by Jamie Metzl
ARTISTIC:
Performing, Music, Drawing, Dancing, Literature, Linguistic
OTHERS:
Sensitivity to Secondhand Smoke, Insensitivity to Secondhand Smoke
NORMAL PARENTING: GENETIC LEVERAGED PARENTING:
Jane learnt to walk and talk as an infant, her parents didn’t think much of her natural talents.
Jane’s natural inclination for music was known from the beginning as an infant
Jane enjoyed running and playing outdoors with other children. By a stroke of luck, she won a race.
Jane’s parents honed her musical sense by exposing her to music and bought her musical toys.
Jane’s parents thought she had an aptitude for running. Lots of money was spent for expensive shoes, equipment and classes to invest in Jane’s talent.
Jane’s parents enrolled her to music lessons when she was three.
After a while, Jane lost interest in running and wanted to pick up piano instead.
Jane became a prodigy at seven years old and started composing when she was ten.
Though Jane displayed her natural flair for music, Jane’s parents were not willing to invest in expensive classes and a piano for her for fear of Jane’s interest loss again in piano after some time like what she did to sports.
As a result, Jane never got to pursue piano and music in life.
Source: Map My Gene, http://www.mapmygene.com/services/talent-gene-test/.
These types of genetic tests are, for now, far more useful for identifying single-gene mutation risks than for accurately predicting any general traits, but the competitive pressure on parents to access this still unproven and, for now at least, still unreliable technology is enormous. Recognizing this, some governments are stepping in to protect consumers. Believing the tests were not sufficiently accurate and that the general public could not handle too much access to genetic data, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2013 temporarily banned the consumer genetics company 23andMe from providing predictive health information to customers about their likelihood of getting genetic diseases. In Europe, France and Germany ban direct-to-consumer genetic testing.20
But this level of caution will not always be entirely in order as the genetic tests become more predictive by providing polygenic scoring to more accurately predict even complex traits and as consumers get better at handling the information. Harvard medical geneticist Robert Green and his team have shown in a series of studies that regular people can handle even complicated genetic information if properly educated.21 Providing complex genetic data to the general public would require massive public education, standard setting, and health-sector reform, but Green’s work shows this is doable. This type of accessible testing, however, will only be the beginning of the consumer-driven adoption curve of genetic technologies, including by parents.
Would the subset of parents in Korea and elsewhere already willing to send their children to all-night cram schools be willing to select embryos optimized for the type of success to which the parents aspire? If they were already selecting embryos, might they be willing to genetically alter them to eliminate disease risk and, while doing that, make a few genetic tweaks that could enhance their future child’s competitiveness in one area or another? If they are already deploying so much energy to give their children advantages accrued after birth, in other words, how big of a step will it really be for parents to want to give their children advantages accrued before birth?
The world’s greatest engineers, computer programmers, and other technical specialists all benefit from a range of special advantages over their peers. Genetic aptitude may only be one element of this success. As in sports, grit resilience, emotional intelligence, personality, relationships, group dynamics, and luck also play a big role. But differences in any one of these, including genetic aptitude, could mean the difference between being—and being recognized and rewarded as—the world leader in many particular fields and not.
Because the prospect of an even partly genetically determined future is justifiably frightening to many people today, parents will rightly worry that making decisions about their future children’s genetic makeup could diminish their children’s sense of autonomy, agency, value, and free will. For these and other reasons, most parents will be able to partly or fully opt out of the genetic testing, assisted reproduction, genetic screening, embryo selection, and genetic engineering at every step along the way. But the choices to opt in, opt out, or do something in between will all come at a competitive cost parents, just like the national Olympic committees, will need to weigh.
Those parents who opt-in for full genetic optimization might, to give one example, ensure their children don’t get certain diseases, live healthier longer, and have greater chances of excelling at a given task. If the opt-in benefits are great enough, we can imagine an accelerating curve of advantages. A generation of enhanced people could gain the advantages necessary to ensure that their children have greater access to the next generation of enhancements, and so on down the line. These people would also likely want to make sure their children only mated with partners with similar genetic alterations and that each generation was further genetically engineered so that the multigenerational impact of their enhancements would accrue.
Alternately, those parents who opt in might also be setting up their children for a lifetime of pain and suffering if the children aren’t interested in performing the functions for which they have been engineered to excel. Because genetics won’t be the only success factor, the child might also not be particularly good at what he or she has been optimized to do in the first place. There could also be a social backlash against enhanced people or some other unforeseen danger.
Those who opt out, on the other hand, might relegate their children to second-class status if their children can never match their genetically optimized or enhanced peers in some areas. The capacity difference between those opting in and those opting out, in this scenario, could grow consistently over time, potentially even creating two classes of people like H. G. Wells predicted in his 1895 novel The Time Machine.
Whatever happens, competition is likely to drive the process forward. And just like sports authorities and parents, states will also have significant competitive incentives to get on the genetic enhancement bandwagon.
When it became clear in 1944 that the allies would win the Second World War, American and Allied planners started imagining a better world that could emerge from the global ashes of destruction. Because they recognized fixed sovereignty and excessive nationalism as the cancers leading to the two world wars, these visionaries built institutions like the United Nations, the World Bank, and NATO to support new ideas of shared sovereignty and communal responsibility. They established concepts like transnational human rights and international law designed to temper the aggressive and all too often dangerous competition between states.
In many ways, these plans succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. American enlightened self-interest, backed by military might, provided the framework for growing peace and prosperity across much of the globe. In the decades following the war, the world experienced greater levels of economic growth, innovation, and improvements to the general well-being than in any previous period in human history, despite the decades-long Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union.
But countries, like people, exist in a highly competitive context resembling biological evolution, where the status quo never lasts forever. Just like biological organisms translate evolved capabilities into competitive advantages, countries translate the combination of the talents of their populations, governance structures, and natural resources into national power that can be deployed to educate more people, build better governments, get more resources, and gain advantages over others.
Although political theorist Francis Fukuyama declared that the “end of history” had arrived when it looked in 1989 as if liberal democracy had beaten out all other forms of government, this theory crashed into the rocks of the natural
history of state competition.22 After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union created a brief moment where U.S.-led globalism ascended, a new challenger was already emerging in the wings.
China has been a great civilization for over four thousand years that fell on hard times in recent centuries. Failing to modernize, it was defeated in a series of battles with European adversaries and Japan over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then suffered terrible destruction as Chinese nationalists battled the invading Japanese during World War II. After the Chinese Communist forces defeated the nationalists in a civil war and took control of the country in 1949, Mao Tse-tung declared that the Chinese people had “stood up” after so many years of foreign domination. But standing up under Mao would have brutal consequences for the Chinese people. In the twenty years following the revolution, Mao’s policies devastated China and its people and wiped out its already small industrial and technological base. During the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ’70s, many universities were closed, scientists were exiled to the countryside, and research came to a screeching halt.
Assuming power a couple of years after Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping recognized science and technology as “primary productive forces” needed to begin laying the foundation for China’s growth. Universities were reopened. Scientists were rehabilitated.
But as China steadily became wealthier, it bristled at the perceived constraints imposed by American economic, political, and military dominance and agitated for a return to the exalted Middle Kingdom status China had once enjoyed. Achieving this aspiration required continued economic growth. China’s leaders felt it also required a massive military buildup to protect China’s access to raw materials and project power at home and abroad. More recently, President Xi Jinping articulated his aspiration for China to achieve its rightful place as a “global leader” in “comprehensive national strength and international influence” by 2050 by becoming a world leader in the technologies of the future. China set its sights on matching and then surpassing its greatest rival.
The United States has been the world’s leader in science innovation for nearly a century and has reaped tremendous rewards from pioneering the jet, space, computer, information, biotechnology, genetics, and other scientific revolutions. America’s technology leadership ensured that many of the world’s leading companies in these sectors would be American ones. At the cusp of its breakout moment for a next generation of revolutionary technologies, including genetics, China’s national obsession is not to miss the boat again.
Beijing’s “Sputnik moment” arrived when DeepMind’s AlphaGo algorithm trounced China’s human champions in the game of Go. Already obsessed with harnessing their country’s economic, military, and political might to challenge U.S. hegemony, China’s leaders realized that becoming the world’s leader in AI and other related technologies was the key to winning the struggle for the future across all areas of technology and national power.23 Because advanced AI is so central to uncovering the secrets of the genome, this aspiration had major implications for the future of human genetic engineering.
Beijing’s ambitious July 2017 Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan appeared to borrow liberally from the Obama administration’s 2016 plan24 but took the national security implications of AI leadership a significant step further. “AI has become a new focus of international competition,” Beijing’s document asserted, and China must “firmly seize the strategic initiative in the new stage of international competition in AI development, to create new competitive advantage, opening up the development of new space, and effectively protecting national security.” The document set several goals for China: to be on par with the world’s leading countries in AI by 2020; for AI to be its “primary driver” of industrial growth by 2025; and to become “the world’s primary AI innovation center” and occupy “the commanding heights of AI technology” by 2030.25
The Chinese government’s 2018–2020 Three-Year Action Plan for Promoting the Development of a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Industry seeks to make China the leader in integrating AI in the health-care, robotics, manufacturing, and automobile and other sectors. The government recruited leading Chinese IT firms including Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent to build national AI innovation platforms.26 For the first time ever, more venture capital funding went to Chinese start-up AI companies in 2017 than to American ones.27
Doubling down on the national security implications of the AI revolution, the document called for the implementation of what it called a “military-civilian integration development strategy, to promote the formation of an all-element, multi-field, high efficiency AI military-civilian integration pattern.”28
In the United States, by the time the Chinese plan was issued the Obama administration had been replaced by the Donald Trump administration. It took the new U.S. president a year and a half to appoint a science advisor to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and even by then a majority of the staff positions in the OSTP had not been filled.29 The president’s proposed 2018 budget called for major cuts at the National Institutes of Health, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, and other federal agencies involved with AI research and science more generally. Immigration visas, including for exceptionally talented specialists, were restricted. Among the few recognitions by the administration of the importance of AI was the creation of a White House Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence in May 2018, but little seemed to come from the effort.30
With the U.S. government less focused on supporting the technologies of the future, China is vying aggressively to assume leadership in unlocking the secrets of the genome and ushering in the new era of precision medicine to help realize the country’s broader strategic aspirations.
Evidence of China’s commitment to winning this race in advanced genetics and personalized medicine is everywhere. China’s recently announced plan to establish national leadership in precision medicine,31 for example, dwarfed the much smaller initiative pledged by the Obama administration, later undermined by President Trump.* Although the U.S. company Illumina remains the leader in building advanced sequencing machines, China is quickly becoming the dominant power in bringing together the massive data sets that will drive the next phases of understanding how genes function.
U.S. research capabilities remain the best in the world, but Chinese authors’ publications in the world’s leading medical journals have doubled in recent years, and the number of U.S. patents granted to Chinese inventors and companies is increasing at nearly 30 percent annually, far faster than their American counterparts.32 Chinese research and development spending has increased by an astounding average of 15 percent a year for most of the past two decades and is now second largest in the world. It is still less than the United States but more than all the European Union countries combined. China also awards more science and engineering PhDs than any other country.33
With their massive scientific, investment, and industrial bases, the United States and China are increasingly competing in a two-horse race to be the leading economy and scientific powerhouse of the future. This competition will impact every advanced technology influenced and revolutionized by AI, genomics in many ways foremost among them. “In the age of AI, a U.S.-China duopoly is not just inevitable,” Kai-Fu Lee, founder of Beijing-based technology investment firm Sinovation Ventures, and former Microsoft and Google executive, recently asserted. “It has already arrived.”34 As researchers Eleonore Pauwels and Pratima Vidyarthi write, “Increasingly, the U.S.-China relationship will not be defined by the ownership of 20th century manufacturing industries but by a race in genetic and computing innovation that will drive the economy of the future.”35
Some of this competition will be win-win, where humanity at large benefits from a faster rate of progress realized through competition. Some of it will be zero-sum, where some societies, companies, and individuals will l
ose power, market share, and perhaps even autonomy as others gain them. Because the wealth and power that will accrue to those countries, companies, and people who lead these revolutions is immense and unpredictable, the race is on. The companies and countries that crack the code of diseases like cancer and thousands of others and gain the ability to understand and potentially alter other human traits will be not just the biology versions of Google and Alibaba but have the potential to be more equivalent in their power and influence to the thirteenth-century Mongols, the nineteenth-century British, or the twentieth-century Americans.
As these two great ecosystems of innovation compete, each will have a unique set of strengths and weaknesses that will together determine how this rivalry plays out and impacts the application of genetic technologies.
China, for example, will have larger genetic data sets, because its population is larger, it is collecting genetic samples much more aggressively, and because data privacy regulations are far weaker than in the United States or Europe. America and Europe’s higher levels of privacy protection for personal data could help maintain public support for genetics research and applications or could become an Achilles’ heel if it keeps American and European researchers from accessing genetic data sets as robust as that of their Chinese counterparts.36
As this rivalry plays out, new national champion companies will emerge, the life sciences equivalents of the American FAAMG technology behemoths (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google) and Chinese BATs (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent). Already, American companies like IBM and new Chinese companies like iCarbonX are positioning themselves to assume this mantle.
Founded by former BGI CEO Wang Jun in October 2015, iCarbonX seeks “to build an ecosystem of digital life based on a combination of an individual’s biological, behavioral and psychological data, the Internet and artificial intelligence.”37 By combining comprehensive biological, patient-generated data with AI technology, it plans to help consumers better understand the medical, behavioral, and environmental factors in their lives to optimize their health and to help companies use genetic data to optimize their products and services. Wang Jun’s plan is to ultimately build a “predictive digital avatar” of hundreds of millions of customers,38 allowing them to pass from sequencing to fully digitizing themselves.39 “We can digitalize everyone’s life information,” Wang Jun says, “interpret the data, find more valuable law of life, and thus enhance the quality of people’s lives.”40 With Tencent and the private equity behemoth Sequoia capital as early investors, by 2017 iCarbonX quickly shot up to a $1 billion valuation, becoming China’s first biotechnology unicorn.41