Mr. and Mrs. Smith You Can Now Choose The Color Of Your Baby’s Eyes And The Kind Of Supreme Athlete You Want To Raise

If you complete the last section, you can also choose the IQ

Photo by **Leeloo Thefirst** On **Pexels**

“We can use it to figure out how to use gene editing tools in the right gene, in the right organism, including human beings.”

When she said that, I paused her TED talk. Did she just say they can now edit genes with that kind of precision? Even in human beings?

There was a word that popped into my mind from absolutely nowhere.

What was the word?

Her name is Jennifer Doudna. She is a biochemist who spent the majority of her career in a laboratory, conducting research on topics that most people outside of her field have never heard of. She, however, became involved in a cutting-edge field of the life sciences over the past ten plus years, a field whose advancement cannot be contained within the confines of any academic research facility.

Jennifer Doudna first heard about CRISPR in 2006 from her colleague, Jill Banfield, who pioneered the breakthrough technology of metagenomics. On June 8, 2012, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier published their paper on CRISPR-Cas9, and from then on, the technology became available worldwide. Doudna and Emmanuelle were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. Her TED talk was in September 2023.

According to her TED talk:

“Metagenomics creates a detailed blueprint of a complex microbiome, and that means that we can use it to figure out how to use gene editing tools in the right gene, in the right organism.”

The two technologies, CRISPR and metagenomics combined, are now called CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology. This technology was about to turn Darwin’s world upside down.

“With CRISPR-Cas9, we can change, remove or replace the genes that govern the function of cells. This means that we now have the ability to use CRISPR like a word processor to find, cut and paste text.”

They could now edit the genes of any living organism, including humans, with breathtaking precision. Even more impressive is the fact that what used to take months or years to locate the affected genes will now only take days or a couple of weeks.

Find. Cut. Paste.

What was the damn word?

CRISPR and the good side of science

As with all new science, one sometimes wrestles with the intentions and goodness of this science. In times like that, it always helps to ask “If I had a child with one of these awful genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s disease, would I allow manipulation of my child’s DNA?”.

I have yet to find a person who answers no to that question. I know my answer will definitely be yes. What parent wouldn’t fight for their child to prevent them from succumbing to a horrific existence?

Any person who has tested their unborn child for Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, or Tay-Sachs disease has already entered this era of genetic diagnosis, management, and optimization. This is not something in our distant future; it is already embedded in our present.

Scientists, using CRISPR-Cas9, are already working on research and clinical trials for the following diseases:

Cancer: They say cancer is perhaps the ultimate perversion of genetics—a genome that becomes pathologically obsessed with replicating itself.

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a genetic disorder that affects the lungs, pancreas, and other organs. A CFTR gene mutation is the root cause of it.

Huntington’s disease (HD) is a genetic disorder that causes progressive degeneration of the brain. A mutation in the HTT gene, which carries the instructions for creating a protein called huntingtin, causes it.

Dementia and Alzheimer’s: My late mom suffered from dementia for the last three years of her life. These are devastating diseases that can have a profound impact on both the patient and their family. This one is personal for me, as I am sure it is for millions of others. I don’t wish this for my worst enemy, and they cannot find a cure soon enough.

CRISPR gene editing is being used to try to develop a cure for a variety of diseases. The field is moving quickly, and the broader public is falling behind. It is likely that they have discovered a cure for some of the diseases I mentioned above. The best approach to staying current is to read scientific papers or articles on various web platforms.

Or TED talks like the one by Doudna.

In her TED talk, she says:

“CRISPR, amazingly, has already cured people of devastating disorders like sickle cell disease, and it’s created rice plants that are resistant to both diseases and drought. Incredible, right?”

Right. Right.

But in the TED talk, she focuses on the positive things that are good for humanity’s future. There is nothing wrong with that.

But we can’t ignore the other elephants in the room.

Especially that word?

CRISPR and the weird side of science

In November 2018, a young Chinese scientist who had been to some of Doudna’s gene-editing conferences used CRISPR-Cas9 to edit embryos and remove a gene that produces a receptor for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Professor He Jiankui, a biophysicist from the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, attempted to introduce a naturally occurring genetic mutation that would grant immunity to HIV infection to children yet to be born.

It led to the birth of twin girls, the world’s first “designer babies”, Lulu and Nana. The father of the girls, Mark, had AIDS.

The professor bravely uploaded his announcement to his YouTube channel, complete with proper video editing, sound effects, studio setup, intros, outros, and everything else that’s good in the Youtube world.

There was an immediate outburst of awe and then shock. Arms flailed, and committees convened like they always do. There is a lot of infighting in the scientific community in all major fields. It seems as if it was especially fierce in the gene editing field during that time. With million-dollar prize money, Nobel prizes, and all that kind of stuff at stake, it was bound to be a chicken fight.

The audacity of Jiankui He? Or is it He Jiankui? How could he fiddle with the children’s genes in order to make them immune to an attack by a deadly virus like HIV?

And then the 2020 coronavirus announced itself to the world. The idea all of a sudden did not sound too bad. The world was in desperate need of a vaccine.

“Less appalling and a bit more appealing,” I think, is what the Nobel Prize people said.

They asked

“If we could safely edit genes to make our children less susceptible to HIV or coronaviruses, would it be wrong to do so? Or would it be wrong not to do so? And what about gene edits for other fixes and enhancements that might be possible in the next few decades? If they turn out to be safe, should governments prevent us from using them?“

We live in a strange world.

And so the era of the designer gene started. You can fill in the blanks. Color of the eyes. Better muscles, memory, and moods. Choose the number for the IQ, and we will find, cut and paste.

That is the one elephant in the room. Designer babies.

The other elephant is biohacking. It is difficult to write about this one as a layperson because I can’t figure out if I am on their side or the other side. Whatever the other side might be.

The most popular person in this field is Dr. Josiah Zayner.

When I first met him, he introduced himself like this:

“Nice to f*ckin’ meet you. I’m a biohacker.”

He went from being a Nasa scientist to America’s most wanted biohacker.

In his world, people do unregulated biohacking from home. They sell $140 mail-order CRISPR kits with a 24-hour delivery guarantee.

The good doctor’s world is best explored on your own by searching “Josiah Zayner” on Youtube. You can’t miss him. On the first video that pops up after the search, he just sits there, looking at you, waiting for you to join him on a journey. Happy travels.

I still haven’t figured out that word, though.

CRISPR and that toxic word

“We rightly celebrate the pleasing Newtonian principle that we see further by standing on the shoulders of giants. We are not nearly as good at recognizing that our vantage point can be unstable because those giants may also have been bastards. There was and is, in practice and theory, positive and negative eugenics”. — Adam Rutherford

That’s the word. Eugenics.

I first picked up on Rutherford’s work in several award-winning television documentaries, including The Cell (2009), The Gene Code (2011), the Beauty of Anatomy (2014), and Playing God, on the rise of synthetic biology for the BBC’s long-running science series Horizon. His website points to the excellent BBC series Bad Blood: The story of Eugenics(2022), a six-part series exploring the history of eugenics. His best and most succinct work, for a layperson like me, is his latest book, Control — The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics.

Much like a pendulum, society swings between embracing and rejecting eugenics, creating a never-ending oscillation of favor and disfavor. Never without disguise.

Rutherford is qualified and justified when he calls them bastards, because bastards they truly are.

We are not talking about Dr. Joseph Mengele, Third Reich, Nazi Germany, Auschwitz concentration camp, “Angel of Death” type of bastards. Mengele, stood on other kinds of shoulders.

We are talking about those giants whose shoulders this science is currently standing on. People like Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and Ronald Fischer who are considered the inventors of modern human genetics.

“We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, especially in the case of man, which takes cognisance of all influences that tend, in however remote a degree, to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea.” — Francis Galton: Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development

More suitable races. Strains of blood.

Their work had an impact on many scientists and powerful people.

“We now know, through the admirable labours of Mr. Galton, that genius tends to be inherited.” — Charles Darwin: The Descent of Man

We now know, as stated earlier, that CRISPR has turned the Darwinian world upside down. What we don’t know yet is if it’s for better or for worse.

“It is possible, and even probable, that the number of intellectually feeble will continue to increase, and that this increase, if unforeseen, will one day lead to a great convulsion.” — Alfred Binet: Mental and Social Development of Normal and Abnormal Children

This quote personifies the racist and elitist view of eugenics. It suggests that people with intellectual disabilities are a threat to society and that they need to be eliminated. For us laypeople, it is there in plain sight, no matter how many times the eugenicist tries to explain their way out of it.

“More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control. We have to sterilize the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased” — Marie Stopes

That was the queen of sterilization in the name of eugenics.

In the USA, In 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the Population Research and Voluntary Family Planning Programs Act, commonly known as Title X. Marie Sanchez, the chief tribal judge on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in 1977, said that sterilization, sometimes without their knowledge or understanding, had been performed on more than a quarter of Native American women of childbearing age. In 2020, there were reports that up to twenty women had undergone involuntary sterilization in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers.

In Saskatchewan, Canada, First Nations women were coercively sterilized as recently as 2018, acts that perpetuate earlier Canadian eugenics policies against Indigenous peoples. In 2021, news about the discoveries of mass graves of children at residential schools in Canada began to filter out into the world. In June 2021, the unmarked graves of 751 children were found at the site of the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, which ran from 1899 to 1997. In May, the bodies of 215 children, some as young as three, were found near the city of Kamloops in British Columbia, presumed to be pupils at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

These discoveries will continue. If policy allows you to coercively sterilize, who knows what else will be "found?"

In China, alongside their rules about how many children parents are allowed to have, the Uighurs, one of the state-recognized ethnic groups, have been persecuted for their religious and cultural practices, and it is estimated that hundreds of thousands have been interned in so-called reeducation camps around the country. A gynecologist in 2021 claimed that she had personally administered eighty sterilizations per day, five minutes per woman, with the insertion of an intrauterine device. Other reports claim that by 2019, the Xinjiang region “planned to subject at least 80% of women of childbearing age in the rural southern four minority prefectures to intrusive birth prevention surgeries.”

In India, state-sponsored population control has been brutal. In 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency, and President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed issued a constitutional edict of rule by decree. “The Emergency,” as it is known, lasted for twenty-one months in response to various internal disputes and turmoil and wild population growth. Sanjay Gandhi, the prime minister’s son, instituted a family planning initiative aimed primarily at men—vasectomies are easier to perform than tubal ligation on women—which purported to incentivize men to be sterilized in exchange for land, loans, or other deal sweeteners. Millions participated, but it is widely understood that coercion was the norm, and there is an overwhelming volume of credible reports of thousands of men being violently dragged away to undergo forced vasectomies.

According to what Francis Galton and Ronald Fisher once proposed, sterilization is still the main method of contraception in India, and financial incentives are common. Their eugenics dreams came true. Most policies target poor women.

Around the rest of the world, the imposition of control by the state continues vigorously to the present day. There is no doubt these types of programs are happening in most countries all over the world, but they are simply under different names and not widely reported.

It is no different from the accusation that eugenics has now been rebranded into human genetics in phase I and genetic engineering in phase II. Phase III will probably be incorporated into CRISPR-Cas9 Precision Gene Cut and Paste.