Hacking Darwin Read online

  A century later, in 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy ascended the podium in Houston to give his now-famous speech announcing that the United States would send a man to the moon by the end of the decade. President Kennedy felt comfortable putting U.S. credibility on the line at the height of the Cold War because in 1962 nearly all the technology that would allow a successful moon landing—the rockets, heat shields, life-support systems, and computers making complex mathematical calculations—already existed. He was neither conjuring a far-off future like Jules Verne nor inventing science fiction. He was drawing very clear inferences from existing technology that only needed some additional tweaks. Nearly everything was in place, the realization was inevitable, only the timing was at issue. Seven years later, Neil Armstrong climbed down the Apollo 11 ladder in his “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

  For the genetics revolution, now is the equivalent not of 1865 but of 1962. Talk of recasting our species is not speculative science fiction but the logical near-term extension of fast-growing technologies that already exist. We now have all the tools we need to alter the genetic makeup of our species. The science is in place. The realization is inevitable. The only variables are whether this process will fully take off a couple of decades sooner or later and what values we will deploy to guide how the technology evolves.

  Not everyone has heard of Moore’s law, the observation that computer-processing power roughly doubles about every two years, but we’ve all internalized its implications. That’s why we expect each new version of our iPhones and laptops to be lighter and do more. But it’s becoming increasingly clear there is a Moore’s law equivalent for understanding and altering all biology, including our own.

  We are coming to realize our biology is yet another system of information technology. Our heredity is not magic, we have learned, but code that is increasingly understandable, readable, writable, and hackable. Because of this, we will soon have many of the same expectations for ourselves as we do for our other information technology. We will increasingly see ourselves in many ways as IT.

  This idea frightens many people and it should. It should also excite us based on its incredible life-affirming possibilities. Regardless of how we feel, the genetic future will arrive far sooner than we are prepared for, building on technologies that already exist.

  As a start, we will use the existing technologies of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and informed embryo selection not just to screen out the simplest genetic diseases and select gender, as is currently the case, but also to choose and then alter the genetics of our future children more broadly.

  A second, overlapping phase of the human genetic revolution will go a step farther, bumping up the number of eggs available for IVF by inducing large numbers of adult cells like blood or skin cells into stem cells, turning those stem cells into egg cells, and then growing those egg cells into actual eggs.

  If and when this process becomes safe for humans, women undergoing IVF will be able to have not just ten or fifteen of their eggs fertilized, but hundreds. Instead of screening the smaller number of their own embryos, these prospective parents would be able to review screens for hundreds or more, supercharging the embryo selection process with big-data analytics.

  Many parents will also consider the possibility of not just selecting but of genetically altering their future children. Gene-editing technologies have been around for years, but the recent development of new tools like CRISPR-Cas9 is making it possible to edit the genes of all species, including ours, with far greater precision, speed, flexibility, and affordability than ever before. With CRISPR and tools like it, it will ultimately be scientifically possible to give embryos new traits and capabilities by inserting DNA from other humans, animals, or someday even synthetic sources.

  Once parents realize they can use IVF and embryo selection to screen out the risk of many genetic diseases and potentially select for perceived positive traits like higher IQ and even greater extroversion and empathy, more parents will want their children conceived outside the mother. Many will come to see conception through sex as a dangerous and unnecessary risk. Governments and insurance companies will want prospective parents to use IVF and embryo selection to avoid having to pay for lifetimes of care for avoidable and expensive genetic diseases.

  With whatever mix of catalysts and first movers, it is almost impossible to believe that our species will forgo chasing advances in technologies that have the potential to eradicate terrible diseases, improve our health, and increase our life spans. We have embraced every new technology—from explosives to nuclear energy to anabolic steroids to plastic surgery—that promises to improve our lives despite their potential downsides, and this will be no exception. The very idea of altering our genetics calls for an enormous dose of humility, but we would be a different species if humility, not hubristic aspiration, had been our guiding principle.

  With these tools, we will want to eliminate genetic diseases in the near term, alter and enhance other capabilities in the medium term, and, perhaps, prepare ourselves to live on a hotter Earth, in space, or on other planets in the longer term. Over time, mastering the tools of genetically manipulating ourselves will come to be seen as perhaps the greatest innovation in the history of our species, the key to unlocking an almost unimaginable potential and in many ways an entirely new future.

  But that doesn’t make all of this any less jarring.

  As this revolution unfolds, not everyone will be comfortable with genetic enhancement based on their ideological or religious beliefs or due to real or perceived safety concerns. Life is not just about science and code. It involves mystery and chance and, for some, spirit.

  If ours was an ideologically uniform species, this transformation would be challenging. In a world where differences of opinion and belief are so vast and levels of development so disparate, it has the potential, at least if we’re not careful, to be cataclysmic.

  We’ll have to ask, and answer, some truly fundamental questions. Will we use these powerful technologies to expand or limit our humanity? Will the benefits of this science go to the privileged few or will we use these advances to reduce suffering, respect diversity, and promote global health and well-being for everyone? Who has the right to make individual or collective decisions that could ultimately impact the entire human gene pool? And what kind of process, if any, do we need to make the best collective decisions possible about our future evolutionary trajectory as one or possibly more than one species?

  There are no easy answers to any of these questions, but every human being needs to be part of the process of grappling with them. We each must see ourselves as President Kennedy stepping to the podium in 1962 Houston, preparing to give our own speech about the future of our species in light of the genetics and biotechnology revolutions. Our collective responses, laundered by our conversations, organizations, civil movements, political structures, and global institutions, will determine in many ways who we are, what we value, and how we move forward. But to be part of that process, we all have an urgent need to educate ourselves on the issues.

  “Mr. Metzl, we are ready for you,” the receptionist called. I shook my head slightly and looked up, still feeling a little nervous. As the door opened to the back corridor, I stood slowly, paused a moment, then took a deliberate first step forward.

  I’ve written this book to lay out my case for why, even though the human genetic revolution is inevitable and approaching quickly, how this revolution plays out is anything but inevitable and is, in important ways, up to us. To make the smartest collective decisions about our way forward, we’ll need to understand what’s happening and what’s at stake and bring as many of us as possible into the conversation. This book is my humble effort to jump-start that process.

  The door is open for all of us. Whether we like it or not, we are all marching toward it. Our future awaits.

  Chapter 1

  Where Darwin Meets Mendel

  “Raise your hand if you are thi
nking of having a child more than ten years from now,” I asked the large audience of millennials gathered in the sleek Washington, DC, conference hall. About half the audience raised a hand.

  I’d been waxing poetic for forty-five minutes about how the coming genetic revolution will transform the way we make babies and ultimately the nature of the babies we make. I’d explained why I believe it is inevitable our species will adopt and embrace our genetically enhanced future, why this was both incredibly exciting and deeply unsettling, and what I thought we needed to do now to try to make sure we can optimize the benefits and minimize the harms of revolutionary genetic technologies.

  “If your hand is in the air and you are a woman, you should probably freeze your eggs. If your hand is up and you are a man, I encourage you to freeze your sperm as soon as possible.”

  The audience eyed me suspiciously.

  “No matter how young and fertile you are,” I continued, “there’s a not-insignificant chance you are going to conceive your children in a laboratory, so you may as well freeze your eggs and sperm now when you are at your biological peak.”

  A wave of apprehension rolled across the faces of these high-flying young professionals. I could almost feel the conflict brewing. I had struggled for decades with the same question that seemed to be troubling them: How do we balance the magnificent wonder and brutal cruelty of our own biology?

  We are all born through a process that feels nothing short of miraculous then immediately begin our never-ending and ultimately losing battle with time, disease, and the elements. We have a strong attraction to what we feel is natural, but our species is defined by our relentless efforts to tame nature. We want our children to be born naturally healthy, but there is practically no limit to how far parents will go in defying nature to save their children from disease.

  A young woman in a blue pantsuit raised her hand. “You’ve just explained where you think the genetic revolution is going and how we should prepare for it, but what about you? Would you genetically engineer your own kids?”

  Uncharacteristically, I froze. I’d been writing and lecturing about the future of human reproduction for many years, but somehow the question had never before been asked so directly. I didn’t quite know the answer to the woman’s question and looked up for a moment to think.

  The science of human genetics has advanced so rapidly that all of us are still racing to catch up. When James Watson, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins identified the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, they showed how the manual of life is organized like a twisting ladder. Figuring out how to sequence genes just a quarter century later proved that the manual could be read and ever-better understood. Developing tools for precisely editing the genome a few short decades later then allowed scientists to write and rewrite the code of life. Readable, writable, hackable—the scientific advances over the past half-century have turned biology into another form of information technology and humans from indecipherable beings into wetware carriers of our source-code software.

  Understanding genetics as IT has led us to increasingly see the genetic variations and mutations causing terrible diseases and enhancing suffering both as the necessary cost of evolutionary diversity and like the annoying bugs interfering with any computer program. Continuing this metaphor, shouldn’t we want whatever software updates that might be available to make sure our systems are running optimally?

  I felt my thoughts gelling. My eyes regained focus. “If it was safe and I knew I could prevent my child from significant suffering,” I said, walking across the stage, “I would do it. If I truly believed I could help my child live a longer, healthier, happier life, I would do it. And if I needed to give my child special capabilities to succeed in a competitive world where most everyone else had advanced capabilities, I would at least think very seriously about it. How about you?”

  The woman swayed in her chair. “It’s tough,” she said, “I hear what you are saying. But something about all this just feels unnatural.”

  “Let me push you on that,” I responded. “What do you mean by natural?”

  “Probably just things as they are before they’ve been changed by humans.”

  “So, is agriculture natural?” I asked. “We’ve only been doing it for about twelve thousand years.”

  “It is and it isn’t,” she said cautiously, starting to recognize nature was a flimsy peg on which to hang an argument.

  “Is organic corn natural? Go back nine thousand years and it would be impossible to find anything resembling today’s corn. You’d find a wild weed called teosinte with a few sad kernels hanging from it. Add millennia of active human manipulations and you get the beautiful, yellow behemoth gracing our picnic tables today. So many of the other fruits and vegetables we eat, even the organic ones from Whole Foods, are in many ways our human creations coming from conscious and selective breeding over millennia. Are they natural?”

  “It’s a gray area,” she conceded, still holding to her original concept of nature.

  “Would we be more natural if we lived in hunter-gatherer societies like our ancestors?”

  “Probably.”

  I didn’t want to keep pushing but needed to make an essential point. “Would you want to do that?”

  An impish smile crossed her face. “Is there room service?”

  “So, you are at the Four Seasons and you get a terrible bacteriological infection,” I continued. “Would you want to be treated like our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago with incantations and berries or would you want the antibiotics that could save your life?”

  “I’ll go with the antibiotics,” she said.

  “Natural?”

  “I get your point.”

  I looked around the room. “We all have deep-seated ideas of what’s natural, but much of it isn’t that natural at all. It may be what’s familiar to us from an earlier time, but we humans have been aggressively altering our world for millennia. And if we have been in the business of altering the biological and other systems around us for so long, must we think of the biology we have inherited from our parents as our destiny? Do we have the right or even the obligation to work out the bugs and software coding errors in the hardware of our and our children’s bodies?”

  The audience fidgeted.

  “If your future child had a terrible disease that you knew would kill him or her, raise your hand if you’d be willing to subject your child to surgery to save his or her life,” I pressed on.

  All the hands went up.

  “If you could prevent your child from having the disease in the first place, would you do that?”

  The hands stayed up.

  “Keep your hands up if you’d do that by going through IVF and screening your embryos to make sure your future child wasn’t at risk.”

  The hands stayed up.

  “How about by safely making one small change to the genes of your child when he or she is just a preimplanted embryo?”

  A few hands dropped.

  I turned to one of the young men whose hand has dropped, a preppy twentysomething looking like he’d stepped out of the L.L. Bean catalogue. “Can you tell me why?”

  “Who are we to start engineering our kids?” he said. “It feels like a slippery slope. Once we start, where do we stop? We could end up with Frankensteins. It makes me nervous.”

  “That’s a very valid point,” I said. “It should make you nervous. It should make all of us nervous. If you aren’t feeling a mix of excitement and fear, you aren’t really getting it. Genetic technologies will allow us to do wonderful things that will ease human suffering and unlock potentials we can hardly imagine. New versions of us, Homo sapiens 2.0 and beyond, will use these new capabilities to invent new technologies, explore new worlds, create phenomenal art, and experience an ever-wider range of emotions. But if we don’t get things right, the same technologies could divide societies, create oppressive hierarchies between enhanced and unenhanced people, undermine diversity, l
ead us to devalue and commodify human life, and even cause major national and international conflict.”

  “So, who determines where this leads?” another woman asked.

  “That will be the most important and consequential question we, individually and collectively, will ask over the coming many years,” I said deliberately. “How we answer it will determine who and what we are, where we live and can live, and what is possible for us as people and as a species.”

  The audience sat up in their seats. I could feel anxiety levels rising in the room.

  “We will have to be the ones who figure out where we go with all of this. That’s why I’m here speaking with you. Our species as a whole will be making monumental decisions about our genetic future over the coming years. Some of these decisions, like passing laws, will happen on the societal level. But many significant choices will be made by individuals, like each of us figuring out how we want to make babies. Each individual and couple won’t feel they are deciding the future of our species, but collectively we will be.”

  That familiar mix of terror, wonder, and confusion I’d come to expect from all of my talks over the years spread across the room.

  Then, as always, the hands shot up. Like the seventh graders I’d spoken to in New Jersey, the high rollers in ideas festivals like Google Zeitgeist, Tech Open Air, and South by Southwest, the experts at Exponential Medicine and the New York Academy of Science, the Stanford and Harvard law students, and the scientists, scholars, and business leaders in conferences around the world, the audience started to understand and internalize the awesome responsibility this historical moment has thrust upon each of us.

  It is a responsibility that comes at an incredible inflection point in our history as a species, when our biology and technology are intersecting like never before and are upending some of our most sacred practices and traditions. Like the others, the Washington millennials were starting to grasp that the future of human genetic enhancement wasn’t just about making a few changes to our and our children’s genes but about creating a new and very different future for our species.