The Unintended Consequences of Playing God

Imagine you're going blind. The world slowly becomes a blur. You can no longer see your family or your friends. You can't see the beauty of a mountain landscape or the ripples in the ocean. Then a YouTuber comes around, offering to give you the gift of sight. This is exactly what happened in January of 2023 when Mr. Beast found a thousand people suffering from cataracts and then offered them a simple surgery to regain their eyesight. Surgery, which takes 10 minutes, cured them forever.

Well, was Mr. Beast playing God and reversing the course of nature? Science and Technology have given people new limbs with prosthetic advancement. It's cured people of immeasurable pain, like Victoria Gray, a 37-year-old mother from Mississippi who was born with the blood disorder CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia) and has endured lengthy hospital stays and debilitating fatigue. In 2019, the controversial gene editing technology CRISPR cured her of her pain and transformed her life. Was that playing God?

Or how about this: in 2018, a doctor in China used CRISPR to genetically engineer two baby girls to be resistant to HIV. Since the beginning of the HIV epidemic, between 65 million and 113 million people have been infected with HIV, and of those people, around 40 million have lost their lives. Yet when this doctor genetically engineered these baby girls to be resistant to this life-threatening disease, he was arrested, with many accusing him of trying to play God.

Our attempts to make scientific and technological advances often leave us confronting the harm they can do. Genetically modified food can make food more accessible, but it threatens economies and environments in places like the Congo. Lab-grown meat reduces the emissions of greenhouse gases but puts farmers out of business. These are the unintended consequences of trying to play God.

There's a new craze around the idea of bringing extinct animals like the mammoth and the dodo bird back to life by genetically transforming one of their close relatives. Instead of trying to bring back animals from extinction, we should focus on preserving our wildlife and stopping them from going extinct in the first place. That might seem like a huge challenge, especially for individuals like you and me, but my friends at Planet Wild have made it easy to support wildlife conservation and have fun along the way. Stick to the end to understand how you can be a part of this.

Humans have always tried to overcome nature. Whether it was ancient Chinese blowing ground-up small pox scabs into people's noses like an early vaccine or building wooden prosthetic limbs that operated with pulley and strings, we've persistently worked to make life easier and safer. In the year 1800, global life expectancy was only 29 years old. Until the late 1800s, people thought that infectious diseases could be caught by breathing smelly air. So they would reduce their chances of getting sick by breathing through bunches of flowers. Seriously!

But the medical advancements that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries made us drastically healthier. After a cholera outbreak in 1854, British Dr. Jon Snow drew a map and discovered that all of the victims lived near the same water pump. The government removed the pump, and the cholera outbreak stopped. This was the beginning of germ theory, which helps us understand diseases like COVID and how they spread from one person to another.

Modern surgical techniques and simple handwashing protocols make hospitals safe for us all. While generally the outcomes of medical advances like these are positive, there can be unintended consequences that we aren't prepared for, like an aging global population.

Two hundred years ago, global life expectancy was only 29 years, and today it's 73. The reality of these advancements is that while some get to enjoy the fruits of innovation, others are left behind. Clean drinking water limits the spread of harmful bacteria and chemicals, yet around 26% of the world's population doesn't have access to safe drinking water. Worse, around 46% lack access to basic sanitation. Even how long we get to live...