“Apocalypse Now?,” Part 2: A Remade Man

The genetic revolution just went into turbo-drive

To learn more about our apocalypse series, click here. To hear part one, click here. And listen to episode 2 below:

Our apocalypse series began one week ago with one grim vision of the future. What if our machines managed to take control of their own code? If they began to self-regulate, even self-replicate? It’s an imaginable scenario — but one that’s still far off in the future.

Watch our guest Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Gene, discuss the genetic theater of the Rio Olympics:

But in the biotech capital of Boston/Cambridge, it has an eerie resonance. Messing with our own code: isn’t that exactly what we human machines are up to—right now, more and more—in labs around this city and around the world?

Thanks to a number of scientific breakthroughs — in particular, the editing technique known as CRISPR/Cas9 — have made possible the manipulation of multiple genetic “sites,” in the service of eliminating genes that harm or hinder — or even to introduce ones that could ameliorate, strengthen, and speed up the species, or parts of it.

The science-minded animators at Kurzgesagt have taken on CRISPR, and why it is being treated as a kind of genetic Holy Grail — or point of no return:

This show is prompted by the incredible pace of progress, and also by some fretting about what the unlocking of the genome might do. We’re inspired to live alongside George Church, the super-confident Harvard scientist behind some of CRISPR’s wildest possibilities. Here’s an incomplete list of the coming attractions from the Church lab.

• Using a technology known as the gene drive to reprogram — or rid the world — of the species of mosquito that carry malaria. It involves the introduction of a new dominant trait over the course of several generations. Church and his team have tried to demonstrate that a gene drive could be easily reversed if something went wrong.

• Growing transplantable human organs inside pigs — the NIH lifted its ban on these “chimeras” just this month;
• Reversing human aging by tinkering not with human tissue, but with genes themselves. Church has made it work in smaller animals, and describes it as a very real economic-recovery effort in The Washington Post: “If all those gray hairs could go back to work and feel healthy and young, then we’ve averted one of the greatest economic disasters in history… Someone younger at heart should replace you, and that should be you.”
• Bringing creatures out of extinction, like the woolly mammoth and the passenger pigeon, by grafting their genes onto those of living creatures,

And more on the way, of course.

Church — bearded, formidable — knows he’s presiding over a revolution. He is careful to speak in terms of “safety engineering,” regulation, and even comprehensive, involuntary surveillance of biohackers to guard against the apocalyptic possibilities.

Our guests, the writing oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee and the philosopher Michael Sandel, remind us that tomorrow’s biotechnology will have an almost unimaginable capacity to surprise, that there may be Robert Oppenheimers among the genetic Edisons.

Mukherjee refers to the 1905 prophesy of the Mendelian biologist William Bateson, who said:

“The science of heredity will soon provide power on a stupendous scale; and in some country… that power will be applied to control the composition of a nation.”

That may mean the revival of eugenics, the state program that sterilized tens of thousands of Americans and reached its nadir in the Nazi regime. If genetic tampering with future generations happens on an elective, retail model (like high-tech hyperparenting), does that make it OK?

We close with Pardis Sabeti, the biologist at the center of the Ebola fight of 2014. That wasn’t an apocalypse, but it was a serious cataclysm: a horrifying, hemorrhagic virus attacking a third-world healthcare system and against, for too long, global sluggishness and indifference. Sabeti says she works by day and worries at night on the prospect of a manmade superbug — Ebola set loose in the air.

Sabeti’s lab at the Broad Institute, like George Church’s, is full of brilliant postdocs pipetting solvents, running centrifuges, all in the service of reading and writing genomes. But in some ways, she’s playing a prudent, even heroic kind of defense to the bioengineers’ offense: trying to make the virus extinct, but without any concept of transhumanism.

Sabeti paid tribute to Dr. Sheikh Humarr Khan, who finally died of Ebola after months of tireless work with more than 80 infected patients at Kenema Government Hospital. If there’s to be hope of global readiness for a biopocalypse — a dreadful attack on human bodies, exploiting weaknesses in our genes or in our governments — it’s going to hang on ordinary human hands and hearts, like Dr. Khan’s.

Stay tuned for episode 3, in which we ask whether and how human civilization can bear rising temps and tempers. With Paul Kingsnorth, Kim Stanley Robinson, concerned investors, and the end of growth.