The Ethics of Changing Human DNA Via Gene Editing, with Siddhartha Mukherjee | Big Think

In principle, gene-editing means it's just like you can go into a word processor and erase a word from what you've written, and you can change that word for a different word. The technologies are beginning to allow us to go into a cell, change its internal code or vocabulary, which would be its DNA in its genome, and answering to, for a human cell, you can switch out the word, change the word with certain caveats.

Who should we intervene on? What are the limits? Who gets to decide what normalcy versus abnormal is? Who gets to decide whether someone is, you know, what suffering is? You could give an example of, for instance, a terrifying lethal disease which you could detect in an embryo before implanting it and decide that that's not the embryo that you want to implant. But that depends on you and I saying that's a terrifying lethal disease, and that's a decision that you and I need to make; I really mean society needs to make in consensus.

So, it's a time to emphasize that idea that we're making decisions like this. Really, this issue came to a head when researchers in China decided to take non-viable human embryos and decided to attempt changing a disease-linked gene. That non-viable human embryo set it. It's important to note that they were non-viable in the long run, but it's also important to note that they were indeed human embryos or very early human embryos, and that the proof of principle experiment was launched.

So, it's created a worldwide set of questions about what we can and cannot do with the human genome. The road to eugenics was paved with the best intentions, and it was a series of—you can almost see the world tipping towards horror step by step. You know, it seemed like one iterative step didn't seem that much, and yet as you accumulated all of these, very soon you went from, you know, in Nazi Germany in particular, starting with trying to eliminate or sterilize those who were somehow physically different from others, all the way including folks who were deaf, folks who had various neurological diseases.

Then sort of marched inexorably towards other forms of identity, including, obviously, Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and so forth. So, it's worthwhile remembering that that progression that occurred in the 1930s was perceived by the citizens at that time as part of a progression. It was not as if, you know, all of a sudden someone woke up; there was a kind of glacial silence—the progression of eugenics in Nazi Germany.

In fact, there was a glacial silence from the United States about what was going on in Nazi Germany. If anything, you know, folks in the United States applauded the eugenicists, applauded the efforts of Nazis, of Nazi scientists in their attempts to cleanse their populations of all sorts of evil and emancipate themselves. So, it's incredibly important to remember that history when we step, as we are going to, towards the genetic modification of human embryos, or even to some extent, the genetic modification of other animals or plants.

We have to remember that it seems as if there's a progression, but all of a sudden, by the time from the beginning to the end, you may land up in a very different place. It's important also not to throw, as we enter new genetic technologies, not to throw the baby out with the genetic bathwater. I mean, it's important to remember that our ability to manipulate genes can be very powerful. It has been very powerful.