But what He Jiankui attempted was only an experiment performed on children-which is another way of saying that the technology is not advanced enough that the flagship use can be paraded before the public.Ī new book, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity, endeavors to explain where we actually are now and where we are heading. For genetic engineering, the flagship is clearly going to be immunity to diseases with broad social concern. The Chinese scientist's mistake lay in his not realizing where we are in the progression of a new technology. There's some evidence that the Chinese government funded the experiment, but once the negative international response became clear, the government turned against He Jiankui, suspending him from his university and investigating him for criminal acts. Denunciations poured in, from America's National Institutes of Health to the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. Isn't immunity to HIV a good thing? Aren't cloning, gene modification, and in-vitro fertilization legitimate technologies? He seemed honestly shocked that the public response was overwhelmingly negative. Using the CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing system, he modified the girls' embryos to create a mutation that may provide immunity to HIV. This past November, He Jiankui, a researcher in China, announced that he had created the first genetically edited human babies: twin girls he called Lulu and Nana. And we are seeing it again in the promises of genetic engineering. We've seen it over and over again in the past 40 years of the computer revolution. We've seen the pattern play itself out in plastic surgery. We've seen the pattern in all the great technological changes of the first half of the 20th century, from the telephone to the automobile. The flagship is not the fleet-and the common uses will not be the highly attractive ones promised in the first sighting of the new technology. But once the technology becomes generally available, those wonderful uses prove the least of it.
Each new potentially large-scale technology shimmers into public view with a promise of certain wonderful uses, always morally tinged and usually sentimentally phrased.
And yet, our experience with the rapid industrial and scientific changes over the past 300 years suggests that new technologies trace a particular pattern as they move toward their unintended consequences.
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