From: Barbara Lamar (barbaralamar@sanmarcos.net)
Date: Fri Nov 01 2002 - 10:28:37 MST
Damien has asked me to post his recent review of `Redesigning Humans' from
the Weekend Australian newspaper.
Barbara Lamar
Redesigning Humans: Choosing Our Children's Genes
By Gregory Stock
Profile Books/Allen&Unwin, 277pp, $55.00
Today, children, we'll talk about human reproduction. No sniggering,
please. Yes, even in this year of 2032 we are speaking of S-E-X, but
today's lesson will not deal with smut. We'll discuss how babies are made.
To make a baby we need a Mummy, who provides a big fat ovum crammed with
food and DNA and energy-making mitochondria which she got from her own
Mummy, and a Daddy, who puts in a tiny little chunk of DNA coded either
male or female. Finally, we have an Optimist. This medical specialist is
known in California as a Clinical Optimalizator, but we Aussies consider
that a bit of a wank. Speaking of wanking, that is how we get hold of
Daddy's DNA sperm. It's rather harder to obtain Mummy's eggs, because first
a slice of her stored ovary tissue has to be thawed out.
The cells from Mummy and Daddy each contain 22 strings of nearly identical
instructions for starting a baby, plus the sex-making string. In the bad
old days, these messages written in DNA were often garbled in places, like
a buggy computer program. Babies begun with really messy code--four out of
every five--aborted spontaneously or died long before they were born. Once
a medical cure for damaged code was found, nearly all the babies that got
started went on to become people. The Pope banned the evil sin of "bestial
congress", which was reproductive S-E-X as animals do it. So many souls
were being lost! Today, only criminals risk making babies the dangerous,
godless old way.
This is where the Optimist comes in. She sorts through Mummy's and Daddy's
cells with a gene chip and picks out those with the fewest bad mutations.
Then she pops in a pair of safe artificial chromosomes to proof-read any
remaining errors, correct mangled instructions, and add the optimal extra
genes that help us resist infection and mental illness, think really fast,
and live for a very long time without getting old and silly. She could
choose whether the baby is a boy or girl, but that's illegal, of course.
How absurd is this scenario (mine, but based on Stock's) of a possible
future? Three decades ago, in vitro fertilization was still five years off.
You might consider such technologies and social reactions unthinkable even
for 2092. That's as far into tomorrow as our world is from Edwardian,
pre-Great War 1912, an era that accepted scandalous social inequities. How
about 2022, then, or 2012? Laughably too soon? Perhaps, but some of those
novelties already exist, in a small way. Stock's approachable, humane book
leads us warily but with resolve into an impending world where traditional
woes of the flesh are healed by science, while many troubling or delightful
opportunities jump from myth into the clinician's regular work day.
Yet even if we can rewrite our genetic code, adding auxiliary chromosomes
packed with advantages, won't people turn away, disgusted? Maybe not. The
Amish are notorious for their strict traditional disdain for consumerism,
fads and such futuristic technologies as cars and TV. Small, inbred
communities, they suffer terrible genetic afflictions such as
Crigler-Najjar syndrome, a potentially fatal loss of a liver enzyme gene.
Somatic cell treatment, inserting corrective genes into disease victims, is
being trialled with enthusiasm by these technology sceptics.
As for artificial chromosomes designed to augment our inherited, badly
corrupted DNA--crammed with "junk", hitch-hiking viruses and copying errors
carried along for the ride over millions of years--these are used routinely
in lab bacteria and yeast. Early versions suitable for human insertion
exist. Would adding such novelties to embryos be ethical? Suppose the new
genes prove disastrous? Stock, a biophysics PhD, Harvard MBA and director
of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at the School of
Medicine at UCLA, is reassuring. Already, elegant methods are at hand to
control or delete annexed genes.
Activate the enzyme CRE, and it searches a DNA strand for a gene sequence
called [Italics on] loxP [Italics off], makes a snip, finds the next copy,
makes another snip, throws away the stuff from the middle and sutures up
the ends. If the discarded portion is your new gene, it won't trouble you
again. Here's the beauty: CRE does not exist naturally in humans. It's an
optional switch. You could take it as a pill. Other pills could activate a
dormant gene.
Genes usually lie doggo until a special cascade of substances switches on
a control sequence. We might inject into a one-celled embryo a batch of
genes designed to switch on at maturity but not before. After normal
childhood and adolescence, toggle them to ensure healthy extended
adulthood. A reckless suggestion? But we routinely inoculate babies. Some
one percent of today's children are conceived in vitro, outside the human
body. Three in ten births are by Caesarean section, hardly "natural". We're
not in Kansas any more, Toto, and haven't been for years.
Will such person-sculpting powers lead to narrow uniformity, as every
couple shapes their next kid in the envied likeness of Eddie McGuire, John
Howard or Elle McPherson? Or might an array of freaks appear, Olympic
swimmers with duck feet and gills, or hormone-charged giants spouting Dante
and string theory? More likely, Stock advises us, germinal choice
technology (GCT) will start by removing some causes of human misery: "the
polio vaccine did as much and brought few complaints". New issues arise.
Today, he notes, some deaf people want deaf children. GCT will enable their
selection. Perhaps these worrying choices really must be left to
parents--unless preference amounts to plain child abuse, or truly endangers
society.
Stock deals deftly with such unnerving topics, countering Francis
Fukuyama's recent demand in [Italics on] Our Posthuman Future [Italics off]
for state control of these technologies. Cautiously, he skips the truly
challenging options some predict for this era of accelerating, convergent
discoveries. If humans are to be redesigned, we and our children, through
our choices, will be the architects. I vote for Chartres Cathedral or a
Jorn Utzon opera house rather than a drab high-rise.
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