Hacking Darwin

by Jamie Metzl

  As more and different types of people have access to advanced genetic-enhancement capabilities, the potential upside benefit of greater innovation and the downside risk of abuse will both grow.

  More people using increasingly powerful technologies to solve more complicated problems will lead to greater innovation, which will expand the capacity of genetic engineering to enhance our lives faster than most of us can imagine. “The most remarkable fact about human genetic engineering today,” Siddhartha Mukherjee writes, “is not how far out of reach it is, but how perilously, tantalizingly near.”5

  At the same time, this proliferation of knowledge and capability will bring real dangers. In addition to the possibilities for international conflict stemming from the uneven application of genetic technologies, gene editing could be used by states, terrorist groups, or individuals to create deadly pathogens with the potential to kill millions.6 Recently, for example, a team of researchers at Canada’s University of Alberta for around $100,000 recreated from DNA fragments the horsepox virus, a dangerous relative of smallpox, in an effort to develop a vaccine to a related modern disease.7 Doing something like this would have been unimaginable or prohibitively expensive just a decade ago, but now the technology is not a big deal and the costs are dropping precipitously.

  These changes have the potential to bring a whole new set of actors into the genetic-engineering world and, with them, both new opportunities and dangers. Just like responsible scientists are weighing options for using targeted gene drives to push genetic changes through animal populations to do things like eliminate Lyme disease and malaria, rogue states, terrorists, or even well-intentioned scientists now have the ability to introduce just a small number of genetically altered organisms that could crash entire ecosystems.8

  Recognizing this type of danger, the U.S. intelligence community for the first time included gene editing as a potential weapon of mass destruction threat in its 2016 Worldwide Threat Assessment. James Clapper, then U.S. director of national intelligence, wrote:

  Research in genome editing conducted by countries with different regulatory or ethical standards than those of Western countries probably increases the risk of the creation of potentially harmful biological agents or products. Given the broad distribution, low cost, and accelerated pace of development of this dual-use technology, its deliberate or unintentional misuse might lead to far-reaching economic and national security implications.9

  As Clapper recognized, maliciously or inadvertently deployed technologies have the potential to cause tremendous damage. “The very nature of life and how people love and hate,” the U.S. National Intelligence Council wrote in its 2017 Global Trends report, “is likely to be challenged by major technological advances in understanding and efforts to manipulate human anatomy, which will spark strong divisions between people, country and regions.”10 In June 2018, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a high-level report, Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology, warning that inexpensive and accessible new synthetic tools could be used by terrorists to create deadly and potentially fast-spreading pathogens.11

  We already see how different countries have different national approaches toward regulating, or in some case not regulating, genetic engineering technologies. No matter how well individual countries regulate themselves, addressing the potential dangers of the misuse of genetic technologies will also require meaningful regulation on an international level. But if creating national restrictions on how these technologies can be used is hard, doing this on an international level is even harder.

  “This spear thing is great,” one of our more thoughtful early ancestors must have once said, “but I’m concerned that left unchecked we could use it to kill the other people in our own tribe.”

  The dirt-crusted humans crouching around the fire gnawing at bones nodded their assent. “Mmmm, good,” they grunted. “Don’t kill others in our own tribe. Good.”

  But our thoughtful early ancestor, a visionary, had an even more enlightened idea.

  “This isn’t just about not killing people in our own tribe; we need to prevent deadly conflict with the other tribes. We have these spears today, but let’s get real. How hard is it to make these things? We just sharpened the end of a stick. Once they see what we’ve figured out, the other tribes are going to make spears just like ours. Then what happens? Maybe they kill us. Why don’t we bring together the neighboring tribes now and all agree we’ll only use these spears to hunt food in the safest and most environmentally sustainable manner possible and not harm each other?”

  Cue sound of crickets.

  “I’ve got another idea,” a scrawny man in a faded, second-hand loincloth chimed in. “Let’s use our spears to hunt animals and steal all the other tribe’s stuff. Then we’ll have more food and more stuff.”

  The heads started nodding vigorously. “Mmmm. Good idea.”

  Creating regulations across group borders has always been a tall order. It is a decent bet that someone like our sagacious ancestor warned of a looming threat and proposed an international regulatory effort at the start of every technological revolution and to largely no avail. The industrial age brought tremendous power and wealth that humans used to kill each other at an industrial scale. The internet connected the globe in novel ways but opened the door to new levels of abuse, manipulation, aggression, and societal control. As Richard Clarke and R. P. Eddy write in their important 2017 book Warnings, the Cassandras raising the alarm about not-yet-realized dangers are often ignored.12

  It’s ironic: If someone suggests creating international regulations now for a potential future danger, many will say it’s unnecessary and not urgent. But if a system isn’t put in place, it can be too late to walk things back when a threat actually appears in the future. Exactly because managing any powerful technology is so difficult, we need to look now at the better examples of how we’ve dealt with other revolutionary technologies, like atomic energy, on an international level for ideas about how we might find the right balance between promoting the great benefits of human genetic engineering and minimizing the worse potential dangers.

  Imagine what would have happened if we’d thrown up our hands in 1945 and said nuclear weapons proliferation was inevitable, so we may as well let it happen. Imagine how much worse things would be if we just accepted the destruction of our environment without fighting to save our planet and find alternative energy sources.* Internationally negotiated treaties on the use of chemical and biological weapons have not been enforced perfectly—or in the case of Syria, at all—but they are still far better than the alternative. We build cars that can go almost eight hundred miles per hour but collectively choose to impose speed limits that balance people’s desire to get where they are going quickly with a societal need for safety.

  To find the right speed limit for human genetic enhancement, we will need to find a way to harmonize approaches to human genetic engineering around the world before the consequences of communal and national differences tear us apart. We must find a path forward that avoids the unrestricted fantasy of transhumanism and the dehumanizing legacy of eugenics.

  As a start, we’ll need to figure out what we, collectively as a species, do and don’t want to restrict.

  There is nothing inherently wrong with human genetic engineering or enhancement. If our species was made perfectly, we would not have all the glitches in our biological software that cause people to suffer disease, die young, or not realize their potential in any number of areas. Even those who believe in god might still imagine their maker created the cosmos as something more than wallpaper for the human sky and wants us to figure out how to amend our biology to make exploring and inhabiting distant solar systems possible, particularly after our planet becomes uninhabitable.

  It may end up being that limiting human genetic engineering in a uniform way around the world could become a collective evolutionary disadvantage. For all we know, some natural or man-made disaster like a deadly
virus or nuclear war is just around the corner that we won’t be able to survive with the biology we’ve evolved to date. It could alternatively be that altering our evolutionary course could make us less diverse and competitive in a world we can’t now foresee. But while the argument for pushing genetic technologies forward is a compelling one, not drawing any lines is a recipe for disaster.

  If the danger of a genetic free-for-all is likely to be conflict within and between societies, we must find the best possible alternative. What our few examples of past success tell us is that smart international regulation must be a key component of our approach.

  For the past few years, top scientists have been meeting repeatedly to propose a best way forward on human genetic engineering. Some observers have warned that by getting involved at too early a stage, governments might do more harm than good. Others have suggested that self-regulation by the scientific community should be enough for now.13 Although the scientific community has done an admirable job laying out a prudent path for using genetic technologies wisely,14 this self-regulatory approach is not enough. The stakes for our species are simply too high to let human genetic engineering go completely unregulated. As tempting as it is for some of us to support letting a hundred flowers of different regulatory and nonregulatory approaches bloom, we must strive for some sort of global harmonization around how far we as a species will go evolving ourselves.

  At its best, global governance balances the complex and often conflicting interests of diverse countries and groups. Just like the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons balanced the needs of nuclear and non-nuclear states, any effective global regulatory structure on human genetic engineering would need to balance the interests of all countries. Those who see the unfettered genetic alteration of their future children as a basic right, and perhaps even an obligation, will need to find at least some common ground with those who see it as an affront to human dignity. Finding this balance is easier said than done. The challenges begin at first principles.

  Although philosophers have struggled for millennia to define human rights and responsibilities, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, created in the aftermath of the two world wars and Nazi atrocities, provides a common standard for “the inherent dignity and…equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” In its first clause, the declaration states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” That’s where things get complicated.

  What does the world born mean in this context? Does it apply to an early-stage embryo genetically altered prior to implantation? Changing the word born to conceived not only limits women’s reproductive rights but also means that each of the thousand fertilized eggs in a dish derived from a woman’s induced stem cells have the same rights as her ten-year-old child. The issues, in other words, are extremely complex.

  If we were able to reach consensus on the rights being protected and how to protect them, however, a globally harmonized regulatory structure would have a lot of benefits. In addition to reducing the possibility of both conflict and dehumanizing human experimentation, it could also facilitate international cooperation, reduce costs of regulatory compliance, and foster an environment of global collaboration for the common good.

  With these types of goals in mind, a few—mostly misguided—efforts have been made over recent years to reach some type of international consensus on the way forward.

  After the UNESCO International Bioethics Committee asserted that “the human genome must be preserved as common heritage of humanity,”15 the 1997 UNESCO Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights prohibited “practices which are contrary to human dignity, such as reproductive cloning of human beings.” The same year, the Council of Europe opened for signature its Convention on Human Rights and Dignity with Regard to Biomedicine, which asserted that interventions aimed at modifying the human genome can only be undertaken “for preventive, diagnostic or therapeutic purposes and only if its aim is not to introduce any modification in the genome of any descendants.”*

  In February 2002, the United Nations Ad Hoc Committee on an International Convention against the Reproductive Cloning of Human Beings began negotiations intended to lead to a binding treaty. The nonbinding General Assembly resolution adopted in March 2005 by a vote of 84 in favor, 34 against, and 37 abstentions, called on members to “prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life.”16 A 2015 UNESCO meeting report called for a moratorium on germline modification because, it argued, making heritable changes to the human genome would “jeopardize the inherent and therefore equal dignity of all human beings and renew eugenics.”17 At the end of 2015, the Council of Europe committee responsible for reviewing the 1997 convention issued a statement backtracking from the earlier document, referring to the convention’s core principles as merely reference points for a future debate.18

  Not only are none of these international agreements and documents legally binding, they don’t even represent a global consensus on the way forward. The countries with the most to gain from, the greatest hopes for, and the greatest cultural acceptance of this science and its more aggressive applications mostly didn’t sign on because they were reluctant to have their activities limited by others with less skin in the game.

  Even more importantly, seeking to restrict “any modification in the genome of any descendants” and thinking of the human genome as a sacred “common heritage of humanity” was an overly simplistic approach two decades ago when few people then could have imagined the clinical miracles that would later arrive. By licensing in 2018 the first clinics to perform mitochondrial transfer between embryos, the United Kingdom, among the most thoughtfully regulated countries in the world for reproductive technologies, was not a rogue actor defiling the “common heritage of humanity” but a medical and humanitarian pioneer. The so-called “three-parent babies” born from this process are not outlaws but, like Louise Brown in the 1970s, healthy forerunners of the world to come.

  With all the new applications in the pipeline for genetically altering ourselves and our future children to eliminate and reduce the risk of disease, avoiding “any modification in the genome of any descendants” starts looking less like a humanitarian gesture and more like an investment in future danger. Seeking to protect the human genome as a “common heritage of humanity,” if taken literally, becomes an argument for banning sexual reproduction and requiring people to only reproduce by cloning. Even if Darwin’s principles of evolution in humans are hacked, they too will continue to evolve—just by different means. Evolution itself is evolving.

  But if efforts to create international consensus around human genetic engineering have so far failed, we must still find a way to do better going forward in order to optimize the future of our species.

  Like the NPT, an international regime on human genetic engineering would have the tough, dual role as both an enabler of responsible science applied for the common good and an enforcer of a limited restrictions on how far these activities can go.

  Finding this balance would be incredibly difficult to negotiate. Draw the line too permissively and the opponents will likely revolt. Draw it too restrictively and proponents will find an alternate way to get the services they want, using underground clinics, other countries, or extra-national environments like the high seas or, someday, space. Draw the line down the middle and any regulation is likely to be too vague to have any real meaning. Fail to establish one global standard for human genetic engineering and this revolutionary set of technologies will become subsumed in an international genetic arms race.

  An agreement would need to neither offend the sensibilities of powerful constituencies deeply uncomfortable with the concept of human germline engineering nor impede the development of new generations of knowledge and its application on which trillions of dollars of commerce; the competitiveness of individuals, companies, and countries; and the well-being of future generations dep
ends. Within these narrow bounds, any standard would need to be extremely permissive, limiting only the most obvious violations of human dignity.

  Because governments don’t always perfectly represent everybody, we would also need to figure out whose interests would be represented in negotiations, how these interests would be organized, what type of enforcement mechanism could possibly be deployed, and how the arrangement could be used to advance the best science rather than impede it.

  At this stage, probably the only restrictions that could be agreed upon would be a common definition of what constitutes a redline beyond which human genetic engineers should not pass. This would include potential behaviors most everyone would agree are reprehensible, such as dangerous and dehumanizing human experimentation, creating excessive mixtures of human and animal genes, and engineering humans with new and radical types of synthetic traits that challenge human identity. The average fertility clinic or university lab is not remotely considering any of these today—just like few university physics departments and nuclear power stations are also creating nuclear weapons.

  Because both the underlying science and our cultural acceptance of what new genetic applications seem normal, healthy, and advantageous will change over time, any international standard would need to be extremely flexible and to be renegotiated regularly to accommodate new technological and medical developments.