Jonathan Anomaly - Creating Future People

We all want future people to flourish. We want our children to be healthy and happy, and we want them to live meaningful lives.

Over the past few centuries weve remade our environment by altering ecosystems and modifying crops. Weve changed how our children think with compulsory education. Weve altered their immune systems with vaccines and antibiotics. Apart from environmental interventions to improve our childrens prospects, should we genetically modify our children?

New forms of biomedical technology will soon enable parents to exercise more direct control over the traits of their children. Pre-implantation genetic testing (PGT) already allows us to screen and select embryos for certain traits, including a reduced risk of developing cancer, cystic fibrosis, and sickle cell anemia. So far this technology is limited by the still young science of genetics, and the small number of eggs women can generate through induced ovulation. But there are two reasons this will change quickly. First, machine learning is accelerating our understanding of what genes do, and how they interact to shape traits. Second, a newly discovered technique allows us to take any somatic cell including a blood or skin cell and turn it into a pluripotent stem cell from which we can create sperm and eggs. This will allow us to generate a large number of embryos from which to choose before deciding which to implant.

As computational biology improves, were increasingly able to identify clusters of genes that correlate with complex characteristics, including personality traits. This knowledge is then used to assign polygenic scores which indicate the likelihood that an embryo will develop into a person with a particular trait.

Apart from selecting embryos for genetic characteristics, gene editing tools like CRISPR Cas-9 are already being used to alter non-human embryos in laboratories around the world. At some point, many of us will be able to use a combination of PGT, CRISPR, and other techniques to sculpt the traits of our kids.

Visionary biologists like Craig Venter and George Church go even farther: they envision a distant future in which we can create children from scratch by writing a genetic code and constructing a synthetic genome from common amino acids. The moral and political questions raised by these technologies are as profound as any our species has ever faced. The risks are grave, and the possible benefits are enormous.

Each chapter in the book will advance arguments for enhancing traits that might benefit future people. The book will cover some of the mainstream debates on genetic enhancement, but will often focus more on issues neglected in the debate so far, including collective action problems in which the reproductive choices of each affect the welfare of all. For example, imagine that each child would benefit from an enhancement that confers immunity to a disease like tuberculosis that threatens the current population, but also that all of us would be better off with more immuno-diversity in the population. Will parents left alone to make choices for their own private reasons solve the problem? Will new laws or norms be needed to coordinate our actions? What are the moral advantages of relying on free choice in comparison with different kinds of restrictions?

Similar questions arise for enhancing cognitive traits like empathy, impulse control, and extraversion all of which are strongly influenced by genes. In a world in which the genetic endowment of our children does so much to influence their prospects, it is likely that black markets for genetic enhancements will thrive, even if governments attempt to restrict them. This fact will influence the feasibility of regulating the market for technologies that allow us to select and alter embryos.