Matthew Cobb is a zoologist and author with a background in insect genetics and the history of science. In the past decade, when CRISPR was discovered and applied to genetic remodeling, he began to worry — actually fear — about three potential uses of the technology. He’s in good company: Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for discovering and applying CRISPR, fears the same things. So he decided to delve into these topics, and As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age is the result.
enumerate fears
The first of his concerns is the idea of introducing hereditary mutations into the human genome. He Jianqui did this in 2018 with three human female embryos in China, so the three girls with the engineered mutations that they will pass on to their children (if they are allowed to have them) are now about four. Their identities have been classified for their protection, but presumably their health is being monitored and the poor girls have probably already been prodded and prodded incessantly by every type of medical specialist out there.
The second is the use of gene drives. This allows a gene to copy itself from one chromosome in a pair to another, so that it is passed on to almost all offspring. If that gene causes infertility, the gene drive means the extinction of the population that carries it. Gene drives have been proposed as a way to eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and they have been tested in the lab, but the technology has not yet been deployed in the wild.
While eliminating malaria seems like an undivided good, no one really knows for sure what would happen to an ecosystem if we got rid of all the malaria-carrying mosquitoes. (Of course humans have exterminated or at least severely depleted entire species before — passenger pigeons, bison, eastern moose, wolves — sometimes even on purpose, but never with the awareness of the interconnectedness of all the things we have now.) There’s coming. another barrier. on the fact that the deployment of this technology depends on informed consent from the local population, which is difficult when some local languages do not have a word for ‘gene’.
The third concern focuses on gain-of-function studies that create more transmissible or pathogenic viruses in a lab. These studies are supposedly done to get a better understanding of what makes viruses more dangerous, so in an ideal world we could prepare for the possibility of one occurring naturally. National Institutes of Health-funded gain-of-function studies conducted in 2011 made the highly deadly H5N1 flu more transmissible, leading to a self-imposed research moratorium that ended with stricter regulations (in some countries). These kinds of studies clearly have the potential to create bioweapons, and leaks are not impossible even without nefarious intentions. (It’s not likely that this kind of work caused the COVID-19 pandemic; there’s some evidence that it jumped from wildlife to humans.)
The title of the resulting book was taken from Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog,” in which he wrote, “We’re like gods and might as well get good at it.” Unfortunately, not all gods are magnanimous. Or even competent, much less good at it.
Calling a timeout
As a science historian, Cobb spends much of the book putting his fears into context. One way he does this is by examining how society dealt with the scary, potentially dangerous and far-reaching advances in genetic engineering that took place in the latter half of the 20th century, and then comparing that to how society dealt with the scary, potentially dangerous, and far-reaching advances in nuclear physics that occurred in the first half.
He uses the change in the origin story in the X-Men comics to trace how public fear of science shifted from the atom to the gene. In the 1960s, the X-Men got their mutations and associated powers from exposure to radiation; by the 1980s, they were the product of genetic engineering experiments by the long-ago alien Celestials. (Check out the podcast episode “Our Opinions Are Correct” on the illusion of change if you’re curious about why and how fans tolerated this backstory behind the scenes.)
The Asilomar Conference, held in California in February 1975, is generally regarded as a paradigm of self-regulation. At the time, scientists were setting up recombinant DNA technology — the ability to move genes between organisms and to essentially express a particular gene in bacteria at will. Amazingly, in the midst of these developments, they decided to pause and debate whether and how to proceed. (This shifting of genes between species also happens in nature, but they didn’t know it yet.) Cobb writes that “no group of scientists, except geneticists, has ever voluntarily interrupted their work because they feared the consequences of what they were doing.” could do.” Discover.”
But the Asilomar conference didn’t take place because geneticists are more moral than other scientists, Cobb claims; they were simply responding to the fears that prevailed at the time. Many of the young researchers who developed advanced genetic engineering techniques reached scientific maturity in the late 1960s, when they protested the Vietnam War in college. Between Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Agent Orange, physicists and then chemists watched in horror as the military-industrial complex turned their research into mass murder and the public turned against the enterprise of science. These new molecular biologists wanted to make sure that the same would not happen to them, says Cobb.
