet the NYU, WEF Associated Bioethicist Who Wants To Genetically Modify Humans To Induce Meat Intolerance
From Public Radio/American Public Media's Marketplace,
Five ways a bioethicist wants to change our bodies to fight climate change
Dr. S. Matthew Liao, a bioethicist at New York University, believes that solving climate change starts with the individual. That’s why he suggests we turn humans into cat-eyed, meat-allergic, semi-genius, hobbit people.
His proposal is dead serious, not a kind of Jonathan Swift-ian exercise. And it has economic implications. It’s centered around the idea that we have passed a point of no return with man-made climate change.
There are lots of ideas on the table when it comes to fighting the environmental impact of humans and technology. As we move further and further into a world where there is vast scientific consensus, and a paradoxical public resistance to that idea, these ideas are getting weirder and weirder.
One idea floated by scientists is geoengineering; shooting aerosols into the atmosphere and cooling the surface temperature. Another, boosted again this week by a $1 billion dollar investment fund led by BIll Gates, is clean energy innovation.
Liao doesn’t discount these, but he believes in some ways that bioengineering our bodies is going to be part of the overall solution and be less dangerous than trying to change the entire planet’s atmosphere with geoengineering. On the are five ways he thinks humans could change ourselves to fight climate change:
1. Cat Eyes
Yes, engineering our eyes to be more like cat eyes and get rid of the need for lighting. “Cats can see just as well as we can during the day,” says Liao. “But they can see about seven times better than we can at night. This could totally affect our consumption of energy. I mean think of that. Who wouldn’t want to see better…and see just as well during the day?”
2. Pharmacological induction of empathy
Taking a pill that helps us feel more empathy for the rest of the world’s residents, so we think twice the next time we’re about to create waste.
3. Hobbit people
Screening embryos so that we have smaller babies. Why will that help us fight climate change? Liao says smaller people use less resources. “We need more fabric to clothe them, and it takes more energy to transport them,” he says. “Add all that up. This could impact our consumption of food, the production of the vehicles and buildings we use, and even the energy to heat those buildings. Liao says as a species we’re taller than we have ever been, and that we don’t actually need to be. So we should use our selective powers to stay short.....
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And short people? A repost from 2011:
"Climate Change Caused Angry Runts"
