to intervene in ways so profound and precise as to make it possible to modify our DNA. Here we see the need for an increased awareness of our ethical responsibility toward humanity and the environment in which we live. While the Church applauds every effort in research and application directed to the care of our suffering brothers and sisters, she is also mindful of the basic principle that ‘not everything technically possible or doable is thereby ethically acceptable.’11
It was a well-manicured statement, crafted in consultation with Bosley and other CRISPR company executives. And it was soon forgotten as Katy Perry and other VIPs lined up for a chance to kiss the Papal ring. Nobody—not even the Pope—knew that halfway around the world, a Chinese woman was in the first weeks of pregnancy. She was carrying twins whose DNA had been sculpted not by God but by the undivine hands of an ambitious genome engineer with an assist from his embryologist.
It was a most maculate conception.
Fears that a renegade scientist might dare to rewrite the genome’s Holy Script have existed for decades, albeit more in the fictional realm. But a 2015 study by a Chinese group showed for the first time that scientists were prepared to fix a disease gene in a human embryo just hours after in vitro fertilization. In ethical terms, it was a giant leap over the mythical red line that supposed that human beings would never play God with their genetic destiny. Over the next three years, various august medical societies and committees published dozens of erudite reports on the ethical pros and cons of genome editing.12 While scientists and ethicists debated, Australian geneticist Daniel MacArthur tweeted, “My grandchildren will be embryo-screened, germline-edited. Won’t ‘change what it means to be human.’ It’ll be like vaccination.”
Several groups, mostly in China, reported experiments on human embryos, without any plans of implanting those edited embryos. But a young Chinese scientist who had spent five years training in the United States dared to take the next fateful step. He Jiankui assumed that his groundbreaking work would be celebrated at home and abroad, published in the world’s premier journal, putting him on a pedestal with his scientific hero, Nobel laureate Robert Edwards, the co-inventor of IVF.
But there was no celebration, no acclaim, and no Nature paper. Instead, outrage and fierce, near-universal condemnation. The work was sloppy, irresponsible, rash, unethical, and possibly criminal, leaving serious questions over the health of two babies. He Jiankui’s career crumbled overnight as he was placed under house arrest, sacked by his university, and eventually sentenced to three years in prison. Undeterred, a Russian geneticist announced his intent to take matters into his own hands and use CRISPR gene editing to help couples with inherited deafness. “We keep advancing where this line is and, in effect, there is no line,” said Regalado.13
The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, is steadfastly opposed to any attempt to tamper with the DNA of human embryos. “Evolution has been working toward optimizing the human genome for 3.85 billion years. Do we really think that some small group of human genome tinkerers could do better without all sorts of unintended consequences?” he said.14 Many leading scientists have called for a temporary moratorium to give scientists and other stakeholders time to explore the rationale and circumstances under which germline editing might be approved.15 But others find little to fear about the prospect of germline editing. Harvard’s George Church, a veteran genome engineer, is keeping an open mind. “I just don’t think that blue eyes and [an extra] 15 IQ points is really a public health threat,” he told a British newspaper. “I don’t think it’s a threat to our morality.”16
In his final book, the great physicist Stephen Hawking predicted that we were heading toward an era of what he termed self-designed evolution. “We will be able to change and improve our DNA,” Hawking wrote. “We have now mapped DNA, which means we have read ‘the book of life,’ so we can start writing in corrections.”17 But for Hawking, the slippery slope didn’t stop at curing devastating diseases such as his own affliction, a slowly progressive form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Hawking believed scientists would use techniques such as CRISPR to modify or enhance traits like intelligence, memory, and longevity—violating the law if necessary. These “superhumans” would be available to wealthy elites, putting them in conflict with natural humans. Hawking continued:
Once such superhumans appear, there are going to be significant political problems with the unimproved humans, who won’t be able to compete. Presumably, they will die out, or become unimportant. Instead, there will be a race of self-designing beings who are improving themselves at an ever-increasing rate.
There was an immediate fear that the abhorrent actions of one scientist could derail the remarkable progress in using CRISPR and other editing techniques for gene therapy in children and adults. As I talked to friends and scientists in the audience, I heard one genome editing luminary portray the numerous concerns over the CRISPR babies as an “existential threat” to the future of therapeutic genome editing.
Thankfully, those fears have not yet come to fruition. Although still early days, genome editing is showing genuine promise in the clinic for patients with cancer, blood diseases, hereditary forms of blindness and many other disorders. The training wheels are coming off, says Fyodor Urnov. “The world gets to see what CRISPR can really do for the world in the most positive sense.”18
I. #MeToo
II. The genome project’s dirty little secret is that the human sequence is still incomplete. Portions of the genome have proven just too difficult to read using current DNA sequencing technologies.
III. There will be no such speech in 2020: all seven Kavli laureates were men.
CHAPTER 2 A CUT ABOVE
On June 26, 2000, President Bill Clinton walked into the East Room of the White House flanked by two famous scientists, Francis Collins and Craig Venter. Clinton announced a landmark in the Human Genome Project (HGP)—the first rough draft of the human genome sequence, the book of life. Beaming in via satellite from 10 Downing Street was British prime minister Tony Blair, waving the flag for the British team that chipped in about a third of the sequence.
For two years, two teams—small armies more like—of scientists had been dueling to reach this epic milestone. In one corner was Collins, the field marshal of the international government-funded alliance to decode human DNA. The prize was a treasure map of the human genome, displaying the order of 3 billion letters of the DNA alphabet (a four-letter code of chemicals abbreviated by A, C, T, and G) bundled into twenty-three pairs of chromosomes.
In the opposite corner was Venter, a maverick scientist/entrepreneur who brazenly launched a hostile takeover of the genome project. He divulged his plans to Collins in the United Airlines lounge at Washington Dulles airport, and then to the world via the front page of the New York Times. His new company, Celera Genomics, vowed to cut through years of government inefficiency and bureaucracy to compile the sequence faster and cheaper using a warehouse full of the latest automated sequencing machines—each named after a sci-fi character—plus a massive Compaq supercomputer to crunch the data. As a consolation prize, Venter said Collins could sequence the mouse genome instead. Almost overnight, the tables had been turned: the “Darth Vader” of genomics had the weaponry and momentum; Collins and his allies were the plucky overmatched rebels with their backs against the wall.