Biophysicist: Society will 'eventually accept' designer babies

“The power to control our species’ genetic future is awesome and terrifying,” writes Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna in A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution. “Deciding how to handle it may be the biggest challenge we have ever faced.” The World Health Organization seems to agree, recommending in 2021 that global standards be adopted concerning the ability to edit genes—or, in common parlance, to play God.

This was largely provoked by the 2018 actions of Chinese biophysics researcher He Jiankui, who announced the births of twin girls with edited genomes using a process called Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR). The father was HIV-positive, and He Jiankui had edited the embryos’ genomes to remove a gene, thereby conferring genetic resistance to HIV—a procedure in direct violation of international protocols and possibly Chinese law.

As a result, he was thoroughly investigated, leaving him censured, fired from his university, and criminally charged, with ramifications for his advisors in institutions around the world.

On December 30, 2019, shortly after being named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2019, He was sentenced to three years in prison.

He has since admitted that he acted "too quickly" with his work, but he has never claimed to regret his actions and has not apologized.

The whole episode is either a bioethicist’s nightmare or a dream come true, depending on how they see their work. MIT Technology Review weighed in on the dream-come-true side last week, saying, "Why wait 100,000 years for natural selection to do its job? For a few hundred dollars in chemicals, you could try to install these changes in an embryo in 10 minutes."

In a 2022 feature article for OnlySky, I discussed the moral maze we navigate with gene editing, noting that our experiments in this area are not limited to human genes. The artificial selection process of farming has been selecting for genes for millennia. Over time, the genetic blueprint for a given crop or livestock has been intentionally altered. This wheat is hardier, and that cow is larger or produces more milk, because of the way farmers selected and reproduced their crops or livestock. Farming is genetic modification at a slower pace.

In modern times, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) represent a much quicker and more targeted process. Rather than breeding this pig with that pig to make a larger pig offspring, we can (in simple terms) alter the genetic code for pig size. The same principle applies to crops.

When it comes to GMO humans, we arguably undergo selective gene modification already. It’s sex, baby. It’s what we do. Well, if we’re lucky.

More of life is about sex selection than you might think. Buying this fancy car, wearing those fancy clothes, going to the gym. We are peacocks in human suits. “I’m not attracted to this person” is arguably shorthand for, “There is some genetic blueprint shortcoming in this person,” and the converse applies as well. This has outcomes and ramifications for offspring.

We also have IVF (in-vitro fertilization) through which we can mess around with the “natural” processes of life that have come about from natural evolution. Certain people are unable to make babies in the standard fashion, so we give them a helping hand. This is made all the more germane to this debate when you implant several eggs and have them biopsied to test for cystic fibrosis (for example)—a genetic condition for which sufferers must undergo intensive daily treatments while halving their life expectancy—selecting the healthier ones and deselecting those with the unfortunate mutations.

On the subject of “natural”: All medicine is in some sense “unnatural.” All of it messes around with “how things should be.”

But when we see a monkey using a tool, we don’t say it's “unnatural.” This is a telling departure. We are no less natural than the monkey, so you could quite rationally argue that everything we do is natural—every tool we create and use and every outcome of that use. There is arguably no such thing as “unnatural.”

Yes, there are many convoluted philosophical arguments concerning the ideology, but also the practicality, of gene editing. Is it human exceptionalism to say we can do it with plants and cows but not with humans? Would it become elitist, the social pastime or societal tool of the rich and powerful? (See my previous piece for those discussions.)

Scientific advance often seems inevitable. We may end up doing things, pushing envelopes, just because we can. Or perhaps we have an ultimate greater good or highfalutin objective in mind. This can scare us. The Terminator will happen. We will inevitably enter into a war with AI robots.

Or maybe not. Perhaps AI will get co-opted to help find a cure for cancer.

He Jiankui, who used CRISPR to edit human genomes, only to find himself in prison, has now been released. The scientist says he has returned to his laboratory to work on a treatment for Alzheimer’s, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and other genetic diseases.

But he has also resumed research on human embryo genome editing.

Though he denies he has plans to produce more genome-edited babies, He sensibly clarified to the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, “We will use discarded human embryos and comply with both domestic and international rules.”

He defends his controversial work, saying he was “proud” of having created the babies Lulu and Nana. He said the twins, and a third 2019-born baby, were “perfectly healthy and have no problems with their growth,” and that Lula and Nana, now 5, are attending kindergarten.

“The results of analyzing [the children’s] entire gene sequences show that there were no modifications to the genes other than for the medical objective, providing evidence that genome editing was safe. I’m proud to have helped families who wanted healthy children.”

To the Japanese outlet Mainichi, He declared society would “eventually accept” human embryo gene editing in the quest to find treatments for genetic diseases.

I don't doubt this. Humans and societies are pretty good at accepting and normalizing all sorts of behaviors and activities, no matter what their worth and moral dimension. The question is whether gene editing is still on the list of nefarious activities that we should avoid at all costs.

Should we be playing God or—in God's absence and as Homo Deus—is this our right, our need, or simply an unavoidable outcome? Is this a necessary part of our journey of self-improvement into deification?

That bath can either burn or soothe us, and right now we're just dipping our toes.