Knoepfler - GMO sapiens: the life-changing science of designer babies

GMO

Sapiens

The Life-Changing Science
of Designer Babies

GMO

Sapiens

The Life-Changing Science
of Designer Babies

Paul Knoepfler

University of California, Davis

Published by

World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224

USA office: 27 Warren Street, Suite 401-402, Hackensack, NJ 07601

UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Knoepfler, Paul, 1967 , author.

GMO sapiens : the life-changing science of designer babies / Paul Knoepfler.

p. ; cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-9814667005 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-9814678537 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Title.

[DNLM: 1. Humans--genetics. 2. Organisms, Genetically Modified. 3. Cloning, Organism--ethics. 4. Genetic Engineering--ethics. QH 442.6]

QH442

576.5--dc23

2015029803

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright 2016 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the publisher.

For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from the publisher.

Typeset by Stallion Press

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Printed in Singapore

This book is dedicated to some wonderful Homo sapiens including my family, friends, and students, and also to future GMO sapiens or human clones should they come to exist.

Preface

Writing was a wild ride.

People have been worrying about designer babies for decades. In some cases in the past, the anxiety reached a feverish level. In contrast, frankly most scientists did not take the past discussion of designer babies seriously enough to get concerned. I know that I didnt. It was, after all, just an idea and there were huge technical roadblocks in the way. A decade ago, many of us felt that it was more hype than anything else.

Today, scientists are taking the possibility of attempts to create designer babies very seriously. Those of us who have spoken out publicly on the issue generally oppose efforts at creating designer babies, but this is not true of everyone. Some prominent voices including certain scientists, ethicists, and legal scholars favor making designer babies. From all that I have seen lately, it is almost certain that someone will give it a try. Taking a stab at creation of designer babies today would be wildly unethical and dangerous, but since when has that kind of potential for disaster stopped people in the past from doing crazy stuff?

Scientists are paying close attention to this issue for another reason too. The same new cause harm to individuals but also that such reckless efforts could derail other important and relatively non-controversial CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing-based research in the process.

I believe that some scientists will try to make genetically modified (GM) people in the coming years. Science fiction is becoming reality in the biomedical world. This creates urgency for public education and more dialogue about how this technology could change the world and us with it. That change could be good, really bad, or some complicated combination of both. For these reasons, the idea for this book came to me with the goal being to make a positive difference in this area through furthering education and sparking discussion.

In writing this book, one major objective was to capture in an understandable way the nature of this tidal scientific and societal change for a broad audience and raise awareness of the possibility of GM people in the coming years. Education is a good thing, right? Still, some fellow scientists told me not to write this book as I began the process in late 2013 and early 2014.

It will be too controversial and may unduly worry the public about biotechnology more generally, came the worries. It will upset people.

Still, others were very supportive of the idea of a new book on human genetic modification. But I thought that it could not just be any book and definitely not a stodgy textbook. It had to be a book that was readable (and even enjoyable) for a large, diverse audience. A new, approachable book could be positive in terms of educating and inspiring a whole range of people on this topic, which was a secondary goal for this writing. I did not see any such book out there so I wrote this one. I felt the same way about the topic of stem cells when I started writing my first book, Stem Cells: An Insiders Guide. There was also a problematic gap in the stem cell world in 2012. Scientists reaching out and engaging with the public was needed on stem cells, and now the same is true about human genetic modification.

Encouragingly, some public discussion on the topic of human genetic modification has begun. For instance, I was happy to see as I continued writing this new book that in early 2015 some prominent genetic modification researchers such as Jennifer Doudna were publicly voicing concerns about human genetic modification. Doudna is one of the top scientists whose work has indirectly made human genetic modification possible through her research on CRISPR-Cas9 technology or CRISPR for short.

CRISPR makes relatively easy work of editing the genome just like one might do edits for a book using a computer keyboard. Much the same as those of us who write on keyboards often make mistakes, CRISPR can make mistakes too, but there is no autocorrect for a CRISPR-induced mistake in the human genome. Further, we may not even know the mistake happened until too late.

Doudna and other gene-editing scientists took the initiative to raise awareness of the possibility of CRISPR-mediated modification of human embryos. They started publicly calling for dialogue on human modification. The US Congress even held a hearing in June 2015 at which she was a panelist. Still more discussion bringing in as wide a public audience as possible would further help and a book could fulfill that role.

The more I learned as I researched this topic, the more I was inspired to blog about it and so I became a participant in the dialogue as well. For example, I reached out to leaders in the gene-editing and genomics fields for dialogue. I posted interviews with them on my blog, including Doudna as well as Harvard geneticist George Church and Duke legal scholar Nita Farahany. The latter two are both advocates from very different perspectives for future human modification under certain conditions. In May 2015 I was invited to speak at a Stanford Law School meeting on heritable human genetic modification organized by legal scholar Hank Greely. and it is discussed more in Chapter 10. We took questions from the public in the audience at the end of the meeting, which resulted in a great exchange of ideas.