Hacking Darwin Read online

  Also by JAMIE METZL

  FICTION

  Eternal Sonata

  Genesis Code

  The Depths of the Sea

  NONFICTION

  Western Responses to Human Rights

  Abuses in Cambodia, 1975–1980

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  Copyright © 2019 by Jamie Metzl

  Cover and internal design © 2019 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Pete Garceau

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Metzl, Jamie Frederic, author.

  Title: Hacking Darwin : genetic engineering and the future of humanity / Jamie Metzl.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018041051 | (hardcover : alk. paper)

  Subjects: | MESH: Genetic Engineering--ethics | Organisms, Genetically Modified | In Vitro Techniques | Human Genetics--trends

  Classification: LCC QH437 | NLM QU 550.5.G47 | DDC 576.5--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018041051

  “Our life is a creation of our mind.”

  —GAUTAMA BUDDHA

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION: Entering the Genetic Age

  ONE: Where Darwin Meets Mendel

  TWO: Climbing the Complexity Ladder

  THREE: Decoding Identity

  FOUR: The End of Sex

  FIVE: Divine Sparks and Pixie Dust

  SIX: Rebuilding the Living World

  SEVEN: Stealing Immortality from the Gods

  EIGHT: The Ethics of Engineering Ourselves

  NINE: We Contain Multitudes

  TEN: The Arms Race of the Human Race

  ELEVEN: The Future of Humanity

  Notes

  Additional Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Entering the Genetic Age

  “Why are you here?” the young receptionist asked.

  It was my first visit to the New York cryobank and I was already feeling a bit uncomfortable.

  “I just think it’s a good thing for most everyone to do,” I said with a shrug. “I lecture around the world on the future of human reproduction and tell anyone who’ll listen who wants to have kids they should freeze their eggs or sperm when in their twenties. I’m just a little late.”

  She raised an eyebrow. About twenty years late? “I don’t understand. Are you a donor?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going into chemotherapy or having some other medical treatment that could harm your sperm?”

  “No.”

  “Are you in the military about to be deployed?”

  “No”

  “The only remaining category on my form is other,” she concluded after an awkward pause. “Should I put you down for that?”

  Already feeling a bit precarious, I didn’t want to go into the options I was mulling in my mind. Maybe I’ll want to have children someday so may as well store my younger sperm now. Maybe I’ll volunteer my sperm to be sent into space when humans starts colonizing the rest of the solar system. Maybe, as I believe, our species is moving toward a genetically altered future in which more of us will conceive our offspring in labs rather than in our beds or the back seats of our cars. Whatever maybes might arise, starting now was the first step.

  “Well?” she asked.

  I smiled nervously, my mind processing the incredible moment in our evolutionary history where revolutionary new technologies and my own personal biology were intersecting in this antiseptic midtown Manhattan office.

  Scientists and theologians can debate whether the first spark of life on our planet sprang from thermal vents on the ocean floor or divine inspiration (or both), but most everyone who believes in science recognizes that around 3.8 billion years ago the first single-cell organisms emerged. These mircroorganisms would have died after one generation if they couldn’t find a way to reproduce. But life found a way, and the microbes that started dividing were the ones able to keep their little microbial families going. If each division of these early cells had been an exact copy of the parent, our world would still be occupied solely by these single-cell creatures, and you wouldn’t be reading this book. But that’s not what happened.

  The history of our species is the story of little errors and other changes that kept popping up in the reproduction process.

  After a billion years of these small variations created a vast number of slightly different models, one or more of them transformed into simple, multicellular organisms. Still not much by today’s standards, these organisms had the potential to introduce even more differences as they reproduced. Some of these variations gave one type of organism or another a small advantage in acquiring food or fending off enemies, providing them the opportunity to live on and mutate more. After two and a half billion years of this, the mutation and competition driving life forward took another miraculous leap with the advent of sexual reproduction.

  Sexual reproduction introduced a radical new way of generating diversity when the genetic information of mothers and fathers recombined in novel ways.1 This incredible process supercharged some of these simple organisms to begin mutating wildly, particularly by around 540 million years ago, into a previously unimaginable diversity of life, including fish. About 200 million years ago, some fish crawled out of the water and evolved into mammals. Around 300,000 years ago, some of those mammals morphed into H
omo sapiens, a.k.a. us.

  That’s basically our evolutionary history. Every one of us is a single-cell organism gone wild through nearly four billion years of random mutation whose ancestors have continually out-competed their competitors in a never-ending cage match for survival. If your ancestors survived and procreated, you are here. If not, you are not. The shorthand name for this is Darwinian evolution. It got us to this point. But now the principles of Darwinian evolution are themselves mutating.

  From this point onward, much of our mutation will not be random. It will be self-designed.

  From this point onward, our selection will not be natural. It will be self-directed.

  From this point onward, our species will take active control of our evolutionary process by genetically altering our future offspring into something different from what we are today. We are, in other words, beginning a process of hacking Darwin.

  It is an incredible idea with monumental implications.

  The current version of our Homo sapiens species was never an evolutionary endpoint but always a stop along the way in our continuous, evolutionary journey. Going forward, we will be driving this process like never before through our technology, hopefully guided by our best values.

  If we traveled a thousand years into the past, kidnapped a baby, and brought that baby into our world today, that child would grow up into an adult indistinguishable from everyone else. But if we jumped back into the time machine and went a thousand years from today into the future to do the same, the baby we brought back would be a genetic superhuman by our current standards. He or she would be stronger and smarter than the other children, resistant to many diseases, longer-lived, and have genetic traits today associated with outlier humans like particular forms of genius or with animals like super-keen sensory perceptions. He or she might even carry new traits not yet known in the human or animal worlds but made from the same biological building blocks that have given rise to the great diversity of all life.

  “Will the category other do?” the receptionist asked, cutting short my reverie.

  I took a deep breath. “That’s probably the best bet.”

  “Hmm,” she murmured, appearing annoyed I seemed distracted. “And for how long would you like to store?”

  “Why don’t I start with a hundred years? Let’s see how that goes.”

  She eyed me suspiciously. “I’m sorry, sir, but our storage plans are for one, three, and five years.”

  My facial expression betrayed my concern. “That’s a lot shorter than I was looking for.”

  “You can always renew.”

  “That’s a lot of renewals,” I said with a shrug. “How can I know you’ll be around as long as I need?”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll be here. We just renovated our office.”

  I gulped. Clearly, we were thinking differently about the future of reproduction.

  “Please have a seat and fill out these forms,” she added, handing me a clipboard, “I’ll call you when the doctor is ready.”

  Sitting nervously in the stiff, red plastic chair under the saccharine Muzak of the white, no-frills waiting room, I filled out the forms and reflected on how I’d arrived to this point. I thought back to the strange series of events that had made me absolutely obsessed with the genetic technologies that will change the evolutionary trajectory of every member of our species, including little old me.

  It began when I was working on the White House National Security Council in the second term of the Clinton administration. My then-boss and now close friend Richard Clarke was telling anyone who would listen that terrorism was a major threat to U.S. security and that the United States needed to much more aggressively go after an obscure terrorist named Osama bin Laden. When the 9/11 planes crashed into the Twin Towers, Dick’s prophetic and now famous memo on Al-Qaeda was stuck, disregarded, in President Bush’s inbox.

  Dick always used to say that if everyone in Washington was focusing on one thing, you could be sure there was something far more important being missed. The lesson stuck with me. After leaving the White House, I kept thinking about what were those critically important and under-addressed issues. My mind kept returning to the then nascent revolution in genetics and biotechnology. I became consumed with reading everything I could find and tracking down some of the smartest scientists and thinkers in the world to learn more. When I felt I knew enough to have something to say, I started writing articles on the national security implications of the genetics revolution in foreign policy journals.

  One day in early 2008, I got a call out of the blue from a smart and eccentric congressman, Brad Sherman of California. Then chairman of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Congressman Sherman told me he’d been thinking a lot about the next generation of terrorist threats. He’d read and appreciated one of my articles and told me he wanted to hold a congressional hearing based on what I’d written. I was honored when he asked me to help frame the event, identify other potential participants, and serve as the lead witness for his prescient June 2008 hearing, “Genetics and Other Human Modification Technologies.”

  “When our descendants two hundred years from now look back at our present age and ask themselves what were the greatest foreign policy challenges of our time,” I asserted in my testimony, “I believe that terrorism, as critically important as it is, will not be on the top of their list. I am here testifying before you today because I believe that how we as Americans and as an international community deal with our new abilities to manage and manipulate our genetic makeup will be.”2

  The attention that came with the congressional testimony gave me confidence that I was on to something important, that I needed to dive deeper into this endlessly fascinating and rapidly changing topic, and that I had a message worth sharing.

  I wrote more and more in policy journals and began speaking around the country and world on the future of human genetic engineering. As I continued to learn and engage more, I became increasingly convinced we as a society weren’t doing nearly enough to prepare for the coming genetic revolution but worried my message was not getting through. Over time, I began to realize that to more effectively share my message I needed to communicate differently. If my genetics policy lectures weren’t breaking through, I needed to reach back into the tool kit I had used once before.

  After publishing my first book, an important but largely unread history of the Cambodian genocide filled with thousands of footnotes, I had realized the best vehicle for telling that tale was not a dense historical tome but a story. Telling stories is what we’ve always done. The tales told in caves and around fires have only now morphed into our novels, movies, and television dramas. My second book, and first novel, The Depths of the Sea, explored the tragedy of Cambodian history but this time through a series of intersecting stories of people drawn to the Thai-Cambodian border after the Vietnam War. The first book was a more accurate account of the Cambodian cataclysm, but the novel was far more digestible.

  So when facing the challenge years later of trying to bring the critically important issues of the genetics revolution to life beyond my nonfiction writing and speaking, I reverted to my same strategy. In my science fiction novels—Genesis Code, which explores the implications of the genetics revolution, and Eternal Sonata, a speculation on the future of life extension—I tried to imagine what revolutionary genetic technologies will mean for us on a very human level. I tried to bring people into the story of our genetic future in ways they could more readily absorb.

  But then an unexpected thing happened in my book tours. People at my events got a bit excited about the doomsday militias, conniving spymasters, budding romances, and flashbang explosions I’d concocted to give life to my sci-fi world, but their eyes opened widest when I explained the real science of the genetics revolution and what it seemed to mean for us human beings. When I explained the science using the language and storytelling of a novelist, audiences seemed to suddenly unde
rstand how the little snippets of scientific information they’d been encountering throughout their daily lives all fit together into the story of our future. I found myself discussing the fiction less and spending more time talking about the very real technology that had the potential to fundamentally transform our species.

  The animated conversations I had with people on book tours and at other events challenged me to learn more and inspired me to ask myself even tougher questions about the future of human genetic engineering and my personal relationship to it.

  I arrived at my midforties without the children I always assumed I’d eventually have, in part because of my long-standing and not entirely rational faith in science, healthy living, and a positive attitude to check the ravages of time and cruelty of biology. I’m a technology optimist to my core, but as I conjured images of our world to come to my audiences, I found myself wondering if I really believed in the magic of technology as much as I professed.

  Did I really believe that the knowledge gained in one hundred and fifty years of genetic science was enough to alter billions of years of our evolutionary biology? Would I really bet that genetic alterations helping make my future child healthier, smarter, and stronger would also make him or her happier? As a student of history, did I not bet that genetically enhanced people might use their advanced capabilities to dominate everyone else like colonial powers have always done? And as the son of a refugee from Nazi Europe, was I really willing to accept the idea that parents could and even should start selecting and engineering their future children based on under-informed genetic theories?

  Whatever my answers, one thing was clear: after nearly four billion years of evolution by one set of rules, our species is about to begin evolving by another.

  In his farsighted 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, French novelist Jules Verne described a three-man crew launching themselves in a projectile to the moon and then parachuting home. In 1865, this was a pure work of fantastical science fiction. Very little of the technology that would eventually get humans to the moon a century later had been developed. Imagining a moon landing in 1865 was like imagining humans landing in a different solar system today—it might someday be possible, but we have no real clue how to do it. The science is just not there.