Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg: A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.
Following Machiavelli’s adjuration to dominate Fortuna, Francis Bacon proposed the conquest of nature “for the relief of man’s estate,” an estate that his follower, Thomas Hobbes, would describe as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. If, roughly speaking, the first step in this conquest was precise navigation, the second industrialism, the third electrification, the fourth the discovery and harnessing (more or less) of nuclear energy, the fifth information technology, then Conquest of Nature 6.0 is “gene editing,” the power to alter the genetic composition of living organisms. Eventually, this power will be used “to change the genome of our own species in ways that are hereditable, forever altering the genetic composition of humankind”—thereby “direct[ing] the evolution of our own species.” On the seventh ‘day,’ humanity will rest, inasmuch as human nature itself will become something else.
This is why so many of us hope for divine intervention, unconvinced as we are that ‘something else’ will necessarily be better. But to the book at hand….
Doudna and Sternberg are biochemists, and readers will see that they must be contemporary scientists of some sort when they read this sentence: “What will we, a fractious species whose members can’t agree on much, choose to do with this awesome power?” The answer is that the question is ill-formed: As a species, we won’t decide anything; there is no United States of the World to make such a decision. Decisions (plural) will be made by the regimes ruling the various countries whose scientists know how to do such things. The scientist’s classification of human beings as a species, while profoundly important, tells us little about how members of that species deliberate, choose, and act because modern science does not conceive of human beings as their distinguished predecessor, Aristotle, did: as political animals. It may be that modern scientists prefer some form of ‘species-being’ to be apolitical, not only ruled by persons wielding the ‘science of administration’ but by scientists wielding the power to transform fundamentally rulers and ruled alike. The authors here see that as a problem, but they see no solution beyond appealing to scientists worldwide to decelerate the research. It may well be that there is no solution; real politics, conducted under real regimes with real differences of opinion regarding what human nature is and what should be done with it, will permit no ‘global’ solution.
Until now, “the Homo sapiens genome has been shaped by the twin forces of random mutation and natural selection.” With the discovery of DNA by James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick in 1953, biologists saw that living organisms have their own “secret language” or code, which “provides instructions to produce a particular protein inside the cell.” Ribonucleic acid (RNA) serves as the biochemical Apollo in this process, “transform[ing] the instructions contained in DNA into proteins.” “RNA acts as messenger, ferrying information from the nucleus, where the DNA is stored, to the outer regions of the cell, where proteins get produced.” “This overall flow of genetic information—from DNA to RNA to protein—is known as the central dogma of molecular biology, and it is the language used to communicate and express life.” The year 2001 saw not a space odyssey but the completion of an odyssey into the interior of human life, as scientists finished the Human Genome Project, which provided a comprehensive map of the genetic structure of our species.
Initially, scientists conceived of this knowledge as the pathway to the discovery of cures for hard-to-treat diseases and improved food sources. Doudna and Sternberg offer a clear account of advances in the field since the millennium, which have been substantial. Doudna has been a pioneer in the latest technology that enables the manipulation of genes, CRISPR, or “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.” “Clustered” means that certain ‘letters’ of DNA exist only in one part of the chromosome within a cell. The ‘letters’ are arrayed in a uniform pattern which is “nearly the same when read in either direction, just like a palindrome such as ‘senile felines.'” “I had never heard of DNA repeating itself with this kind of precision and uniformity, where every repetition was truly identical and always separated from its neighbor by a similarly sized, random spacer sequence,” Doudna recalls. If “every cell had a different CRISPR array due to the unique sequences interspaced between the repeats,” whereas “every other part of the DNA was nearly identical in each of these cells,” then the “CRISPRs were probably the fastest-evolving region in the genome,” the part of the cell that enabled the cell “to change or adapt quickly in response to something the cells encountered in their environment.” In a bacterium, for example, this rapid-response capacity enables the organism “to fight off viruses,” those banes of microbial existence, with “a warrior protein” that can “seek and destroy viral DNA.” They, and viruses, can also become immune to human-designed attacks by antibiotic and antiviral medications.
Thus in the space of fewer than two decades, microbiology “had advanced from a loose collection of interesting but inconclusive studies to a broad, unified theory about the inner workings of a microbial adaptive immune system.” If so, then in principle “the genome would become as malleable as a piece of literary prose at the mercy of an editor’s red pen.” This goes beyond mere editing to “genome engineering, a reflection of the supreme mastery that scientists held over genetic material inside living cells.” Scientists can now mutate cells or “destroy a gene’s ability to produce a functional protein”; they call the latter effect a “gene knockout,” a shutoff of the gene’s natural function. “Think of the cell as the largest symphony in the world, made up of more than twenty thousand different instruments. In a healthy, normal-functioning cell, the various symphonic voices are perfectly balanced; in malignant cancer cells or infected cells, the balance is disrupted, with some instruments playing too loud and others too soft.” But who or what is nature’s equivalent of Oscar Levant, playing all the instruments? Now, potentially, the microbiologists or biochemists, if “armed with the complete CRISPR toolkit.” “It often feels like the genome-engineering applications made possible by CRISPR are limited only by our collective imagination.” But, as someone famously asked, what do mean by ‘us’? After all, witty Oscar was also a bit daft. Who rules? And what for?
As Tocqueville would have predicted, given its “low cost and ease of use,” this technology will become democratized, making a “once-esoteric practice into a hobby or a craft, just like home-brewing beer”—which, the thirsty authors hasten to add, is already being done with the CRISPR “toolkit.” “The democratization of CRISPR will accelerate the process of research and development,” in turn “lead[ing] to uses of this technology that people are not yet prepared for,” “whose effects can’t be contained within the lab.” “With our mastery over the code of life comes a level of responsibility for which we, as individuals and as a species, are woefully unprepared.” ‘We’ will continue to be woefully unprepared if ‘we’ think of ourselves as individuals and species, and not also as regimes and states.
Doudna and Sternberg quite sensibly observe that human beings have exerted influence over the “evolutionary process” of organisms for centuries by artificial selection or breeding, as distinguished from natural selection. The roil over ‘genetically-altered’ foods does indeed seem a fuss over not much, since human beings have been doing it for a long time. The authors cite Luther Burbank’s 1901 statement averring that natural species are “as plastic in our hands as clay in the hands of the potter or colors on the artist’s canvas, and can readily be molded into more beautiful forms and colors than any painter or sculptor can ever hope to bring forth.” Almost all foods have been so altered, obscuring the distinction between natural and unnatural. In this sense, gene editing only offers a much more precise way of effecting such alterations. Such alterations might be far from benign, inasmuch as “there’s no way to guarantee that this incredibly powerful tool won’t wind up in the hands of people who have no compunction about using gene drives to cause harm,” devising ‘gene bombs’ “to target the human microbiome or major food sources.”
Accordingly, the authors distinguish between two types of cells that can be ‘edited.’ Somatic cells are specific to an individual organism; gene editing might cure my genetically-induced disease (or, in the wrong hands, cause one). Their good or bad effects are limited to the organism whose cells are altered. Germ cells are “any cells whose genome can be inherited by subsequent generations.” Figuring out how to alter germ cells is harder than figuring out how to alter somatic cells, but it promises a much more elegant solution to the problem of disease, as “reversing a disease-causing mutation in a single human germ cell is much simpler than trying to do the same thing inside some of the fitty trillion somatic cells that make up a human body.” The task will be to get CRISPR into the body of the patient, “to the tissue where the disease is exerting its greatest effect”; scientists are working on that. But this only ratchets up the urgency of the ethical-political questions arising from the invention of this power. “Whether we’ll ever have the intellectual and moral capacity to guide our own genetic destiny is an open question.” Making “heritable changes to the human genome” should be resisted, the authors recommend, although it must be observed that their recommendation has not been followed. After all, why would the Chinese communist regime, in principle committed to the manipulation of human ‘evolution’ through political-economic revolution, wielding mass-slaughter of peasants as one of its weapons, halt at the use of a biological tool which offers a much less crude way of achieving the desired outcomes? Why not enforce communal equality by designing human beings capable of no other life than one of communal equality?
Somewhat comically, the authors’ principal worry seems to be that such a prospect might hurt the scientists, “set[ting] many members of the public against this fledgling technology despite its enormous potential for good.” As they more or less acknowledge, given the character of their regime, the Chinese rulers do not need to worry so much about public opinion, and so have directed their scientists to forge ahead. American intelligence agencies have already listed genome editing “as one of the six weapons of mass destruction and proliferation that nation-states might try to develop, at great risk to America.” Leave it to the spooks to think politically, when the scientists would rather not.
What of religion as a source of possible constraints? The authors make short work of it. Religious “perspectives vary widely.” Christians often “regard the embryo as a person from conception,” while Jews and Muslims don’t. Since the human embryo is the most obvious site for germ-cell manipulation, such discrepancies could bring religious warfare back with higher-tech swords and scimitars.
Hemming and hawing somewhat, the authors begin to wonder, is it really a problem at all, however? There may be no principled constraints on such research. For example, “The argument that germline editing is somehow unnatural doesn’t carry much weight”; the distinction between natural and unnatural they judge “a false dichotomy, and if it prevents us from alleviating human suffering, it’s also a dangerous one.” (One might add that if, on the other hand, germline editing might elevate the status of some at the expense of the human suffering of others, that result might be dangerous, too.) Or what if (again, as Tocqueville would suggest) germline editing would elevate the status of some by alleviating the suffering of others—by anesthetizing them into a condition of dronelike docility without dronelike laziness? (“Timid and industrious herd animals,” in Tocqueville’s phrase.) The authors scramble to distinguish gene editing from eugenics, which has rightly taken on such a bad odor in recent decades, but what is gene editing but a more precise and reliable form of eugenics, a word that describes the aspirations of gene editors more accurately than any term gene editors have devised?
More radically, is the dichotomy between natural and unnatural false? In urging that it is, the authors ask if a coral reef, which is natural, really differs in any meaningful way from a “megalopolis like Tokyo,” a thing usually considered unnatural. The example is more complex than it seems, if human beings are by their nature political animals. If so, then in some respects Tokyo must be natural inasmuch as it’s a ‘polis,’ however ‘megalo’ it may be. The reason one balks at the claim is that the coral reef has no customs or conventions; it must be what it is, given the nature of the animals that built it. There is no such necessity about a megalopolis; whatever their size, political communities mix human nature—identifiably the same, everywhere—with habits, opinions, institutions that vary considerably from place to place, time to time. It makes sense to ask if a given political community is good for the human beings who inhabit it; it doesn’t make sense to ask if a given coral reef is good for the beings that inhabit it, unless some exogenous force—pollution, for example—has damaged it.
The authors finally approach the question of political regimes in the last ten pages of their book. They raise the question of justice. How would we edit genes “equitably—that is, in a way that improves human health across the board, not just in certain groups”? In the future, “people with more money” might “live healthier and longer lives thanks to their privileged sets of genes” and not merely because they can afford better health care. But, like all matters of distributive justice, the issue will be settled by the character of the regime in which it arises. This is why the authors raise a smile when they claim that “governments are simply not going to begin forcing parents to edit their children’s genes.” Really? Why not? Governments have been known to kill people because their genes were defective, or supposed to be. Why not wield the micro-scalpel instead of the truncheon?
And then there is the matter of foreign policy, which the authors do not neglect to remark. “Any prohibitions on germline gene editing in the United States would effectively cede leadership in this area to other nations—something Americans are arguably already doing with our existing bans on federal funding for germline editing,” which one suspects to be their primary concern in all of this. Indeed, “once a game-changing technology is unleashed on the world, it is impossible to contain it.” They end the book with a whine about how non-scientists don’t trust scientists, anymore. By the same token, one wonders why they trust their fellow scientists, especially those in the pay of foreign and hostile governments.
Are there natural limits to human efforts to manipulate natural limits? Evidently there are some, as seen in the use, and the non-use, of nuclear weapons. A technology that threatens to obliterate me if I use it to obliterate you, because you might use it against me in your dying moments, has yet to be used against any country that maintains a nuclear arsenal that might survive nuclear attack. Deterrence works. Similarly, although regimes might attempt to breed supermen, even enhance them with artificial intelligence and other powers, it seems unlikely that any regime would design such a ‘race’ of warriors without taking firm precautions against their rebellion. The main threat would be a regime that intends to transform the rulers themselves into such warriors, a regime animated by some notion of trans-humanity. Such regimes have already existed, but they’ve never had such powerful technological means at their disposal.
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