Beyond gene-edited babies: the possible paths for tinkering with human evolution

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Beyond gene-edited babies: the possible paths for tinkering with human evolution

By Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review | Sep-Oct 2024 Issue

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In 2016, the author attended a large meeting of journalists in Washington, DC. The keynote speaker was Jennifer Doudna, who just a few years before had co-invented CRISPR, a revolutionary method of changing genes that was sweeping across biology labs because it was so easy to use. With its discovery, Doudna explained, humanity had achieved the ability to change its own fundamental molecular nature. And that capability came with both possibility and danger. One of her biggest fears, she said, was “waking up one morning and reading about the first CRISPR baby”—a child with deliberately altered genes baked in from the start.  

Gene editing had become the biggest subject on the biotech beat, and once a team in China had altered the DNA of a monkey to introduce customized mutations, it seemed obvious that further envelope-pushing wasn’t far off. 

If anyone did create an edited baby, it would raise moral and ethical issues, among the profoundest of which, Doudna had told the author, was that doing so would be “changing human evolution.” Any gene alterations made to an embryo that successfully developed into a baby would get passed on to any children of its own, via what’s known as the germline. What kind of scientist would be bold enough to try that? 

According to the author two years and nearly 8,000 miles in an airplane seat later, he found the answer. At a hotel in Guangzhou, China, he joined a documentary film crew for a meeting with a biophysicist named He Jiankui, who appeared with a retinue of advisors. During the meeting, He was immensely gregarious and spoke excitedly about his research on embryos of mice, monkeys, and humans, and about his eventual plans to improve human health by adding beneficial genes to people’s bodies from birth. Still imagining that such a step must lie at least some way off, the author asked if the technology was truly ready for such an undertaking.  “Ready,” He said. Then, after a laden pause: “Almost ready.”  Four weeks later, the author learned that he’d already done it.

For his actions, He was later sentenced to three years in prison, and his scientific practices were roundly excoriated. The edits he made, on what proved to be twin girls (and a third baby, revealed later), had in fact been carelessly imposed, almost in an out-of-control fashion, according to his own data. 

Editing human embryos is restricted in much of the world—and making an edited baby is flatly illegal in most countries surveyed by legal scholars. But advancing technology could render the embryo issue moot. New ways of adding CRISPR to the bodies of people already born—children and adults—could let them easily receive changes as well. Indeed, if you are curious what the human genome could look like in 125 years, it’s possible that many people will be the beneficiaries of multiple rare, but useful, gene mutations currently found in only small segments of the population. These could protect us against common diseases and infections, but eventually they could also yield frank improvements in other traits, such as height, metabolism, or even cognition. These changes would not be passed on genetically to people’s offspring, but if they were widely distributed, they too would become a form of human-directed self-evolution—easily as big a deal as the emergence of computer intelligence or the engineering of the physical world around us.

The author was surprised to learn that even as He’s critics take issue with his methods, they see the basic stratagem as inevitable.  When the author asked Urnov, who helped coin the term “genome editing” in 2005, what the human genome could be like in, say, a century, he readily agreed that improvements using superpower genes will probably be widely introduced into adults—and embryos—as the technology to do so improves. But he warned that he doesn’t necessarily trust humanity to do things the right way.  Some groups will probably obtain the health benefits before others. And commercial interests could eventually take the trend in unhelpful directions—much as algorithms keep his students’ noses pasted, unnaturally, to the screens of their mobile phones. 

3 key takeaways from the article

1. In 2016, the author attended a large meeting of journalists in Washington, DC. The keynote speaker was Jennifer Doudna, who just a few years before had co-invented CRISPR, a revolutionary method of changing genes that was sweeping across biology labs because it was so easy to use. With its discovery, Doudna explained, humanity had achieved the ability to change its own fundamental molecular nature. And that capability came with both possibility and danger.
2. Editing human embryos is restricted in much of the world—and making an edited baby is flatly illegal in most countries surveyed by legal scholars. But advancing technology could render the embryo issue moot. New ways of adding CRISPR to the bodies of people already born—children and adults—could let them easily receive changes as well. Indeed, if you are curious what the human genome could look like in 125 years, it’s possible that many people will be the beneficiaries of multiple rare, but useful, gene mutations currently found in only small segments of the population.
3. Some groups will probably obtain the health benefits before others. And commercial interests could eventually take the trend in unhelpful directions.

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Topics:  Technology and humans, Bio-technology, Gene-modification