Hacking Darwing by Jaime Metzl
This book provides technical information for the layman as well as some helpful discussions on the brave new world we and our children are going to experience. It raises tough questions as you will see. Harari’s Homo Deus carries a similar message. Some interesting facts and troubling scenarios follow:
VISION: Consider Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon: Verne was the founder of Science Fiction. He told a story of travel to the moon and anyone with engineering experience and knowledge from his time would have acknowledged the notion as far-fetched—a fiction and nothing more. John F Kennedy proclaimed in 1962 that the United States was committed to land men on the moon before the end of the decade. He meant it. While the technology was not complete or assembled, it was clear that in that time frame, it would be achievable. The case is made, that with respect to manipulating the genetic code and intentionally making evolutionary changes within it, we are at that Kennedy moment. This is not science fiction; it is already happening: witness non-browning apples, virus resistant papaya, bruise resistant potatoes and pink pineapples, all courtesy of intentional genetic manipulation. In addition, GMO foods are staples in many parts of our agricultural supply systems. Bacteria produce human insulin in vats……and on and on.
SCENARIO: Fifty years from now, our female descendants will have discussions with physicians regarding pregnancy. What choices will there be twenty, fifty, and a hundred years from now? For us currently, there are some leaps of faith, not unlike those found in the antivaxxers: “let your body heal naturally and avoid an intervention that may backfire.” So it will be in the future: having a baby through normal conception, unscreened, might well be considered irresponsible, annoying, and old fashioned—- when you could, through In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), have the option to “weed out” genes or embryos that carry risk for disease before the impregnation occurs. I thought the expense and technical expertise needed to have a pregnancy like this would limit it to a small minority. The author makes the case that the expense and technical expertise is on a track like Moore’s law with computer efficiency ie doubling every two years. FYI: 1.5% of pregnancies in the US are done with IVF and 5% in Japan (2017). I was surprised by those numbers. Asian mothers are offered panels of testing for genes already if they attempt IVF.
VIAGRA: We follow a slippery slope with this approach to pregnancy. Viagra was initially advertised with a very senior Senator Dole extolling the benefit having this option for a deficit in his life. Within a few years, that advertising was gone; Viagra is marketed to men of all ages with a goal of enhancing sexual performance; the medical issues raised initially are now a side show. The initial appeal of IVF would be to deselect the embryos found to have Downs syndrome, Tay Sachs, Sickle Cell……these are disease caused by a single gene and the technology to do this not so complicated. A majority of people might agree that this seems reasonable. With time, there will be options to expand the screening of negative features involving multiple genes and then selecting for positive features as well. We are at the forefront understanding the roles in genes for athletics, musical aptitude, personality, and intelligence. Parents may well be interested in responding to the question before implantation, what do you want to know? What do you want to do? Currently, a minority would want to jump into that world.
EUGENICS: Selecting embryos before implantation and eliminating those with “negative” traits has an appeal. It is done preventatively and avoids the current practice: screening for Down’s syndrome during pregnancy and asking the parents to decide about carrying the pregnancy to term or terminating the pregnancy. And that is different than the Third Reich’s take on Down’s syndrome. To go further: there are collections of genes associated with certain physical and mental capabilities: aptitude for music or marathon running. It is within the norms of many families now, to train children to achieve skill or greatness along certain lines; how tempting to consider selecting an embryo that has improved capabilities. Imagine a generation having had this genetic destiny cast on them with the associated expectations on the part of the parents: “I made sure you had the genes to make you a musical master (or a fast runner) and you don’t want to follow through?” The generation gap and its normal resentments will expand in this world. Doing it for the furthering of the race is likely to ring hollow—it would be a selfish act without a guarantee of success.
NON-EUGENIC GENETICS: as the cost of sequencing genes continues to be done more cheaply and more quickly, there is a need for Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs to assist in sorting out the very complex world of genes and gene expression. Screening the genes of someone could still be useful for general healthcare: as a doctor, my ability to forecast side effects with drugs was based on published statistical probabilities, confounding effects of other medications used, underlying medical conditions, and empiric observations. A time is coming when one’s genetic profile can be tied to the success of one drug over another for a condition and avoidance of others altogether. That could take the guessing out of many prescriptions and therapies more successful on the first try.
COMPLEXITY: if one uses stem cells and transforms them into eggs and sperm, one no longer has to harvest eggs for fertilization—a limiting factor. There are many many more eggs to work with using this technique. With rapid sequencing of DNA one can screen hundreds of fertilized eggs for a variety of conditions and transform the surviving and selected cells to do it over again and again with a focus on specific genes (say those associated with IQ potential). Repeat this process and one could impregnate a woman with her great great grandchildren’s generation of a fertilized egg. The author suggests that within a hundred or so years, such offspring could see an elevation of IQ by 60-100 points. Is this a good idea? If our society chooses to forbid such technology but other societies permit it, is there a likely genetics arms race? Are we smart enough to plan for that? I have known plenty of really smart people who do really stupid things; is pushing evolution towards humans with higher IQ’s a guarantee of success?
NATURE: I regard many of these problems like I regard the nuclear industry. Once it was invented, there was no going back. A difference, is that nuclear energy was novel with no precedent. As we speak of evolution and genetics, humans have had a profound effect on this “naturally.” For example, large mammals by-and-large were eliminating from the Americas with the introduction of humans. 10,000 years ago, chickens in the wild might lay an egg a month. With the domestication of chickens and using selective choices, humans developed chickens that can deliver an egg a day. Similarly, cows can produce huge amounts of milk, without precedent to the farmers of even 200 years ago. Such changes are not always positive. Mao Tse Tung famously directed the elimination of sparrows in China. They were a nuisance. Their absence allowed for a dramatic increase in insects who fed on crops. A famine ensued. Humans directing evolution often make mistakes. The Chinese one child policy and the ability to screen a fetus for sex as well as the availability of abortion led to a demographic shift in Chinese society (more grown men than women) that causes social problems and not just in China. This raises the concern about personal choice vs the needs and risks to the population in general. That reminds me of the issue we confront with world-wide epidemics.
ETHICS OF BIOENGINEERING: it all starts with a simple question; what if we could cure Sickle Cell disease with this technique? Sounds positive and yet, all other things equal, if you could deliver on this in Africa, more people would die of malaria. If you get rid of malarial mosquitoes with genetic manipulation, you could crash ecosystems with unpredictable results. The hubris humans have to improve their world has been proven to be significant as are the risks we face from it. To pass on inherited traits to offspring with this technique is in effect a form of eugenics just as infanticide for defective infants was back in the day.
Genetic diversity is an important component of how evolution feeds adaptations to a changing environment. Knowing what we know about how people make choices for virtually everything, maintaining diversity is not high on that list and the impact could be huge. Whether by “natural” selective breeding or direct genetic breeding, imagine the plague that destroys all selected corn plants from these efforts. We will be starting over with relatively non productive stocks likely found in the valleys of the Andes or Africa in that event. It is a problem already and this technology could make it even more risky while potentially offering the solutions as well.
If we could offer parents screening and choices to allow their children to be smarter and stronger, how does that help humanity when depending on where they are born and the color of their skin, their ability to use these traits are already constrained? If we made use of the genes expressed naturally in our current world, maybe this science fiction future would remain just that, a fiction.
Human judgement and choices complicate even an apparent positive effect of this technology. The green revolution allowing for more production per acre for a variety of crops has saved humanity from dire conditions while allowing the population to continue growing unchecked. Europeans who are disparaged for their colonial history are now at the forefront advocating for more rigid control in the environment and this technological revolution much more than their counterparts in the US and Asia. Golden Rice is a GMO product eliciting Greenpeace-like activism to resist. The effect of that activism will be minimal in Europe but quite dramatic in Asia and Africa. The objection to these actions by Greenpeace led to the suggestion that such lobbying is as if the United States decided to boycott all automobiles in 1910 or the Europeans, printing precess in the 1500’s.
The cat is out of the bag………………..
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