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by Kiran Jayasinghe
My twin sister and I are fraternal, and our differences, while slight, have always been rather apparent. My sister had a large gap between her two front teeth for most of her childhood, whereas I had a smile that barely needed the help of braces. I grew five extra inches, while she inherited our mother’s genes and stayed put at five feet. She maintained perfect eyesight, though mine has steadily declined since we were four. As we went through school and partook in sports and developed our own interests, even our smallest differences affected our character and experiences. Without them, we wouldn’t be who we are now. But I would be lying through my (straight) teeth if I said I didn’t want to change a few of my own traits. I believe we’ve all experienced the longing to change ourselves. To turn the color of our eyes into something deemed more ‘striking’, to transform our hair from straight to curly or curly to straight. Perhaps some of us have even wished for things like being genetically intelligent, or to have an affinity for math or art — anything society deems as valuable. The human need to conform to a popular or widely accepted standard is a societal trait that’s existed for ages, so the idea that we could easily change our traits to fit that standard has always been appealing. Naturally, then, the discovery of DNA and genes in the 1860’s by a relatively obscure physician was a beacon of hope for us (“Friedrich Miescher and the discovery of DNA”). If our defining characteristics were formed based off of instructions given by single genes, then by changing those genes, we could change our traits — pick and choose which ones we wanted, delete the ones we didn’t. And after decades of research, some genetically modified mice, food, and bacteria, we have developed the ability to gene-edit. For better or worse, the development of CRISPR technology in 2009 has made it infinitely easier to edit, add, or even erase the the human genome. The benefits of CRISPR and other gene-editing tools are virtually endless. The option to delete, switch, and edit genes means we could cure diseases such as sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer’s, and even many forms of cancer (“Don’t Edit The Human Germline”). CRISPR could — eventually — result in the complete erasure of all hereditary diseases. And we aren’t limited to editing just ourselves, either; we could edit other species and save them from extinction in the process. We could even bring back the already extinct. But with these benefits comes the question of whether CRISPR is entirely ethical. Since the point of CRISPR is to let us wipe out our ‘flaws’, CRISPR also gives us the power to determine what exactly those are. It gives us the ability to decide what we think is inferior and what we believe is desirable — and that is dangerous. If we deem a mental disorder as inferior and delete it from our genomes, we, firstly, are denoting people who have that disorder as lesser,, and also automatically ridding that particular perspective from society. Deleting disorders, diseases, and traits — especially in embryos — could rid crucial biological diversity from our population, which would weaken our society. “Expanding diversity in all its forms, including disability, strengthens the human community ethically and biologically because it opens the public and private sphere to a variety of perspectives, life experiences, ideas, and solutions to live together with mutual flourishing”, says Sandy Sufian and Rosemarie Garland-Thompson. While using gene-editing to treat life-threatening diseases could be revolutionary, we could also overstep and erase what makes us us. With shrinking diversity also comes increasing social inequity. We see this now with all types of modern-day technology — things like computers and phones and new medicines and treatments can only be accessed by those wealthy enough to afford it. With CRISPR, the rich would be at even more of an advantage — parents editing their child’s genes so they could become naturally more athletic, have a more symmetrical face, be a few inches taller. The rich would become genetically predisposed, and the poor would depend on luck only — or rather, natural genetics — to compete with the wealthier. It’s undeniable: gene-editing is the future of humanity, and that future is arriving remarkably fast. But determining how we handle these tools and the usage of CRISPR technology won’t come to us so quickly, and will be, perhaps, even harder than developing the actual tool, because the danger of CRISPR is CRISPR itself. Editing genes could save thousands of lives and ease the suffering of just as many. It could also set us on a path more akin to Hitler’s, leading us to a world filled with blue-eyed, blonde-haired individuals. We’ve already begun to draw some lines — for example, the majority of the scientific community and the NIH oppose the editing of human embryos, which means edited DNA would not pass down through the generations (nih.gov). To use CRISPR in an effective and ethical way, we as a society need to decide which of these lines to cross — because once we do, we can’t cross back. Works Cited Dahm, Ralf. “Friedrich Miescher and the Discovery of DNA.” Developmental Biology, Academic Press, 21 Dec. 2004, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012160604008231?via%3Dihub Lanphier, E., Urnov, F., Haecker, S. et al. Don’t edit the human germ line. Nature 519, 410–411 (2015)]. https://doi.org/10.1038/519410a Sufian, Sandy, and Rosemarie Garland-Thompson. “The Dark Side of CRISPR.” Scientific American, Scientific American, 16 Feb. 2021 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dark-side-of-crispr/ “Statement on NIH Funding of Research Using Gene-Editing Technologies in Human Embryos.”National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 28 Nov. 2018, https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/statement-nih-funding-research-using-gene-editing-technologies-human-embryos
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