Hacking Darwin

by Jamie Metzl

  The parallels between the ugly eugenics of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth and what’s beginning to happen today are not insignificant. In both cases, a science at an early stage of development and with sometimes uncertain accuracy was or is being used to make big decisions—forced sterilization of the “feeble-minded” in the old days, not selecting a given embryo for implantation or terminating a pregnancy based on genetic indications today. In both cases, scientists and government officials seek to balance individual reproductive liberty with broader societal goals. In both cases, future potential children lose the opportunity to be born. In both cases, societies and individuals make culturally biased but irrevocable decisions about which lives are worth living and which are not. These parallels offer us a powerful warning.

  But if we collectively paint all human genetic engineering with the brush of Nazi eugenics, we would kill the incredible potential of genetics technologies to help us live healthier lives. “If cannibalism is our greatest taboo,” Oxford philosopher Richard Dawkins wrote, “positive eugenics…is a candidate for the second… In our time, the word has a chilling ring. If a policy is described as ‘eugenic,’ that is enough for most people to rule it out at once.”25 Bioethicist Diane Paul writes that the term eugenics is “wielded like a club. To label a policy ‘eugenics’ is to say, in effect, that it is not just bad but beyond the pale.”26 That there probably is an element of eugenics in decisions being made today on the future of human genetic engineering should push us to be careful and driven by positive values, but the specter of past abuses should not be a death sentence for this potentially life-affirming technology or the people it could help.

  Unlike the earlier eugenics movement, today’s models of prenatal testing and embryo selection are not state controlled, coercive, racist, or discriminatory by standard uses of those terms. “Modern eugenic aspirations are not about the draconian top-down measures promoted by the Nazis and their ilk,” journalist Jon Entine writes. “Instead of being driven by a desire to ‘improve’ the species, new eugenics is driven by our personal desire to be as healthy, intelligent and fit as possible—and for the opportunity of our children to be so as well. And that’s not something that should be restricted lightly.”27 Entine’s point can be debated, but for our and our species’ sake, we must be having the debate.

  A basic tenet of liberal societies is that wherever possible the individual should be protected from the excessive power of the state. One expression of this philosophy in many societies is the protection of a woman’s right to make her own reproductive decisions on issues like contraception and abortion. “Reproductive freedom,” New Zealand philosopher Nicholas Agar writes in his book Liberal Eugenics: In Defense of Human Enhancement, “encompasses the choice of whether or not to reproduce, with whom to reproduce, when to reproduce, and how many times to reproduce… Liberal eugenics adds the choice of certain of your children’s characteristics to that list of freedoms.”

  Agar contrasts liberal eugenics with what he calls “authoritarian eugenics,” the idea that the state should determine what constitutes a good life. “While old-fashioned authoritarian eugenicists sought to produce citizens out of a single centrally designed mold,” Agar writes, “the distinguishing mark of the new liberal eugenics is state neutrality. Access to information about the full range of genetic therapy will allow prospective parents to look to their own values in selecting improvements for future children. Authoritarian eugenicists would do away with ordinary procreative freedoms. Liberals instead propose radical extensions of them.”

  As opposed to decisions made by governments in authoritarian systems based on race and class, liberal eugenics systems would focus on the individual. In the society Agar envisions, “parents’ particular conceptions of the good life would guide them in their selection of enhancements for their children,”28 but these parental choices would need to be balanced by consideration of the broader societal impact of their individual decisions.

  Parental choice, however, is an important principle but not an unlimited one. The United States, for example, has upheld the right of Amish parents to separate their children from modernity and of Hasidic Jews to raise their children speaking only Yiddish and not learning English. Many U.S. states offer less latitude for pregnant women who poison their fetuses through drug and alcohol use while pregnant or for Christian Science parents who deny their children urgent medical care. It’s also probably impossible to think of individual parental choices outside of the social and political context.

  Given that selecting embryos to avoid disease is already permitted in most jurisdictions around the world, it’s unlikely other reproductive decisions intended to enhance the health and well-being of future children will be forever banned in most countries. When this happens, the essential question for parents will move from whether to select and ultimately manipulate embryos but how much. Some will call this eugenics, but the connotations will change.

  In his provocative 2017 Los Angeles Times editorial “Is There Such a Thing as Good Eugenics?” Adam Cohen asserts, “Twentieth century eugenics has rightly been called a ‘war on the weak… [t]wenty-first century eugenics…can be a war for the weak.”29 This point is necessarily controversial, but just as genetically engineering our future children comes with a potential cost, so does the alternative.

  It’s not that hard to imagine future scenarios when humans would need to genetically alter ourselves in order to survive a rapid change in our environment resulting from global warming or intense cooling following a nuclear war or asteroid strike, a runaway deadly virus, or some kind of other future challenge we can’t today predict. Genetic engineering, in other words, could easily shift from being a health or lifestyle choice to becoming an imperative for survival. Preparing responsibly for these potential future dangers may well require we begin developing the underlying technologies today, while we still have time.

  Thinking about genetic choice in the context of imagined future scenarios is, in many ways, abstract. But potentially helping a child live a healthier, longer life is anything but. Every time a person dies, a lifetime of knowledge and relationships dissolves. We live on in the hearts of our loved ones, the books we write, and the plastic bags we’ve thrown away, but what would it mean if people lived a few extra healthy years because they were genetically selected or engineered to make that possible? How many more inventions could be invented, poems written, ideas shared, and life lessons passed on? What would we as individuals and as a society be willing to pay, what values might we be willing to compromise, to make that possible? What risks would we individually and collectively be willing to take on? Our answers to these questions will both propel us forward and present us with some monumental ethical challenges.

  Some people today see diversity as a way to redress historical wrongs committed against minority populations. Others see it as a way of making sure our universities, corporations, governments, and other institutions benefit from a wide range of perspectives. All of these understandings miss an even more essential point: diversity has been and remains the sole survival strategy of our species.

  Random mutation, one of the two pillars of Darwinian evolution, is just another name for the precursor of diversity. Diversity allowed our single-cell ancestors to morph into what we are today. Diversity was what both ensured those species without helpful adaptations would die off and those benefiting from adaptations more suitable to the changing world around them would thrive. Evolution sometimes feels like an inexorable progression from better to worse, from the knuckle-walking monkey to the upright man, but this is not the case. Evolution is directionless and agnostic about its winners and losers. Conditions are always changing, so evolving creatures generally have no sense they are evolving and no possible way of knowing which traits will be selected for, or against, in the context of future conditions they cannot imagine.

  If given a choice, monkeys in trees would probably choose to make themselves better c
limbers. Our tree-living ancestors must have looked at that first lunatic who climbed down as some type of freak, but the adaptations associated with savannah living conferred advantages that ensured the associated genetic mutations persisted. Most of our ancestors were not the first early humans to leave Africa, only the first early humans to leave Africa and ultimately survive. They lasted presumably because they evolved a set of traits that gave them a better chance of survival within their new context. Had we asked our ancestors at the point of leaving Africa what traits they would need, they would have had no way of knowing. Genetic diversity conferred a range of traits, some of which made survival possible for a small subset of people.

  Diversity, therefore, is conferred upon us, but we would, by definition, be hard-pressed to overcome our biases of the present moment. Left to our own devices, we humans are easily swayed by what we see around us. A recent Australian study that reviewed the records of 154 women’s selections of donors at a Queensland sperm bank found that women preferred well-educated, introverted, and analytical donors over those who were less educated, extroverted, and less methodical.30 If given the choice, it’s a good guess that most parents would want smarter, taller, better looking, and more compassionate kids because these traits are valued in today’s world.31 Each of these traits, however, reflects our specific cultural bias.

  The closer we move toward sensitive and culturally significant issues like race, sexual orientation, and intelligence, the greater the danger we might collectively be swayed by pernicious social biases. Very often concerned people ask me in the question-and-answer session following my talks whether embryo selection or gene editing could be used for parents to not have a gay child or to make sure their child is light-skinned. The answer is maybe.

  Although there is no single “gay gene,” the irrefutable case has been made through twin and genome-wide association studies that there is at least a significant genetic foundation to homosexuality.32 It would be impossible to today determine which among the fifteen or so embryos being considered for implantation in the mother would have the greatest likelihood of being gay, but this may not always be the case.

  The same is true for skin color. A 2018 study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania identified eight genes that significantly influence a person’s skin pigmentation.33 A single mutation of the SLC24A5 gene accounts for most of what we call white skin. It is likely that parents with different skin tones selecting from among their embryos will in the not-too-distant future be able to choose one that has a lighter or darker complexion. In the longer term, it will probably be possible to genetically edit a preimplanted embryo or even perform gene therapy on adults to change their color. The usual human colors wouldn’t necessarily be the only options. Japanese scientists have already used CRISPR to change the colors of flowers from purple to white by disrupting a single gene.34 It is only a matter of time until a wide range of color-changing options will be available to humans, should we choose to use them. Choices like these that could reduce human diversity would not only have significant and negative social implications but also potentially expose us to yet-unknown risks.

  Over the past eight thousand years our ancestors domesticated corn to increase yield, but because this modified corn became so genetically homogenous its susceptibility to blight increased. Similarly, if enough people around the world start making individual decisions about their future children based on whatever cultural biases, we run the collective risk of weaponizing our biases and making our species more genetically uniform and less able to withstand some type of natural virus, germ warfare, or other yet unknown challenge in the future. If we don’t recognize the evolutionary benefits of our diversity in its many facets, we run the risk of harming ourselves, even in the name of our individual and collective efforts to help ourselves.

  In 2017, a U.S. military contractor invited me to a conference that brought together futurists and military leaders to explore what impact the genetics revolution might have on the future of warfare and how the U.S. military might prepare. After dividing into breakout sessions designed to generate different scenarios for what might happen, each group came back to share their thoughts. The first team outlined how future soldiers could be genetically engineered to be great at pattern recognition.

  “Why don’t we just recruit high-functioning autistic people into the military who are already far better at solving certain types of cognitive problems than non-autistics?” I piped in, trying not to be snarky. “Why genetically engineer people with great pattern recognition when we already have them?”35

  These types of questions must broadly be asked as we enter the age of human genetic engineering. Why breed people for superior IQ when we could significantly enhance our society’s collective intellectual and problem-solving capability by providing real opportunity and better schools to the least advantaged among us? Why use embryo selection to reduce the rates of bipolar disorder when some of the world’s greatest artists are great because their brains function differently?36

  These are tough questions for which there are no easy answers, but the idea of parents selecting embryos less likely to become gay adults or biracial parents choosing or gene editing kids to be one color or another is not only morally repulsive but also a potential blow to the beneficial diversity of our species. Because these could well be potential choices in the future, we must redouble our efforts today to find better and new ways to celebrate and invest in our diversity and ensure our common genetic data pool is diverse to prevent the genetic revolution from ultimately becoming a horror show. Diversity is our species’ greatest asset should we choose to embrace it. Reducing our diversity, even with the best of intentions, could become our Achilles’ heel.

  On the other hand, it would also be a mistake to over-fetishize every aspect of genetic diversity. A few genes can save us, others can kill us, and most everything else sits somewhere in the middle being experienced differently in different contexts. To suggest we should accept the terrible genetic diseases that kill our children out of respect for genetic diversity or that we should allow parents or scientists to engineer children with debilitating diseases to enhance diversity would be preposterous. And as much as genetic engineering might be used to limit genetic diversity, it could also conceivably be used to enhance it. Either way, to realize the greatest upside of the genetic revolution we will have to articulate, celebrate, and affirm in our individual and collective choices the value of diversity in the coming genetic age in a far more profound manner than we do today.

  Like diversity, issues of equity will also need to be front and center in our thinking.

  All technology has an uneven adoption curve.

  There’s always a first person or a first group to have access to a particular advantageous technology. Scientists are divided about whether our Homo sapiens ancestors out-competed, out-hunted, out-survived, and/or out-humped our Neanderthal cousins to extinction, but whatever the case we used our tools, social strategies, sex organs, and brains to devastating impact. Tens of thousands of years later, the Mongols built the largest geographic empire in history, marrying the military advantage that stirrups gave their cavalry to a ruthless warrior culture and new ideas for social organization. Although China invented gunpowder and the compass, these technologies were fully weaponized into guns and warships by the Europeans, who used these capabilities to colonize the rest of the world. In each of these cases, a relatively small technological advantage was levered into decades or centuries of domination or, in the case of the Neanderthals, extinction.

  There are many ways the unequal distribution of genetic technologies could lead to these kinds of frightening results. If only wealthy and otherwise advantaged people can select or genetically engineer their children to have certain useful traits, their children could come to dominate societies because of their real or perceived capabilities. Employers might not want to take the risk of hiring someone who was not enhanced if the odds of an enhanced person doing the sa
me job better, by whatever metric, were statistically higher or even if there was only a false perception this was the case. If enhancements are allowed and unequal access continues over time, each generation of an advantaged family could become more genetically enhanced than their disadvantaged peers until the difference between two groups becomes unbridgeable.

  But despite the critical importance of striving for greater levels of equality, absolute equality should not be a goal. The popular 1997 film Gattaca, in which an unenhanced young man wanting to become an astronaut is blocked because of his genetic profile, explored this idea. The protagonist eventually makes it to space through grit, wit, and wile. In real life, would a society really want a genetically nonenhanced person traveling to space if someone else was genetically optimized to be more resistant to radiation and maintain bone density better in a zero-gravity environment?

  Many technologies start out being used by a few elites before later reaching a wider audience. Meeting with female villagers participating in a microcredit program during my 2012 visit to Bangladesh, I was incredibly impressed by what all the women receiving the loans were doing to start small businesses and take care of their families but saddened that they seemed to have little chance to do more. With my iPhone connecting me to the universal library of the internet, I felt the already huge advantage of my privileged American birth widening. How could these poor people ever afford the expensive technological marvel I held in my pocket? I wondered. Today, Bangladeshi villagers can get a new smartphone for an affordable $60, and usage levels are skyrocketing. If we had demanded equal access to smartphones for everyone from the get-go, the smartphone industry would never have grown quickly enough to drive down prices to where these phones became accessible to poor people around the world.