Author: Susan Crawford / Source: WIRED
Last month, Chinese national He Jiankui flouted a vigorous scientific debate when he told a room full of scientists that he had manipulated the embryos of Chinese twins, using Crispr to make one resistant to their father’s HIV. He revealed to the group that the twins of the experiment had already been born.
The big reveal was ethically dubious at best. He never went through proper channels to get his experiment approved. The scientist is being condemned by his contemporaries for ignoring universally respected protocol and forgoing peer research. In The Washington Post, Eileen Hunt Botting wrote that He’s experiment had “no moral or scientific justification, given that the medical profession can successfully prevent fathers from transmitting HIV without genetic engineering.” Botting went on to compare He’s experiment to popular science fiction: “However extreme their scenarios, both ‘Gattaca’ and ‘Frankenstein’ remind us that all children are vulnerable to discrimination based on factors beyond their control—including circumstances shaped by artificial reproductive technology.”
Collier Meyerson is an Ideas contributor at WIRED. She was awarded an Emmy for her work on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes and two awards for her reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists. She is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, and maintains the Nobler Fellowship at The Nation Institute.
It’s easy to fear this kind of procedure: follow embryonic gene editing to its logical conclusion and we’ll end up with a society dramatically altered through eugenics, with generations of people engineered to fit a single vision of perfection. It’s an unequivocally scary prospect. (Also, those people would be boring in their uniformity, and no sane person wants a world full of cogs.)
When we think about genetic engineering, we tend to think in absolute terms—a black-and-white stance with a barrier that, once crossed, leads to the downfall of civilization as we know it. In reality, we make genetic decisions all the time, in ways that are already subtly altering the people who make up society. It might seem strange to group He’s experiment alongside the more common genetic procedures parents use to ensure their offspring don’t inherit diseases. Yet both exist within a system in which—generally—only the economically privileged are able to pay for treatment to alter the traits that their offspring will and won’t inherit. The danger isn’t in the procedure…
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