by Jamie Metzl
We’ve already explored how governments and insurance companies will be incentivized to promote embryo screening and then gene editing to eliminate genetic diseases and avoid the cost of providing a lifetime of care to those who would otherwise be born with those diseases or develop them later in life. But saying that companies and governments will be incentivized to make embryo screening and genetic engineering more widely available does not mean they will do it effectively or at all, because even the inefficient status quo always has its protectors. On top of that, some parents with means will want to select and enhance their future children more aggressively despite whether their governments or insurance companies will pay for it. There are no easy answers, but it’s fair to ask whether preventing the first adopters from genetically enhancing their children would be the same as preventing the early adopters of smartphones and supercomputers from leveraging the advantages those technologies provided.
And while many people fear a dystopian future of genetic determinism, the case for genetic identification should not be rejected out of hand. Mozart grew up in the Hapsburg court, but how many Mozarts are today languishing in Syrian refugee camps? Will we always think it wrong for music programs to know which of their young applicants are genetically predisposed to having perfect pitch?37 Will we oppose the genetic screening of the world’s most disadvantaged communities to identify children with tremendous genetic potential and give them a better shot at realizing that potential or of all children to assess what teaching styles may best correspond to their learning abilities?
No one wants to live in a society where people are pegged at birth for certain roles and never have the opportunity to find their passions and show what they can achieve, and we must do all we can to provide equal opportunity to everyone. But providing extra opportunities for people with remarkable genetic potential in one area or another may come over time to be seen as a service to disadvantaged communities, a boon to national competitiveness, and the good and right thing to do. It could well be that some of us will want, over the coming decades and centuries, for our children to have enhanced abilities and traits.
POTENTIAL GENETIC ENHANCEMENTS
General intelligence
Super-sensory capabilities in their sight, hearing, or intuition
Specific intelligence best suited for a given function or task, like incredible math skills, special sense, or pattern recognition
Desirable behavioral traits
Creativity
Ability to extract nutrients from foods
Uniqueness as biological works of self-art
Survival capabilities, like an increased ability to survive nuclear fallout, deadly synthetic pathogens, a hotter earth, or the higher levels of radiation and lower gravity in space
Physical characteristics like beauty, height, stamina, or power
Ability to do other things we can today hardly imagine
Even if enhancements like these were not evenly distributed, a compelling case can be made that a small number of enhanced people, if motivated by positive values, could make tremendous contributions to various fields like science, philosophy, art, or politics that could make the world better for everyone.
As we co-evolve with our technology, it may be that we’ll need to generate a group of brilliant coders to extend the human role in our human-machine interface. It may be that human creativity and human qualities like empathy become so valued in an AI-defined world that we will start an arms race with each other to genetically engineer more empathic and creative children. As frightening as this might seem to some, restricting the genetic enhancement capacities we may need to maintain our species’ position in a world of artificial superintelligence might end up being like limiting horse and buggy speeds at the dawn of the automotive age.
Accepting that identifying genetic predispositions for a certain function could be justified, however, does not mean that we should passively accept a future where perceived capacities are determined by genetics or where the gap between genetically enhanced and unenhanced people continually grows.
After every talk I give on the future of human genetic engineering, someone asks about the future dangers of genetically engineered inequality. My answer is always the same. Genetic inequality should be a very real concern for our future. But if we are concerned about inequality at some distant point in the future, we should start living our values of equality today. Addressing the current difference between the average person reading this book and the average resident of the Central African Republic would be a good place to start.
Because of chronic civil war, 76 percent of the Central African Republic population lives in poverty, a quarter is displaced, half are food insecure, and 40 percent of young children are experiencing stunted growth. Widespread maternal malnutrition suggests that the cognitive function of these children is very likely, on average, significantly lower than that of average children born into more advantaged environments.38 In comparison to their Central African Republic counterparts, therefore, advantaged children from other countries are already genetically enhanced. If we care about equality—and genetic equality—as we should, advocating for it in our divided world today will model our best values for tomorrow, when genetically engineered inequality becomes a possibility.
As we aspire to live these values, however, we must also remember that some genetic inequality is part of being human, a central aspect of our diversity. The truest nightmare scenario for our species is not genetic inequality but complete genetic equality. At the same time, inequality run amok would become a terrible nightmare. The Goldilocks solution to this challenge may be that we need to find a balance between the excesses of too much and too little genetic equality. But members of a hubristic species like ours must at least consider challenges to such a seemingly reasonable hypothesis.
In his introduction of the idea of the Übermensch, or superman, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche recognized what it meant that humans had not plopped on the earth fully made, as the Bible suggests, but were instead products of an ongoing evolutionary process with our current form only one step along the way. This transitory version of us, according to Nietzsche, was something to be overcome. “All beings so far,” he asked, “have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man?”39
Julian Huxley, a zoologist and leader of the British Eugenics Society (and brother of Brave New World author Aldous), was an avowed eugenicist in the years before the Second World War who supported the voluntary sterilization of people with “mental defects” and restrictions on immigration into the United Kingdom. Even after Nazism drove a nail into the heart of the eugenics movement, Huxley struggled for years to define a more modern eugenics, based on principles of “scientific humanism.”40 In 1957, the same year that the Soviets launched Sputnik and ushered the world into a new era of big science, he wrote in his essay “Transhumanism” that:
The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way—but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature…the human species [can] be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.41
In the years since, the transhumanist movement has grown from an intellectually aligned group of thinkers and technologists into a global movement with its own international association, manifesto, and even candidates for political office. Championed by brilliant thinkers like Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, and Nick Bostrom, transhumanists, according to the 1998 Transhumanist Declaration, “believe that humanity’s potential is still mostly unrealized.” This potential can be broadened “by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suf
fering, and our confinement to planet Earth.” Individual humans should be afforded “wide personal choice over how they enable their lives,” including the “use of techniques that may be developed to assist memory, concentration, and mental energy; life extension therapies; reproductive choice technologies; cryonics procedures; and many other possible human modification and enhancement technologies.”42 Like eugenics and most religions before it, transhumanism imagines a world where humans transcend the limitations of their current biology.
But while Nietzsche’s imagining of the Übermensch gained sinister implications,43 the transhumanists and others like them are imagining an Über-intelligence combining human and machine capabilities into a seamless web of evolutionary revolution. These ideas are at the same time frightening and tantalizingly appealing.
The entire history of human existence has been marked by our incessant struggle to increase our chances of survival by becoming better at securing calories, protecting ourselves from the elements, and procreating. With every three steps forward we’ve made as a species, we’ve fallen two steps back as lifetimes of learning succumb to the aging decay of our brains and the destruction of death. If genetic technologies help us live healthier and longer, retain knowledge, and do many other things better, or even just make us feel we have the capacity to fight back against the caprice of our own biology, the magnetic pull of using these technologies will prove collectively irresistible.
But the intellectual connectivity between eugenics and transhumanism faces all of us as a warning. Saying that we will and probably should do something does not mean that there should be no limits. Even the most liberal societies have laws regulating what people can and can’t do in their intimate lives and beyond. The future of genetic engineering is in many ways the future of humanity. To enable our future, it must be embraced. To save us from ourselves, however, it must be regulated.
The challenge we face today, however, is that while the science is advancing exponentially, public understanding of it is only increasing linearly. The regulatory structures needed to find the right balance between scientific progress and ethical constraint are only inching forward glacially. And all of this is happening in a world where significant cultural and societal differences, driven by ever-greater levels of competition within and between societies, make it ever more difficult to find common ground.
Chapter 9
We Contain Multitudes
We humans aren’t just a genetically diverse species. We are also culturally diverse. It’s a big part of what makes our world so interesting and our relationships so rewarding.
This diversity of opinion and approach is a great asset for our species but also sometimes comes at a cost. We approach a range of issues related in one way or another to the future of human genetic engineering—including how we treat the environment, how we grow our food, and how we think about when life begins—very differently. When differences over issues like these became too great, we have argued, we have competed politically to gain an upper hand, and sometimes we have fought to prove our righteousness. Exploring how we handled these past debates on issues adjacent to human genetic engineering gives us both an indication of what we might expect as the genetic revolution plays out and a warning about just how difficult it will be to chart a common path forward.
Genetic engineering involves altering nature in ways our ancestors could hardly have imagined. Our forebears swimming in the oceans, crawling onto the land, and swinging in the trees didn’t have the capacity to massively disrupt the environment. We were just one among many species struggling to survive in the hostile and dangerous world around us, facing repeated bouts of near starvation and ravaged by diseases, and fighting off predators trying to kill us.
But as soon as we could, we humans fought back hard against the vagaries of nature. We developed weapons to kill other animals and occasionally each other, agriculture to secure a stable source of calories, and medicines to fight against the afflictions of nature. Some human communities were more rapacious than others, but all molded the world to our needs.
Even hunter-gatherer societies with traditions revering the natural forces around them were likely responsible for mass extinctions of other species. After the ancestors of the Native American Indians crossed the Bering Strait thirteen thousand years ago, for example, huge numbers of species in the new world—including mammoths, mastodons, dire wolves, giant beavers, and camelops—quickly went extinct.1 The same destruction of the natural habitat happened after the first humans arrived in Hawaii, New Zealand, Easter Island, and many other places.
Early Western theologians referenced the Old Testament to justify human domination of nature. “Let us make man in our image,” god says in Genesis 1:26, “and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”2 After using the philosophy of dominion to justify conquering the natural world and destroying their environment at home, European societies used their new scientific and industrial capabilities to brutally colonize and ruthlessly exploit the rest of the world. In the second half of the twentieth century, majority European sensibilities shifted, and Europeans became the world’s leading environmentalists and champions of global efforts to slow climate change.
European settlers in the United States cut down vast forests to build plantations, wiped out large ecosystems when covering the land with farms, and hunted animals like the bison to near-extinction for sport. But then preservationists like John Muir inspired Teddy Roosevelt to create America’s first national parks, and environmental consciousness grew. In the three remarkable years between 1969 and 1971, Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were created and the first Earth Day was proclaimed.*
China has similarly undergone a series of about-faces in popular and governmental perceptions of nature. Traditional Chinese culture valued a sense of harmony between humans and nature. The unity of man and nature, tian ten he yi, is prominent in major Chinese schools of thought like Confucianism and Taoism. “If close nets are not allowed to enter the pools and ponds,” the great fourth-century BC philosopher Mencius wrote, “the fishes and turtles will be more than can be consumed. If the axes and bills enter the hills and forests only at the proper time, the wood will be more than can be used.”3 As with other cultures, this harmony was an ideal not always realized.
After Mao and the Chinese Communists seized power in 1949, this nature-respecting traditional philosophy was turned on its head with a vengeance. In an effort to speed up China’s modernization, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward in 1958. To build an agricultural surplus to support industrialization, peasant farmers were forced into communes and told to plant up to ten times more seeds in their fields than they had previously done. The crops died from over-density. Because sparrows were eating some of the crops that remained, Mao and party leaders called on children to search out and destroy sparrow nests and on farmers to bang pots and pans together to drive the sparrows to exhaustion. After millions of sparrows were killed, the insect populations predictably exploded, further devastating agricultural yields. Even in this downward spiral, peasant farmers were ordered to build backyard furnaces to melt metals that could be used to speed up industrialization. Trees around the country were cut down to make wood for these useless furnaces, decimating China’s forests. When drought arrived, Mao’s China was wholly unprepared. Between 1958 and 1962, an estimated forty-five million Chinese people died, the greatest man-made famine in history on the back of Mao’s great ecocide.4
China’s destruction of its environment continued after Mao, even as the country implemented smarter industrialization policies. In 1978, newly installed premier Deng Xiaoping began a process of opening China’s economy that paved the way for the country’s rapid growth. Led mostly by engineers, the Chinese Communist Party behaved as if all of life could be e
ngineered. It adopted a one-child policy to engineer the population, massive works projects like the Three Gorges Dam and the South-to-North Water Diversion Project to engineer the environment, and industrial policies to engineer growth with little regard for pollution, safety, or worker rights. As China became the fastest growing economy in history over the next four decades, the grow-at-all-costs philosophy led to the contamination of the vast majority of its waterways, the poisoning of its air, and the transformation of previously verdant lands into deserts.5 But facing the threat of revolt from newly empowered middle class choking on China’s air and being poisoned by its food, recent Chinese leaders like Xi Jinping have made cleaning up China’s environment a priority.
All of these twists and turns in national approaches to environmental protection make clear that the national and communal ideologies that will guide our future actions on genetically altering ourselves will not be uniform within or especially between societies.
At its core, the coming debate over human genetic engineering will be a debate about how far we as a species—made up of many diverse groups with very different views on whether and how much to alter the biology bequeathed to us by evolution—will go. These types of distinct philosophies about our relation to nature have played out very differently in various societies in our contentious debates over genetically modified crops.
Our ancestors were selectively breeding plants long before Gregor Mendel figured out the mechanism governing the transfer of traits across generations. Understanding the rules of genetics made researchers even better able to breed all sorts of organisms with particular genetic traits. By understanding more of what genes are and do, scientists were able to go one step further by transferring genetic material from one organism to another.