Hacking Darwin

by Jamie Metzl

  This convergence of competitive pressures on the individual, business, and societal levels will push the boundaries of how genetic tools are utilized and confer an increasingly broad set of advantages on the people, companies, and countries who optimize their development and application. But while all of these competitive pressures drive the adoption of genetic technologies forward, the same types of competitive pressures also have the significant potential to drive conflict within and between communities and states.

  Imagine you are the leader of a society that has chosen to opt out of the genetic arms race by banning embryo selection and genetic alteration. Because your country is progressive enough to make a collective decision like this, parents desiring these services are free to go elsewhere to get what they want. But preventing the genetic alteration of your population by definition requires both restricting genetic enhancement at home and enhanced people or expectant mothers carrying genetically altered embryos from entering your country.

  To protect the genetic integrity of your populations and keep genetically enhanced people out, you would need to perform genetic tests on all people entering the country. But there would likely be no way of knowing whether a person had been genetically enhanced without knowledge of their genetic baseline—their genome prior to any changes. For those few people for whom genetic information from the moment a few days after their conception is available, their former and current genetics could be compared. Everyone not able to provide baseline genetic information might be banned from entering the country or threatened with long jail terms for procreating with a citizen of it.

  To prevent women from going abroad to have genetically engineered embryos implanted, pregnancy tests would need to be performed on all women of fertile age coming into your country. Prenatal blood tests would then need to be performed on the pregnant women to try to guess if the embryos had been manipulated in some way. Even with a list of the most fashionable genetic alterations,* this would be all but impossible. To be effective, these types of blood and prenatal tests would probably need to be accompanied by a polygraph asking pregnant women if they are carrying a genetically enhanced embryo.

  If someone already in the country was identified as enhanced, what penalties could possibly be meted out? Even if enhanced people were stripped of their citizenship and exiled for giving birth to a genetically enhanced person, their children would also need to be imprisoned, banned from procreating, or exiled. Enforcing any of this would require building the oversight machinery of the most totalitarian, intrusive, abusive, and downright odious police state with the ability to track peoples’ movements and continually monitor their biology and that of their children.

  But let’s say your country has done all this and become a preserve of nongenetically enhanced people. We’ve already seen why different states will adopt advanced genetic engineering technologies at different rates based on the significant historical, cultural, and structural differences between them. Imagine you are assessing your country’s options in a world where your country has opted out but other countries are moving forward with human genetic enhancement. Here are your general choices:

  Option 1: You recognize that your country has made a moral decision based on your collective values and accept facing the consequences, even if this means your country will gradually lose its competitive advantage and future generations will be less healthy, live shorter lives, and have fewer superstars of various sorts. You sit tight in your belief you’ve made the right choice. With schadenfreude in your heart, you hope your national decision will give you a competitive advantage if and when human genetic enhancement proves to be less beneficial and more dangerous than initially believed. Because your country has taken such a strong and principled stand on human genetic engineering, you feel duty-bound to protect this ban against encroachment. You are a progressive in your heart but recognize you’ll need some trappings of a police state to maintain your country’s genetic purity. How is it, you ask yourself late at night, that an idealist like you is starting to adopt the language of Nazism?

  Option 2: You try to hold the line and support your national decision but feel the pressure growing. Many of your most talented people are leaving the country to get the genetic enhancement services they want. Your unenhanced aspiring Olympic athletes and advanced coders are becoming community organizers, yogis, and nurses instead, pursuing careers that don’t require competition with their enhanced counterparts. Parents are having second thoughts about your ban as they hear about kids in other countries who are immune to genetic diseases, doing better on IQ tests, and achieving all sorts of seemingly superhuman feats. Your military is worried your future soldiers will be at a disadvantage compared to their genetically enhanced adversaries. The leaders of your national space program tell you that your unenhanced astronauts will, unlike their enhanced counterparts from other countries, not be able to withstand the radiation exposure and bone density loss of extended space travel. Opting out is seeming less appealing an option. You need a face-saving alternative. You call for a national referendum. After a heated debate, you cast your vote to opt in.

  Option 3: You see the benefits of genetic enhancement, but your citizens still believe meddling with the human genome and rewriting biology is a form of hubris likely to end badly. As a matter of principle, you recognize that societies, like people, are diverse and don’t begrudge the many other choices different societies make in all sorts of areas. But this is different. If other societies genetically enhance their populations and yours doesn’t, you may not just be at a competitive disadvantage in the future. You may not be able to protect your population from the very thing they have so adamantly opposed. Just like genetically modified crops spread into adjacent fields and gene drived mosquitoes spread across national boundaries, there will be really no way to protect your population from inheriting what you see as unnatural genetic modifications unless other countries can be prevented from allowing the most egregious modifications. Your only option is not just for your country to opt out but to define, promote, and seek to enforce limits on genetic enhancement for all countries to follow. You ask your top advisers how you can make this happen.

  First on their list is trying to use your national powers of persuasion to convince people and countries around the world that the downsides of human genetic enhancement outweigh the benefits. But what are the chances of your being able to convince the whole world to buy into your pessimism, particularly when other societies are enthusiastically racing forward into the genetics age?

  Second, you can try to build an alliance of like-minded states to collectively pressure other countries to limit genetic enhancement. Getting an enforceable global treaty to limit genetic enhancement is an appealing option, but it’s difficult to do. Most global leaders agree that human-induced climate change is threatening the livability of our planet, but we’ve not been able to get an enforceable global treaty to turn things around. Could a global effort limiting a technology many people and other states support be more effective than the high-profile efforts to limit climate change?

  Third, you identify the enhancing countries you are most concerned about and, if you have the power and influence to do it, try to stop them to set an example. One Central Asian country in particular has become a hub for highly aggressive genetic alterations of preimplanted embryos designed to create superhuman capabilities. Parents are sending their frozen eggs and sperm, or skin grafts and blood samples from which these sex cells are being generated, to this country for embryo selection, embryo mating, and genetic enhancement.42* For the Central Asian country, building this industry is seen as a moral imperative, a great business opportunity, and a strategic boon. You ask them nicely to stop. They refuse.

  Perhaps you try getting a group of countries to impose travel, economic, or other sanctions on the offending country. If none of these approaches work, are you willing to use military force to stop the genetic alteration of the human species? It’s certainly one option on the
list.

  Over the course of the twentieth century, an estimated 170 countries were invaded by others for a whole host of reasons, ranging from outright theft to ideological differences to pre-emption of a wide range of perceived threats.43 Is it so outlandish to believe that countries in the future might resort to military force to prevent other countries from altering the shared genetic code of humanity? Many countries have been invaded for far less.

  Military force would be an option if advanced genetic enhancement were only being carried out in a relatively weak country or even in international waters or space. But what happens if a powerful country like China takes the lead in deploying advanced genetic and other technology to enhance the capabilities of its populations while another country, say the United States, has entirely opted out for political and other reasons? Would the United States and China be willing to use as much force over the potential transformation of our species as they are now threatening over a few contested reefs in the middle of the South China Sea?44

  If all of these types of competitive pressures on the personal, communal, and national levels were rare in our human experience, an argument could be made that they could be avoided in the context of the genetics revolution. But because competition has been at the very core of our evolutionary process for almost four billion years, the overwhelming odds are that these same drivers will push us, unevenly but collectively, into our brave new world of increasingly sophisticated human genetic engineering.

  Both the competitive pressures pushing human genetic engineering forward and the potential conflict scenarios this competition is likely to spark are very real. If we do nothing to apply our best values to influence how the genetic revolution plays out, we will place ourselves on a path to conflict. Avoiding worst-case scenarios will require our species to come together as never before to figure how the benefits of revolutionary genetic technologies might be optimized and the dangers minimized.

  The good news is that we’ve tried to do this kind of thing before. The bad news is that we’ve never fully succeeded.

  *In a snub to the Trump administration, Congress rejected requested cuts to the precision medicine initiative and increased the program’s budget in 2017.

  *This would be something like the virus-scanner programs on computers, which continually generate lists of potential viruses to defend against.

  *This is not unthinkable. A 2014 New York Times article described a Chinese parent who sought to have six children born from U.S.-based surrogates to then choose the “pick of the litter” and put the others up for adoption.

  Chapter 11

  The Future of Humanity

  The early nuclear scientists understood both the creative and destructive potential of their work. “The splitting of the atomic bomb has changed everything save our mode of thinking,” Einstein wrote after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War began, “and thus we drift toward an unparalleled catastrophe.” Just as nuclear power could help us build a better future, nuclear weapons could destroy us.

  American postwar leaders also recognized this dual promise and peril of nuclear power. Even though the United States had a monopoly on atomic weapons at the end of the war, some American officials argued the U.S. should share its nuclear secrets with the Soviets to prevent a dangerous arms race. Others, like State Department strategy guru George Kennan, believed the United States should leverage its atomic monopoly to resist Soviet aggression.

  After a U.S. proposal for international control over nuclear materials, global inspections of all nuclear sites around the world, and the active sharing of atomic energy technologies for peaceful means was rejected by the Soviets, the USSR tested its first atomic device in August 1949. The nuclear arms race was on. The British detonated their first nuclear weapon three years later, in 1952, the French in 1960, and the Chinese in 1964. Our world was fast becoming a much more dangerous place.

  Global efforts to balance the legitimate desire for nuclear energy with the existential danger of an unbounded nuclear arms race took a small step forward with negotiations in the 1960s to establish a nuclear arms treaty. Ratified in 1970, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or NPT, did two critical things. First, it established standards for nonproliferation in the five countries by then permitted to possess nuclear weapons: Britain, China, France, the United States, and the USSR. Second, it created a set of incentives to encourage other states to refrain from developing or acquiring nuclear weapons in exchange for a promise to help them develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

  Since ratification, the NPT’s impact has been imperfect at best. On the positive side, the world hasn’t seen the nuclear arms free-for-all many feared. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by nonnuclear states also remains an important, if weakening, taboo protecting humanity. On the other hand, the United States and Russia today have the nuclear weapons to blow up the planet many times over; both Ukraine and Libya were invaded after giving up their nuclear weapons programs; Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have acquired nukes outside the NPT; and the danger of a global nuclear arms breakout is real and growing. It’s not difficult to imagine a regime for nuclear arms reduction that might have worked better. But we’re all still much better off even with the flawed system we have.

  When I started thinking many years ago about how the worst dangers of the genetics revolution might be prevented, I kept coming back to the nuclear arms example.

  Like the nuclear arms race, an international competition in the field of genetics—a genetic arms race—has enormous potential to either improve people’s lives or do them harm. Both represent technological capabilities developed in more advanced countries that become desirable and ultimately accessible the world over. Having nuclear weapons in one country may empower that country, but having nuclear weapons at all or in multiple countries threatens us all. Likewise, human genetic engineering has the potential to significantly help individual humans and countries, but an uncontrolled genetic arms race could harm humanity.

  At first blush, the idea of regulating the miraculous genetic technologies that researchers around the world developed with the most noble intentions feels somehow wrong. The nuclear era began at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The worst case was realized before the benefits became apparent. The genetic era is beginning in research labs, with scientists finding cures for our most debilitating diseases and IVF clinics helping loving parents make healthy children. The dangers of human genetic engineering remain more hypothetical and in the future.

  But as tempting as it may seem to some libertarians and transhumanists to keep governments out of science’s way in these benign early days of the genetics revolution, that is not the right approach. It will simply be too dangerous for everyone if some of us start remaking the biological code of life on earth without any common rules of the road. This will become even more the case as access to the genetic revolution’s most powerful tools are democratized.

  Most of the NPT signatory states gave up the right to possess nuclear weapons in exchange for help developing their civilian nuclear industries because they recognized that a world where every country had nuclear weapons would be an inherently more dangerous world. If we followed the same model for human genetic engineering, countries would need to feel they were giving up the possibility of using unlimited and unrestrained gene editing on humans in exchange for assurances their countries, and the world at large, would be better off by developing these technologies for the common good. This may sound like a simple proposition but it is not, particularly because, as we’ve seen, the aims of different people, groups, and countries are so diverse.

  Like with the nuclear revolution, the early pioneers of the genetic revolution are professors and researchers at important institutions. A few have already or will soon win Nobel Prizes. The people applying their work will be well-trained local doctors and technicians in IVF clinics and university, hospital, and corporate laboratories and clinics
around the world. Someday in the not-distant future, however, the next generation of today’s do-it-yourself, or DIY, biohackers—people doing biological work outside of professional laboratories—will be able to make meaningful alterations to living organisms, including future humans, on their own.

  The biohacking movement is exploding around the world. In a 2005 Wired article, scientist Rob Carlson outlined how he built a powerful genetic-engineering lab in his garage spending under a thousand dollars on eBay.1 Carlson wasn’t birthing a genetically altered Frankenstein or giving his dog sonar but foreshadowing our decentralized world to come. Today there are more than fifty DIYbio community spaces in the United States, sixty in Europe, twenty-two in Asia, twelve in Canada, sixteen in Latin America, four in Australia and New Zealand, and a few in Africa.2 Biohackers are largely unregulated and deploying increasingly powerful technologies, and they will, over time, significantly decentralize the ways and places where the genetic engineering of life happens.

  In these still-early days, some of the biohacker applications—like the use of genome sequencing to determine whose dog is responsible for the poop on your lawn—are amusing. Others, like making cheap batches of “homebrew” synthetic insulin, are potentially more useful.3 Soon, however, DIY biologists will have access to almost unimaginably powerful and inexpensive tools, like desktop genome printers that can combine easily acquired genetic fragments to recreate life. As this happens, these DIY biohackers will become to the scientific establishment what home computer hobbyists like Steve Wozniak ended up being to the established mainframe-computer companies like IBM—seemingly irrelevant outsiders who proved a heck of a lot more significant than they first appeared.4