Creator Gods, Part III

Creating life in the lab

It was hard for me to stop looking at the photo. The guy was smiling at the camera. He had on a blue workshirt and jeans. He’d just won a prize; no wonder he was smiling. But there was more to the smile than that. It wasn’t smugness, and at first I couldn’t figure out what it was: Then it came to me: he seemed assured. Confident. He knew he’d figured out stuff; he knew how things worked. In this case it was something not about computers but biology.

This photo accompanied one of the many stories I was reading about scientists — computer guys, biology guys — finding out stuff, creating stuff. In the case of the computer guys, it was machines that learned on their own, machines that joined other machines in learning; machines that were learning to tell the scientists what to do. For the other guys, it was creating the stuff of organic life itself.

Chimeras, long a staple of horror stories, were being created and brought to life. Even cells, created in the lab, were being grown, and growing, perhaps, conscious.

Reports surfaced of that in Japan scientists had gotten government support to create mouse-human chimeras; and of biologists in China creating monkey-human chimeras in an effort to understand how human intelligence evolved. Long a staple of the folklore of monsters, a “chimera” today simply meant a single organism that carried DNA from more than one species. Reportedly the modified monkeys “did better on a memory test involving colors and block pictures, and their brains also took longer to develop,” like those of human children.

In a biologist’s lab, human brain cells -brain organoids — were being created. The scientist “altered human skin cells into stem cells, then coaxed them to develop as brain cells do in an embryo….The organoids grew into balls about the size of a pinhead, each containing hundreds of thousands of cells in a variety of types, each type producing the same chemicals and electrical signals as those cells do in our own brains… the organoids were stowed inside a metal box, fed by bags of nutritious broth… They were “replicating like crazy.”

The process wasn’t new when I stumbled upon it in an article. It had been half a dozen years since scientists created these kinds of cells. What was new was that the tiny cells seemed to be, perhaps, conscious. Whatever “conscious” was.

In the summer of 2019, the journal Cell Stem Cell carried a report “Complex Oscillatory Waves Emerging from Cortical Organoids Model Early Human Brain Network Development”: “Cortical organoids exhibit phase-amplitude coupling during network-synchronous events.” Not exactly a mass-market attention-grabber, the gist of it was that the organoids had, in the months they’d been studied, “exhibited consistent increases in electrical activity.” It seemed, in other words, that they were putting out brain waves, which had not been expected. Nobody had known it would happen.

It wasn’t a question of being alive; they’d been alive from the moment they’d been fashioned. They were called “organoids,” meaning things “like organs”. These were “like” brain cells, developed to study brain function, brain disease — anything about the brain that they could be used to study. The aim was to make them available, like mice were available, to be experimented on. Even now some were thinking about trying to create organoids that could feel pain.

But because they were human brain cells and because we humans put a value on anything human, moreso than any other type of life (mice, for example,) the apparent discovery of their consciousness — or possible discovery, because nobody was really sure — was creating, if not exactly worry, then at least fodder for discussion. Some hand-wringing of course; that was to be expected, but more like … awe.

The handwringing took its predicable course: “this is an ethically fraught endeavor absent a pre-established protocol for knowing when the organoid impinges upon the threshold of self-awareness.” To this, someone replied that “Attentiveness or mental ability to focus is also not yet consciousness in the way we regard ourselves.” After all, flies had this kind of “consciousness” — so not to worry!

“Animals have long been used in research and they are self-aware,” the discussion continued (think: mice, rats, dogs — really anything but human). To the concern that these were human cells, “well the modern-day human started out as some lower form of single cell with no brain and over time evolved into humans.” Where was the problem?

Then came the awe: “Just think what kind of intelligent new species could be developed”! Ones that would “not be afflicted with the shortcomings that modern day humans” have. “Just think of a human-like species that no longer has to suffer from mental or physical illness nor physiological problems”!

The argument that changes were coming, and one might as well get used to it, was one I saw repeatedly. It had been ever thus, some shrugged. It was like arguing in favor of the plow. “You know some people are going to argue against it, but you also know it’s going to exist.”

Humans have always had the drive to create, but it seemed to me the creating nowadays was more fraught than before; with larger consequences. But perhaps my kind of worry had always existed, perhaps it was a condition of those of us who were not creator gods. Worrying was also what old people did.

Using CRISPR technology, scientists in China edited genes in a pair of twins. The plan was to give them HIV immunity. When the procedure came to light, however, it seemed a step too far. Horrified scientists told the MIT Technology Review that while the scientist’s team had targeted the right gene, they did not replicate the Delta 32 variation, which was what they were supposed to do; instead additional edits had occurred that it was clear they’d not intended nor even realized they’d made. It also seemed unclear whether there had, in fact, been any kind of an “ethics review” at all. CRISPR could cause “off-target” edits that could not be controlled, and who knew what would happen?

Unintended consequences seemed to occur with a frequency startling to me. This was the kind of thing Bostrom and Joy worried about with artificial life. It was happening with wet life too — mistakes of creator gods which to me seemed to be mostly shrugged off. The Chinese scientist heading the gene-editing team — confusingly for American readers he was named “He” — was evidently eventually convicted and jailed. But jailing seemed to be the exception, and China seemed, if home to more scientists who took risks unimperiled by things like U. S. ethics boards, also more willing to punish those it deemed to have crossed some line or other. In the U. S. it seemed punishment for unintended consequences rarely occurred; one received the opprobrium of outraged fellow scientists, but not much more.

When the Oxitec company used CRISPR to inject genes into Brazillian mosquitos in an effort to create offspring that would die rather than reproduce to transmit Zika and the other plagues mosquitoes were delivering to Brazillians, it turned out that the company had evidently managed instead to create more vigorous mosquitos. “The idea sounded solid. Male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were genetically engineered to have a dominant lethal gene. When they mated with wild female mosquitoes, this gene would drastically cut down the number of offspring they produced, and the few that were born should be too weak to survive long,” ran the story on the New Atlas website. Researchers were pretty sure the process would reduce the mosquito population 85 percent. But when Yale University researchers “examined mosquitoes around the city of Jacobina, Brazil,” where the largest test was carried out, not only had numbers bounced back up in the months after the test, “but some of the native bugs, they found, had retained genes from the engineered mosquitoes.”

“The claim was that genes from the release strain would not get into the general population because offspring would die,’’ says Jeffrey Powell, senior author of a study describing the discovery. “That obviously was not what happened.”

The FDA in the U.S. had approved Oxitec to deploy their genetically engineered line of mosquitos to accomplish the very things Oxitec continued to insist (even after the Yale University findings) that they had accomplished. They insisted Yale was wrong and that New Atlas (and, I think, Nature, which was where much of the information in the New Atlas story came from) retract its story.

A he-says, she-says debate ensued in the pages of Nature. The company and its minions — men, as far as I could tell — insisted that the rate of survival was not what independent studies claimed: other scientists — and these seemed to be a preponderance of women, especially on the sites of the scientific journals — insisted that the risk had been too great to have attempted.

But there seemed to be little doubt that this kind of Jurassic Park creation would only grow. And it seemed creator gods knew it, and didn’t find unintended consequences too worrying; not when the products of their creation were now so amazing.

An ad on the New Atlas website — a glowing, blue-toned array of beakers with the caption “Introducing Engineered Cells — CRISPR For All, One Click Away” led me to the website of Synthego, where this notice popped up:

“Don’t Spend Time Optimizing CRISPR!

Is it really worth your time to do CRISPR by yourself? We can help! Engineered Cells delivers your edit in your cell with guaranteed results in as little as four weeks.

The amazingness of their creations awed creator gods every bit as much whether they were of carbon or silicon. But those creating silicon life seemed to me more arrogant, as well they might: they had absolutely no restrictions. They had managed to get it set up that way, since their field had arisen more recently than the field of biological experimentation. While the creators of biological life forms still had oversight from governments, those who created silicon life had pretty much bought the government.

But in either case, it seemed there was no reason to slow down; in fact, it seemed, it was all the more reason for moving full speed ahead. Faster, stronger, better… well, faster anyway.

The lid was pretty much being blown off Pandora’s box, and there seemed to be no dearth of hands at the detonator.