Playing God's Apprentice

Lt. Commander Data - Star Trek

Lieutenant Commander Data, an enduring character in the Star Trek empire, is an android, a powerful computer in human form. Data’s computer processes the instructions of his sophisticated software, yielding the sympathetic and somewhat humorous character which millions have come to love.

But we are all data, in more than a figurative sense.

Men and mice, towering redwoods and diminutive bacteria, all have DNA, the very stuff of life. Think of DNA as data which instructs our cells to create and maintain the peculiar beings that we are. Living creatures, plant and animal, all consume nutrients and absorb energy from the environment, but it is their DNA which shapes them.

DNA can be conceptualized as a “computer program” that defines us. It is made up of genes, individual commands that instruct our cells how to behave and multiply and specialize. Not a computer in our common sense of laptops and smartphones and mainframes, but a computer nonetheless.

And in 2015, scientists perfected something that any computer programmer would instantly recognize: an editor. Just as a programmer uses an editor to manipulate the source code of the myriad computer applications we encounter daily, scientists can now edit the DNA of living creatures, changing their characteristics.

The basic technology is called CRISPR (pronounced crisper), an acronym for a genetic manipulation technique first discovered in 2012. With recent perfection, CRISPR now allows researchers to quickly edit nearly any gene in the DNA of any organism.

This is astounding, truly a scientific breakthrough. Mankind is now capable of mucking about with God’s designs for living creatures. This promises great good, but, as with many scientific innovations, great evil as well.

First a brief review of genetic modification. We have always been able to do so, but ever so slowly and unreliably. It is done by selective breeding, looking for desirable traits over many generations. This is how Beagles were derived from wolves. More recently, we have developed the means to create genetically modified crops which use bacteria to introduce foreign genetic material into the DNA of existing plants. Both of these techniques are painfully sluggish and less dependable than CRISPR.

Here are some of the things that CRISPR has already done:

In October, scientists reported that they had deactivated 62 genes in porcine DNA, thereby removing viruses and making these pigs safer for human organ transplants.

In the same month, Chinese researchers published their account of using CRISPR to edit dog DNA, resulting in a more muscular beagle than her untreated littermates. (Now think of editing Tom Brady’s future children to create a generation of super-strong quarterbacks).

And as reported in Science News, “…scientists turned to CRISPR to genetically engineer organisms in the lab, including rhesus macaques, mice, zebrafish, fruit flies, yeast and some plants.”

Now there is one more major concept to absorb: germline versus somatic editing.

Somatic cells make up the majority of your body. Muscle, bone, blood. Changes to these cells would survive only in you. They cannot be passed on to your children. Germline cells, on the other hand, exist in sperm or eggs. Changes to these cells can be passed on, possibly changing permanently the linear descendants of the edited organism.

Wow. Now we have the possibility of designer babies who will have their own designer babies, and so on. The ethical implications are immense.

CRISPR could also be used to eliminate malaria, for instance, by editing the germline cells of mosquitoes to code a vaccine against malaria. The descendants of these mosquitoes could propagate the malaria vaccine, thereby eventually eliminating the Plasmodium protozoa that causes it.

But there are ethical implications here, too. Does God have any plan for Plasmodium? In some future “War of the Worlds” scenario, might malaria infect and kill invading space aliens? We can’t know the answer to that. But relieving the suffering of millions of worldwide malaria victims is a very seductive outcome.

We are proceeding, carefully, cautiously. The world’s leading scientific bodies and governments are convening conferences to establish guidelines for gene editing. While the benefits are potentially enormous, there are deep ethical and governance issues to be resolved.

Although we have discovered how to program the biological computer, we cannot play God lightly.