Genetically Modified Human Affairs

There is a birthday poem that was written by Dr. Seuss that in some gruesome way illustrates what is happening in genetic science. The poem expresses that you should be grateful to be present and that to be in existence is pleasant and to not means “you isn’t,” to coin a phrase:

If we didn’t have birthdays, you wouldn’t be you.
If you’d never been born, well then what would you do?
If you’d never been born, well then what would you be?
You might be a fish! Or a toad in a tree!
You might be a doorknob! Or three baked potatoes!
You might be a bag full of hard green tomatoes.

Or worse than all that…
Why, you might be a WASN’T!
A Wasn’t has no fun at all. No, he doesn’t.

A Wasn’t just isn’t. He just isn’t present.

But you…You ARE YOU! 

And, now isn’t that pleasant!

Just like that you either are or you are not. Birth and death, defected or perfected or designed like a toy. In the future YOU might be YOU and it may not be all that pleasant.

In 1997 we started talking about the possibility that mankind was about to map the human genome. At the time we were all being subjected to a lot of predictive programming about the dangers and or obstacles that were already approximated to come with DNA or genetic sequencing.

In fact this topic has been supplying films with great content for the past 25 years or so. The problem with these films is that they never really captured anything scientific.

The films and stories use genetic science as the base bogeyman and then uses it in a relationship to much older and more universal lay concepts of heredity, consanguinity and reproduction or replication, and its equally close connection to widespread contemporary concerns about loss of individual identity, the religious concepts of ethics and the soul and whether or not a genetic miracle human can have any authenticity in a society increasingly dominated by technology and big business.

Another recurring theme in popular movies involving genetic engineering, cloning or artificial life forms is the existential angst of the genetically modified human or clone when it becomes aware of itself as an artifact or comes face to face either with its creator or its original.

This spins a form of Frankenstein anxiety, a trope always used to fuel an anti genetic science attitude.

Today mankind is edging closer to the reality of creating life through science. The Frankenstein story is a metaphor for our times. In some ways it can also be a metaphoric blasphemy.

A creature is formed in a laboratory. The creator sees that his creation has flaws and lacks intelligence so he attempts to parent it. When the creature gets too big for the laboratory it escapes. The creator realizes that he has lost control of his creation and decides to hide from it. All the creature wants is acceptance from its creator. The creator then provides a mate for his creation. But the creator does not approach or come in contact with his new offspring. The creature tries everything he can to find his creator. He makes mistakes, he takes life, he destroys the laboratory and his mate. The whole time he just wanted to know if his creator loved him. He dies confused and helpless.

All the more the monster shows its humanity and is still shunned. The monster didn’t ask to be brought to life and the creator had the power to recreate life from death. The question is should he have done such a deed?

This metaphor gets lost in the nuts, bolts and even in the dialogue of the movie Frankenstein directed by James Whale. The most important dialogue of all was lost in the Universal 1931 movie when the creation moves its trembling hand Henry Frankenstein played by Colin Clive cries out:

Look! It’s moving. It’s alive. It’s alive….It’s alive, it’s moving, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive! Oh — in the name of God. Now I know what it feels like to be God.

The last line was censored by the studio.

The line clearly defined the promethean hubris that Dr. Frankenstein possessed. He saw himself as a God because he created life from death.

Science now id fueled by the same hubris and soon we shall see the fruit of their long and frightening labors.

In the next 50 years, technological advancements will lead us into a world where only those who risk going too far, will find out how far we can actually go.

The ability to edit human genes and, consequently, actually engineer a human being from birth, is something we’ve always thought of as Gattaca-style science fiction.

Growing an edited embryo into a fully fledged adult human wouldn’t just remove a health problem — or, in the dystopian future model, create an augmented human. It would leave lasting changes that are passed on; something that many scientists say is desirable in the case of awful health problems, but much more questionable in the case of enhancements.

The Chinese have announced that their scientists have attempted to genetically engineer human embryos something that took much of the world by surprise, but for those familiar with the latest gene-editing technology it was a long-anticipated inevitability.

Researchers in China not only revealed that they attempted to modify the genes of “spare” embryos deemed unsuitable for IVF treatment — the first such attempt anywhere in the world — they had done so on an almost industrial scale, involving 86 “non-viable” embryos donated by a nearby fertility clinic.

The study came to public light after it was published in a rather obscure online science journal called Protein & Cell, set up in China to publish peer-reviewed science that cannot find a home in more prestigious international journals such as Nature and Science.

In fact, according to a news report in Nature, the lead author of the paper, Junjiu Huang of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, had submitted the scientific paper to both journals but had been rejected in part because of ethical objections — and possibly because of uncertainties over the provenance of the embryos used.

Ever since genome-editing technology CRISPR/Cas9 emerged a couple of years ago, scientists had been predicting that it wouldn’t be long before it was used to correct defects in the genes of humans, including those in the “germline” cells of sperm, eggs and embryos, which are passed down the generations.

In short, Crispr promises to eliminate many inherited diseases for good from affected families, but some scientists in Britain were appalled by the Chinese research, arguing that it overstepped the ethical boundary separating good scientific practice from badly-conceived experimentation of dubious ethical standard.

China is not the only country where scientists are beginning to think the “unthinkable” of tinkering with the genes of eggs, sperm and embryos, to bring about germline genetic modification that would be inherited by each subsequent generation within a family affected by inherited diseases.

In March, for instance, a journalist writing for MIT Technology Review revealed that scientists working at the Harvard Medical School had attempted to use the CRISPR technique on human ovarian tissue, which could have included human egg cells — although the work had not advanced to the stage of being ready for a scientific publication.

CRISPR has astonished scientists by the simplicity and accuracy at which it can “cut and paste” the building blocks of DNA at precise points on the chromosomes, rather like a spell-checker being able to find, correct or delete a single misspelled word in a 46-volume encyclopedia. It has already worked well on adult (non-germ line) human cells, as well as animal cells and embryos.

CRISPR as a tool that allows biologists to basically “search-and-replace” components of DNA, meaning they can rewrite specific segments of something’s genetic code.

Don’t want the code that’s related to a particular disease? This will allow science to rewrite it. It is quite literally an editing tool.

Now it can’t be done with perfect accuracy yet: CRISPR currently successfully deletes target code 40% of the time and switches it out correctly about 20% of the time. It can make other unwanted changes too, meaning that now; it’s largely unreliable and inconsistent. But researchers expect these rates to improve.

That being said, the human embryo tests performed in China were hit and miss.

The team injected 86 embryos and then waited 48 hours, enough time for the CRISPR/Cas9 system and the molecules that replace the missing DNA to act — and for the embryos to grow to about eight cells each. Of the 71 embryos that survived, 54 were genetically tested. This revealed that just 28 were successfully spliced, and that only a fraction of those contained the replacement genetic material.

Is this a success?

Researchers are developing ways to use CRISPR to treat genetic conditions like sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis, and are also experimenting with genetic changes that could eliminate viruses like HIV.

Even though viruses aren’t genetic diseases, certain gene edits have been shown to prevent the virus from spreading to new cells and to destroy inactive HIV residing in the human genome by altering critical viral genes.

One consequence of routine editing is that individuals may find out they are carriers for a number of genetic conditions. We all carry hundreds of potentially deleterious mutations, some of which are known to cause disease, though often only if both inherited copies of the gene are mutated.

Nature magazine reports that one doctor, Dr. Huang used 86 embryos in his experiment that all been fertilized abnormally by two sperm cells, which would have given them three sets of chromosomes rather than the normal two of a healthy, fertilized egg. These embryos were therefore “non viable” and could not have developed into a fetus even if they had been transplanted into the womb — and he emphasized there was never any intention of this.

In Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, society is rigidly split into five castes determined through embryonic modification. Much of the consternation surrounding the idea of “designer babies” is that germline editing could make Huxley’s dystopian vision of the future a reality.

“The fear is that germ-line engineering is a path toward a dystopia of super people and designer babies for those who can afford it,” Antonio Regalado wrote in Technology Review. “Why not design a highly intelligent group of people who could be tomorrow’s leaders and scientists?”

At the moment, the prospect of a world populated by genetically modified humans is barely remaining only in the pages of science fiction. The study of the genetics of intelligence itself remains in its infancy, with the artificial improvement of human intelligence looming near the edge of the impossible.

Text – Check out Ground Zero Radio with Clyde Lewis Live Nightly @ http://www.groundzeromedia.org