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Smart Development

Heritable Human Genome Editing Is Not Inevitable

Mar 17, 2020 Donna Dickenson , Katie Hasson, and Marcy Darnovsky

In recent years, the consensus barring genetic changes that would be passed down to a person’s every descendant has collapsed, and scientists and bioethicists now focus largely on creating a detailed roadmap for moving forward. But there's a strong case to be made that the previous consensus was correct.

LONDON – The announcement by the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui in November 2018 that he had created the world’s first gene-edited babies – an egregious ethical and legal breach that resulted in a three-year prison sentence – gave discussions about heritable human genome editing a new sense of urgency. But those discussions are fundamentally flawed. Given the stakes – for today’s societies and future generations – a course correction is urgently needed.

Some scientists, futurists, and others assert the inevitability of heritable genome editing – altering embryos or gametes in order to produce genetically engineered children who will pass the changed genes and traits to their own offspring. These proponents seem to assume that, overall, it would probably be a good thing – as long as we wait until the technology is “safe” and apply it under the right circumstances. With this in mind, they have focused largely on creating a detailed roadmap for moving forward.

The organizers of the 2018 International Summit on Human Gene Editing, held just days after He’s announcement, proclaimed that “it is time to define a rigorous, responsible translational pathway toward” clinical trials of heritable genome editing. This echoed previous conclusions by the British Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the National Academies of Sciences and Medicine in the United States. The US National Academies, together with the United Kingdom’s Royal Society, then established the International Commission on the Clinical Use of Human Germline Genome Editing to fulfill this mission.

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Prashant Kotak Mar 17, 2020

I don't have any background in the Biomedical Sciences (Comp Sci is my bag) but I have followed genetics developments for a long time because it links to an interest of mine, the creation of universal constructors in cellular automata. I started paying particular attention since 2014, after I was made aware of Doudna's work, which seemed to me a gamechanger. So I offer my opinion as an informed amateur who makes a serious attempt to understand the science, but without getting hung-up on specific ‘engineering’ problems in the field. Rather, I attempt to take a ‘birds-eye view’ of the trajectory of both tech and biotech. As such, my views may to some appear completely unhinged, but hey.

I cannot, sadly, agree with the authors' view that genome editing is not inevitable. I think it is absolutely inevitable, furthermore, probing in absolutely *all* directions . Don’t get me wrong – I am not *advocating* a free-for-all – I just think a descent into a free-for-all is highly likely willynilly, for reasons I will try to explain. I also would like to clarify I think any and every try at regulation is worth attempting, in the hope that it will buy enough of a slowdown to prevent chaos.

- I don't doubt that commercially motivated research is progressing outside regulation in many countries (China not least) because the monetary rewards are so huge.
- I don't doubt that research is (covertly) progressing at national (military) level in many countries, because none of the major countries will allow themselves to fall behind the others. And eventually not just military reasons – it’s not unimaginable that for example the Chinese set up zygote banks on a large scale in a couple of decades, because they face a demographic crisis in specific skills.
- The super-wealthy have another incentive, not discussed in the article, which will drive certain types of (non-heritable) editing. I mean by this, the lure of life extension. And the incentive magnifies when some oldie is at deaths door, and will attempt the riskiest kind of self-experimentation if available, because they have nothing to lose (the ‘Pharaoh’ syndrome). That this might have totally unforeseen consequences sounds like a cartoon sci-fi line, but with a grain of truth nonetheless.
- The defining characteristic I see with technologies like CRISPR and Prime is that the cost of editing looks likely to plunge over time, because the underlying enabling technologies are neither expensive nor difficult (notwithstanding the whole bunch of underlying engineering problems, e.g. in PCR), so it will become widely accessible, which means regulation is close to impossible in that scenario. It’s not like building nuclear reactors. I mean, you can pass the laws, but that only means something if you can police/enforce them.

- Now the unhinged (especially) bits. It looks to me that starting an embryo from scratch with fully chosen characteristics, is essentially an engineering problem. Hugely complex absolutely, with an explosion of causality mapping of effects still to be explored, but dovetailing with ever more capable computers and ever more sophisticated algorithms and knowledgebases, it looks to me all possible within a couple of decades. I contend, once the fundamental science is cracked (already done, Watson/Crick and unknown to most, von Neumann, all in the 1950s), it is a matter of time before the engineering problems are all solved in all directions for applications. And for genetic tech, like it or not, that time is here now. It just so happens, this technology alters us.
- The problem with the moral/ethical lines of counter-argument is that they are purely human constructs, and so cut no ice when humanity is statistically viewed as a species. Nature is amoral; that is not a stance that feeds into personal behaviour (I don’t even eat meat, and save spiders trapped in the bath) but that does not mean it is not a fact that personal morality is a mirage built out of biological drivers. What I am trying to say, is that within humanity as a species, if something can be done, someone somewhere will do it, and vis-a-vis the editing technologies, that then will create schism in humanity, as happens by one means or another with all lifeforms, so I think of that as the only sane working assumption. The only difference is, as we self-apply the changes, in the context of a transition out of biological speeds and into electronic speeds, it's all gonna happen rather fast.
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