Dr. Frankenstein or future Nobel winner?

What I'm reading: The Transformative, Alarming Power of Gene Editing in the New Yorker. The gist is right there in the headline — gene editing has gotten very powerful, very fast.

It's becoming increasingly tempting to use gene editing in practice for all sorts of things — even though the techniques are not perfected yet, and though the consequences of getting things wrong are unknown, and possibly horrible.

The villain at the heart of the story: The article focuses on the figure of Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui. Back in 2018, He made headlines around the world after it was announced that he had edited a single gene in two human embryos.

The goal was to make the embryos immune to HIV, which their father had. The embryos were then implanted into the mother and developed into twin girls, Lulu and Nana, who were born in 2018.

Why this was a huge deal: He’s experiment was a world first, and shocking. Gene editing had been performed in humans before — on grown adults, a type of editing that's known as "somatic." Somatic editing only affects the individual and is not passed on to future generations.

But what He did was edit the “germline” — the original single cell of the two embryos. This meant the new genes would be passed on to any offspring. In effect, He had created a new strain of humanity.

When the news broke, international furor followed, both among the public and among scientists. Part of it was a practical issue, that gene editing techniques were not yet developed enough to edit the human germline safely. Part of it was the moral issue of editing embryos and creating "designer babies."

So where are we today? As the article makes clear, while there was furor about He's actions five years ago, this is a future that's almost certainly coming. Gene editing techniques are improving, and the pressure to eliminate horrific diseases with genetic components will eventually become too great.

One scientist interviewed in the article believes "there will be legitimate clinical studies of heritable editing within a decade.” All this points to a complex, exciting, and possibly terrifying human future where we can consciously control the evolution of the human race. If you'd like to understand just what’s at stake, the New Yorker article is worth a read.