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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The sci-fi possibilities of genetic tampering may soon become real. And there's no law against them.
Jun 27, 2000 | A young couple having difficulty conceiving a child undergoes tests to pinpoint the problem. As they sit in the doctor's office, awaiting the results, each wonders whose reproductive system has failed.
"There's nothing wrong with either of you," the doctor tells them, at last.
"So what's the problem?" they ask.
"You're two different species. You can't interbreed."
Science fiction? Perhaps for now. But according to the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson, this is where the human genome project will inevitably lead us. He and his Princeton colleague, molecular biologist Lee Silver, say that rapidly emerging genetic technology will ultimately split humanity into many species.
They draw their conclusion from cold, complex science, but their point is simple, and frightening: Once we figure out how to safely manipulate our genes, people will start adding and deleting them to their perceived advantage. Different sorts of humans will emerge. And it's safe to assume that each will decide that it is superior.
While anyone who watched even a minute of "Britney in Hawaii" might believe that this has already occurred, rest assured it has not.
But the development and use of genetic engineering are the subject of ferocious debate among the scientific elite. Some influential scientists, notably James D. Watson, the father of DNA research, are pushing for experiments that were once unthinkable: tampering with the human germline -- sperm and egg cells. In other words, genetically altering not only an individual, but future generations.
"Some people are going to have to have some guts and try germline therapy without completely knowing that it's going to work," Watson said at a UCLA conference in 1998. "And the other thing, because no one has the guts to say it, if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes (from plants or animals), why shouldn't we do it? What's wrong with it?"
Human germline engineering is prohibited in federally funded research. But there is no ban on such experiments in the private sector. Last weekend, a coalition of activists and organizations met in San Francisco to form the Exploratory Initiative on New Genetic Technologies. On Wednesday, the group will announce efforts to develop a broad movement to push for limitations on genetic technologies, including statutory bans on germline genetic engineering and human cloning.
"A ban," says Watson, "would be a disaster."
To get a glimpse of what might very well be our future, it helps to understand some boring science. All current human genetic therapy trials are called somatic: they involve genes in various parts of the body, but not the sex cells, which produce eggs and sperm. Tampering with sex cells -- producing genetic alterations that will be passed to your offspring, and their descendents -- takes genetic engineering into an entirely new technological and ethical realm.
While many experts believe that germline engineering is at least a decade away, Hamilton Smith, a Nobel laureate biochemist, sees the technology developing much more rapidly. "It might come pretty quickly," he says.
Smith knows something about the speed of technological advance. He is the director of DNA Resources for Celera Genomics Corp., which, in just nine months, produced a rough map of the human genome -- a feat that most scientists said would take years.
The pressure for germline engineering is also likely to come from another direction -- you and me. We want children better than ourselves. We certainly don't want them to suffer unnecessarily. David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate who heads the California Institute of Technology, believes that consumer demand will encourage the rapid development and utilization of germline engineering.
Genetic screening is already standard in prenatal care. It is not farfetched to imagine that prospective parents will one day turn to clinics to produce embryos that can not only be tested for genetic defects, but also "corrected." And is there any reason to think people will stop at fixing disease-causing defects? Is it such a stretch to imagine people demanding genetic enhancements -- mental, physical, behavioral?
