Redesigning HUMANS by Gregory Stock
Excerpt from Chapter 1
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EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 1:
The Last Human
God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to be . . . Let the sky and God be our limit and Eternity our measurement.
—Marcus Garvey (1887–1940)
We know that Homo sapiens is not the final word in primate evolution, but few have yet grasped that we are on the cusp of profound biological change, poised to transcend our current form and character on a journey to destinations of new imagination.
At first glance, the very notion that we might become more than “human” seems preposterous. After all, we are still biologically identical in virtually every respect to our cave-dwelling ancestors. But this lack of change is deceptive. Never before have we had the power to manipulate human genetics to alter our biology in meaningful, predictable ways.
Bioethicists and scientists alike worry about the consequences of coming genetic technologies, but few have thought through the larger implications of the wave of new developments arriving in reproductive biology. Today in vitro fertilization is responsible for fewer than 1 percent of births in the United States; embryo selection numbers only in the hundreds of cases; cloning and human genetic modification still lie ahead. But give these emerging technologies a decade and they will be the cutting edge of human biological change.
These developments will write a new page in the history of life, allowing us to seize control of our evolutionary future. Our coming ability to choose our children's genes will have immense social impact and raise difficult ethical dilemmas. Biological enhancement will lead us into unexplored realms, eventually challenging our basic ideas about what it means to be human. Some imagine we will see the perils, come to our senses, and turn away from such possibilities. But when we imagine Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, we are not incredulous or shocked by his act. It is too characteristically human. To forgo the powerful technologies that genomics and molecular biology are bringing would be as out of character for humanity as it would be to use them without concern for the dangers they pose. We will do neither. The question is no longer whether we will manipulate embryos, but when, where, and how.
We have already felt the impact of previous advances in reproductive technology. Without the broad access to birth control that we take so for granted, the populations of Italy, Japan, and Germany would not be shrinking; birth rates in the developing world would not be falling. These are major shifts, yet unlike the public response to today's high-tech developments, no impassioned voices protest birth control as an immense and dangerous experiment with our genetic future. Those opposing family planning seem more worried about the immorality of recreational sex than about human evolution.
In this book, we will examine the emerging reproductive technologies for selecting and altering human embryos. These developments, culminating in germline engineering — the manipulation of the genetics of egg or sperm (our “germinal” cells) to modify future generations — will have large consequences. Already, procedures that influence the germline are routine in labs working on fruit flies and mice, and researchers have done early procedures on nonhuman primates. Direct human germline manipulations may still be a decade or two away, but methods of choosing specific genes in an embryo are in use today to prevent disease, and sophisticated methods for making broader choices are arriving every year, bringing with them a taste of the ethical and social questions that will accompany comprehensive germline engineering.
The arrival of safe, reliable germline technology will signal the beginning of human self-design. We do not know where this development will ultimately take us, but it will transform the evolutionary process by drawing reproduction into a highly selective social process that is far more rapid and effective at spreading successful genes than traditional sexual competition and mate selection.
Human cloning has been a topic of passionate debate recently, but germline engineering and embryo selection have implications that are far more profound. When cloning becomes safe and reliable enough to use in humans — which is clearly not yet the case — it will be inherently conservative, if not extremely so. It will bring no new genetic constitutions into being, but will create genetic copies of people who already exist. The idea of a delayed identical twin is strange and unfamiliar, but not earthshattering. Most of us have met identical twins. They are very similar, yet different.
Dismissal of technology's role in humanity's genetic future is common even among biologists who use advanced technologies in their work. Perhaps the notion that we will control our evolutionary future seems too audacious. Perhaps the idea that humans might one day differ from us in fundamental ways is too disorienting. Most mass- media science fiction doesn't challenge our thinking about this either. One of the last major sci-fi movies of the second millennium was The Phantom Menace, George Lucas's 1999 prequel to Star Wars. Its vision of human biological enhancement was
simple: there won't be any. Lucas reveled in special effects and fantastical life forms, but altered us not a jot. Despite reptilian sidekicks with pedestal eyes and hard-bargaining insectoids that might have escaped from a Raid commercial, the film's humans were no different from us. With the right accent and a coat and tie, the leader of the Galactic Republic might have been the president of France.
Such a vision of human continuity is reassuring. It lets us imagine a future in which we feel at home. Space pods, holographic telephones, laser pistols, and other amazing gadgets are enticing to many of us, but pondering a time when humans no longer exist is another story, one far too alien and unappealing to arouse our dramatic sympathies. We've seen too many apocalyptic images of nuclear, biological, and environmental disaster to think that the path to human extinction could be anything but horrific.
Yet the road to our eventual disappearance might be paved not by humanity's failure but by its success. Progressive self- transformation could change our descendants into something sufficiently different from our present selves to not be human in the sense we use the term now. Such an occurrence would more aptly be termed a pseudoextinction, since it would not end our lineage. Unlike the saber-toothed tiger and other large mammals that left no descendants when our ancestors drove them to extinction, Homo sapiens would spawn its own successors by fast-forwarding its evolution.
Some disaster, of course, might derail our technological advance, or our biology might prove too complex to rework. But our recent deciphering of the human genome (the entirety of our genetic constitution) and our massive push to unravel life's workings suggest that modification of our biology is far nearer to reality than the distant space travel we see in science fiction movies. Moreover, we are unlikely to achieve the technology to flit around the galaxy without being able to breach our own biology as well. The Human Genome Project is only a beginning.
Considering the barrage of press reports about the project, we naturally wonder how much is hype. Extravagant metaphor has not been lacking. We are deciphering the “code of codes,” reading the “book of life,” looking at the “holy grail of human biology.” It is reminiscent of the enthusiasm that attended Neil Armstrong's 1969 walk on the moon. Humanity seemed poised to march toward the stars, but 2001 has come and gone, and there has been no sentient computer like HAL, no odyssey to the moons of Jupiter. Thirty years from now, however, I do not think we will look back at the Human Genome Project with a similar wistful disappointment. Unlike outer space, genetics is at our core, and as we learn to manipulate it, we are learning to manipulate ourselves.
Well before this new millennium's close, we will almost certainly change ourselves enough to become much more than simply human. In this book, I will explore the nature and meaning of these coming changes, place them within the larger context of our rapid progress in biology and technology, and examine the social and ethical implications of the first tentative steps we are now taking. Many bioethicists do not share my perspective on where we are heading. They imagine that our technology might become potent enough to alter us, but that we will turn away from it and reject human enhancement. But the reshaping of human genetics and biology does not hinge on some cadre of demonic researchers hidden away in a lab in Argentina trying to pick up where Hitler left off. The coming possibilities will be the inadvertent spinoff of mainstream research that virtually everyone supports. Infertility, for example, is a source of deep pain for millions of couples. Researchers and clinicians working on in vitro fertilization
(IVF) don't think much about future human evolution, but nonetheless are building a foundation of expertise in conceiving, handling, testing, and implanting human embryos, and this will one day be the basis for the manipulation of the human species. Already, we are seeing attempts to apply this knowledge in highly controversial ways: as premature as today's efforts to clone humans may be, they would be the flimsiest of fantasies if they could not draw on decades of work on human IVF. Similarly, in early 2001 more than five hundred gene-therapy trials were under way or in review throughout the world. The researchers are trying to cure real people suffering from real diseases and are no more interested in the future of human evolution than the IVF researchers. But their progress toward inserting genes into adult cells will be one more piece of the foundation for manipulating human embryos.
Not everything that can be done should or will be done, of course, but once a relatively inexpensive technology becomes feasible in thousands of laboratories around the world and a sizable fraction of the population sees it as beneficial, it will be used.
Erewhon, the brilliant 1872 satire by Samuel Butler, contains a scene that suggests what would be needed to stop the coming reworking of human biology. Erewhon is a civilized land with archaic machines, the result of a civil war won by the “anti-machinists” five centuries before the book's story takes place. After its victory, this faction outlawed all further mechanical progress and destroyed all improvements made in the previous three centuries. They felt that to do otherwise would be suicide. “Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years,” wrote their ancient leader, “and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing . . . I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity at which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present . . . Though our rebellion against their infant power will cause infinite suffering . . . we must [otherwise see] ourselves gradually superseded by our own creatures until we rank no higher in comparison with them, than the beasts of the field with ourselves.”
Butler would no doubt have chuckled at his own prescience had he been able to watch the special-purpose IBM computer Deep Blue defeat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997.We are at a similar juncture with our early steps toward human genetic manipulation. To “protect” ourselves from the future reworking of our biology would require more than an occasional restriction; it would demand a research blockade of molecular genetics or even a general rollback of technology. That simply won't occur, barring global bio- catastrophe and a bloody victory by today's bio-Luddites.
One irony of humanity's growing power to shape its own evolution is the identity of the architects. In 1998, I spoke at a conference on mammalian cloning in Washington, D.C., and met Ian Wilmut, the Scottish scientist whose cloning of Dolly had created such a furor the previous year. Affronted by my relative lack of concern about the eventual cloning of humans, he vehemently insisted that the idea was abhorrent and that I was irresponsible to say that it would likely occur within a decade. His anger surprised me, considering that I was only speaking about human cloning, whereas he had played a role in the breakthrough that might bring it about. Incidentally, patent attorneys at the Roslin Institute, where the work occurred, and PPL Therapeutics, which funded the work, did not overlook the importance of human applications, since claims on their patent specifically cover them.
We cannot hold ourselves apart from the biological heritage that has shaped us. What we learn from fruit flies, mice, or even a cute Dorset ewe named Dolly is relevant to us. No matter how much the scientists who perform basic research in animal genetics and reproduction may sometimes deny it, their work is a critical part of the control we will soon have over our biology. Our desire to apply the results of animal research to human medicine, after all, is what drives much of the funding of this work.
Over the past hundred years, the trajectory of the life sciences traces a clear shift from description to understanding to manipulation. At the close of the nineteenth century, describing new biological attributes or species was still a good Ph.D. project for a student. This changed during the twentieth century, and such observations became largely a means for understanding the workings of biology. That too is now changing, and in the first half of the twenty-first century, biological understanding will likely become less an end in itself than a means to manipulate biology. In one century, we have moved from observing to understanding to engineering.
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