Transhumanism, genetic engineering, and the biological basis of intelligence.

The latter

This made me curious how much the UK Biobank cost. Remarkably, apparently only about $150 million. (Their funding page says their "core funding" has been £133 Million.)

In terms of impact on genomics, I subjectively think it's on a scale comparable to a particle accelerator or space telescope, but it has received more than an order of magnitude less funding.

I wonder whether there's a EA case for funding biobanks, given that they seem underfunded compared to other big science projects.

There is such a biobank in the US being formed right now. It's called "All of Us", and it will probably have more genomes from Africans and American Natives than any other biobank in existence.

Unfortunately, it has two problems:

1. They have made it very hard to actually access the data. Getting an application for access actually approved is a huge slog, and researchers themselves actually have to pay for some of the costs.
2. They aren't investigating intelligence at all

It would be incredibly helpful to have a large biobank (or even just a consumer genetics company like 23&Me) that was interested in intelligence. One such organization could triple or quadruple the accuracy of our current intelligence predictors.

So it has extremely limited versatility

I obviously agree that in its current form this therapy has no potential for use as a means of enhancement (at least if we define enhancement as deviation above normal human baseline).

But it's worth pointing out that the chemotherapy step of the treatment was only necessary because ANY remaining sickle-cell carrying stem cells would continue to produce misshapen red blood cells which cause all of the symptoms and problems associated with the disease.

Other conditions are not all like that: going from no cells having a copy of some particular variant to SOME cells having a copy would still produce a positive effect.

The real reason I think somatic cell editing is unlikely to produce any large enhancements any time in the next 50 years is because you have to edit an ungodly number of cells all over the body to have an effect, and some of the modified genes won't do anything because they're only active during the developmental phase of a person's lifespan.

I don't have a good reference and I left bioinformatics a couple of years ago, so I am open to being corrected by someone who is more in the loop. To me the general picture seems to be:

1. There was a huge hype around epigenetics maybe 10,15? years ago, when epigenetics was supposed to explain everything. This hype has basically vanished. 
2. The epigenetics results in human all seemed to look like: The effect skips a generation and only goes from grandfather to granddaughter, p < 0.038. Hence E-p-hack-netics. I think you just can't publish this kind of result any more these days. 
3. I think our ability to read out methylation patterns has improved. For example the third generation sequencing technologies like PacBio sequencing were able to read methylation patterns directly. Third generation sequencing hit the market ten years ago and became generally accepted maybe 5 years ago, which would support a story where we gained the ability to measure accurately and the effects vanished. 
4. There were results like with dolly, where later investigations overturned the initial theorising. 
5. The general mechanism of epigenetics also came under fire if I remember correctly. I don't remember this very well, but something about methylation patterns resetting during oogenesis or embryogenesis?
6. Many of the stories just didn't make sense from an evolutionary perspective. Epigenetically transmitted trauma? How does that evolve? 
7. Generally smart guys became dismissive about epigenetics I think mostly because, like you, they caught a whiff of research smell. 

I am not very sure in the single claims, because they are based on things I read or heard over the years and generally quite a few years ago. But overall things just seemed to overwhelmingly point in the same direction. Though I do have to say that some of the mice results looked more robust, but of course those come from a much bigger sample size. 

I, too, would definitely be interested in a concrete analysis "What the hell happened to epigenetics" by an actual geneticist - ideally without a horse in the race. But right now I have a strong prior that epigenetics is mostly bunk. 

Yeah. It's pretty crazy to imagine that DNA synthesis is happening anytime soon. Meanwhile, embryo selection is safe and effective now, and getting better all the time.