Genetically Engineered Babies — Inevitable?

Words by Alexi Barnstone

The world collectively reared its head when Professor He Jiankui claimed to have edited the gene code of two twin girls in China. It was the first time someone had announced that they had used gene editing techniques on humans, and though the claims are now are considered dubious, it brought about questions about the morality of artificial design in our own species and the risky slippery slope that it could catalyze.

The influence gene editing could have on our lives has been explored for some time, these paradigms have become mainstream questions in ethics, even permeating the thematics of film in Hollywood. Gattaca for example, a Hollywood film produced in 1997, explored the potential negative implications of gene editing on society.

The protagonist in Gattaca, an astronomy enthusiast named Vincent Freeman, aspired to make a career out of flying to space. But society rejected him. Vincent was born before gene editing technology hit the market. He had been born completely naturally. He was not the perfect human.

But many others were. After the introduction of the biotechnology more and more parents birthed design babies that were guaranteed to be all the best parts of their natural species, no disease or weakness. His burning passion for space travel would never happen because he was not synthetic. All the high-class jobs in the Gattaca society were withheld for people that were edited at birth, who are stronger, faster, and smarter due to their altered DNA.

Genetic editing creates a new form of prejudice in the film. People that were not altered at birth are considered “invalids” and are reduced to holding low paying blue collar jobs with no possibility for upward mobility. Chasing his dream Vincent would go to interviews at space firms. He had the knowledge base and drive for the job. He loved every aspect of the work and had studied extensively, but as soon as they asked him to pee in a cup he knew what would happen. They would test his DNA, see that he was invalid, and reject him without hesitation. Genetic editing fulfilled humanities worse fears. It created a society built on a class-based division of people based on a physical property. Racism was reinvented to distinguish between edited or natural. The world took on a new shape to an all too familiar dystopia, a world filled with the same paradigms we have fought so hard to eradicate from our real world for generations.

Of course, we do not know that Gattaca is an accurate projection of the future. There are no guarantees that such a reality will culminate. There are many positives that could also come out of the popularisation of gene editing. Having the capacity to alter the DNA of a person could see an end to certain diseases such as Cystic Fibrosis. The disease is caused by abnormalities in DNA, causing damages in the lungs. Cystic Fibrosis effects around 70,000 people worldwide. Genetic editing could be used to completely abolish this disease. The same goes for diseases like AIDs and Diabetes.

Benefits like these provide a great argument for use of gene editing, but they don’t absolve the technology of the risks that it comes with. One moment you are healing the world of genetic disease, rationalizing your actions because they make the person better. The next you are using that same rational argument to create a species of superhumans. It is a slippery slope. Where do we draw the line between fixing a deficiency and perfecting nature? Once we start to play god there is no going back.

Some people argue that there is an inherent difference between enhancement, as in the case with genetically perfecting human DNA, and healing the sick. It might be easy, in a future world where gene editing technology is advanced and ubiquitous, to prohibit the use of the biotechnology for any type of enhancement purposes and only allow it to be used to heal the weak and suffering. Such protections could save us from plummeting into a real-world Gattaca.

Perhaps such a future world is possible. Maybe we could suppress the urge to play god and be able to stop ourselves from sliding down the slippery slope of intelligent human design. But it is very unlikely, and there is a very good argument for why. The argument is founded in Game Theory. The potential implications of gene editing create a perfect reflection of an age-old game theory problem — the prisoner's dilemma.

Consider the two competing global powers the United States and China. There is not a massive amount of trust internationally between the two. Creating designer babies could lead to some kind of strategic advantage. Neither would be willing to risk letting the other gain some kind of economic, militaristic, or societal advantage over them. Nor can either be certain that the other is not willing to implement this technology. They have no way of guaranteeing that the other will abide by popular moral reasoning and abstain. So just to be safe they each start to create designer babies.

Even though the best outcome for all of us is that neither ever engages in playing god in this fashion, it is likely that both will for fear that the other is. The same paradigm explains the cold war era’s prolific missile production that led to us having enough nuclear bombs to destroy the planet — 160 times over.

During the cold war, neither the United States nor Russia was willing to hedge their bets on the other deciding to make the right choice and stopping the creation of weapons of mass destruction. They couldn’t risk it. And in the future designer babies could lead to some kind of strategic advantage, so just like the cold war, they simply won’t be able to risk it.

If either country could stand to gain an economic, militaristic, or intellectual advantage over the other by creating designer babies then they probably would do it — even if it is worse than both agreeing not to do it. The possible actions of each country can be expressed in the table below. In each of the four boxes you can see the action of the US in black and the actions of China in red.

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And here, in the second table, we can see the impacts that this would have on each country.

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So why do both countries take the less than ideal route? Because it is a safer bet than risking being truly moral. Like many of the atrocities of the past, including the nuclear bomb, nations engage in despicable acts that put us all in danger because they are too afraid of what might happen if they don’t. The need to preserve power trumps our need to preserve humanity as we know it.

Genetically edited babies are probably going to happen. We do not know when it will happen and we certainly do not know how the world will change because of it. Maybe gene editing will culminate in the creation of a world like Gattaca, maybe it will create a new utopia. We do not know yet, but it seems that inevitably time will tell us the answer.

Pulp Editors