Matthew Cobb - As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age

E ver since the early 1970 s the world has been living through a scientific and technological revolution. New genetic techniques have transformed science, providing profound insights into the whole tree of life and allowing us to investigate a huge range of organisms with astonishing precision. These discoveries have been turned into novel technology with far-reaching implications, putting food in the fields and healing bodies. Vast fortunes have been made as whole sectors of the pharmaceutical industry have been transformed. To give just one example: if you take insulin, it was produced in a genetically engineered microbe.

Built upon dreams, genetic engineering has equally provoked nightmares throughout its history. The impact of the new genetics on popular culture and our global mindset over the last fifty years has mirrored the promises and doubts about nuclear power during the post-war decades. Nuclear physics lost its innocence in the searing white heat of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; genetic engineering has yet to suffer a similar fate but that is not for want of trying from the very beginning, hidden from history, the new science has been used to create terrifying new weapons. The potential for the nightmares to become reality grows with our increasing mastery and our endless appetite for ever more audacious applications.

With every new development there have been promises of new sources of food or medicine, or new cures for diseases, which have been rapidly counterbalanced by fears of plagues, of genetically manipulated humans, or of the inadvertent or deliberate release of dangerous organisms. Genetically modified plants promised to transform agriculture, but opponents feared ecological catastrophe. Neither happened. The genetic dreams and nightmares have tended to recur: the promises are rarely fully realised, the worst fears never come to pass and after a while the whole issue subsides, only to re-emerge a few years later following new discoveries and applications.

This cycle has occurred repeatedly over the last half-century. Now, after a long period in which the technology began to appear commonplace, three recent developments have brought the dreams and nightmares back into our waking lives, providing amazing opportunities and raising the real possibility of catastrophe:

In 2018 we stepped into the brave new world of heritable human genome editing when Chinese researcher He Jianqui used CRISPR gene editing in a botched experiment that mutated three healthy embryos, with unknown consequences for the resulting children. Despite a global outcry, there is no agreed way of preventing this from happening again.

We can now transform whole ecosystems through a process known as a gene drive, which is essentially a genetic chain reaction. This could eradicate malaria mosquitoes, but as the scientists working on these systems have warned, it could also wreak havoc on the ecosystem.

Well-meaning scientists trying to gain insight into the potential shape of future pandemics have deliberately produced new variants of lethal pathogens that are even more dangerous than before. These experiments were not behind the COVID- pandemic, but such research could inadvertently lead to an outbreak of a terrifying new disease.