Falter~Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

Author:Bill McKibben [McKibben, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1250178266
Google: UapbDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07CRJ9X7Z
Goodreads: 40046057
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2019-04-15T23:00:00+00:00

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The advertisement writes itself: As we get better at germline engineering over the years, we could produce improved children. Their smiles would reveal broad rows of evenly spaced teeth, and of course they’d be smiling a lot because they’d be in a good, sunny mood. And why not, given that their fine-tuned brains would be earning them high grades. “Going for perfection,” as James Watson, the father of the genetic age, once put it. “Who wants an ugly baby?” Who indeed. (Of course, you might want to be a little careful here, as someone has to define “ugly.” Watson, for instance, also said, “[W]hen you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them,” and suggested further that germline engineering could be used to deal with the problem of “cold fish.”)1 We have giant industries based on the idea of what constitutes beauty, and libraries full of self-help books that point us toward particular personalities, so it stands to reason that many people will see this kind of genetic improvement as an obvious next step in our progress as a species.

In the first flush of enthusiasm about new technologies, though, we often overlook the possible drawbacks. For example, if you knew everything you now know about how the smartphone and social media were going to affect your life, and our society, would you still welcome them as enthusiastically as you did the first time you saw an iPhone or logged on to Facebook? That’s not a useful question at this point; we have the world we have, Twitter and all. But as we don’t yet quite have a world with germline genetic engineering, we should raise the questions now.

It’s not as if possible worries are buried very far down. Jennifer Doudna reports that in the years since she pioneered CRISPR, she’s had a series of nightmares, most notably one in which Adolf Hitler (with a pig face, “perhaps because I had spent so much time thinking about the humanized pig genome that was being rewritten with CRISPR around this time”) summons her to tell him about “the uses and implications of this amazing technology you’ve developed.”2

It’s never a good sign when even an imagined Adolf Hitler is interested in your work, but for the moment, let’s leave aside the specter of cloned soldiers in jackboots and concentrate instead on the more practical problems and immediate difficulties that could arise from human genetic engineering, or from the strong artificial intelligence that scientists say may be just around the corner.

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