There are plenty of issues with this movie — not least that its producers seem to have seriously overestimated the public appetite for movies about eugenics. It also portrays a world where existing discriminations all disappear and are replaced with “genoism,” when it would be far more interesting to explore how racism or sexism already are forms of genetic discrimination.
Nevertheless, it’s a decent, noir-ish thriller that didn’t deserve to bomb so hard at the box office. Its imagined world built around genetic discrimination is compelling for how plausible it felt then—and feels today. Because gene editing on a mass scale is coming relatively soon, thanks to something called “ CRISPR,” or “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats” to use its catchy full name. CRISPR makes altering and editing a genome as easy as “ cutting and pasting” a piece of text on a computer—and it’s cheap, too.
The benefits of this kind of genetic editing are profound. Just by targeting specific genes , scientists have already made a strain of wheat invulnerable to powdery mildew and produced a tomato that ripens much slower to prolong its shelf life. Researchers have created a new kind of micropig, to be sold as pets; more seriously, there is potential to eliminate inheritable diseases like sickle cell anemia within a generation. One team at Harvard has even encoded a video file inside a bacteria’s genome, while other teams in the U.S. and China have already experimented with editing human embryos.
The possibilities of gene editing this potent bring us back to Gattaca, and longstanding ethical concerns in the field of genetics. The questions that we can’t escape here—once we get past worries over CRISPR’s safety and viability in human subjects — are important: Who benefits from this? Which diseases will be focused on, to the detriment of others? Will everyone who needs it be able to afford it? Who will actually get a chance to become perfect? Who decides what “perfect” is, anyway?
In the fifth episode of the Human Machine, out next Tuesday, September 26, Corin Faife will be untangling these issues. In the meantime, we’re going to be looking at the radical potential of gene editing — a profound alteration of the body, one in which technology alters the very essence of what makes us human.
Here’s how to get up to speed on CRISPR:
- READ: Michael Specter’s “The Gene Hackers” in The New Yorker, from 2015, on how CRISPR—an RNA strand in bacteria and other cells which had long been considered merely a curiosity—turned out to hold the potential to rewrite the language of life:
“CRISPR has two components. The first is essentially a cellular scalpel that cuts DNA. The other consists of RNA, the molecule most often used to transmit biological information throughout the genome. It serves as a guide, leading the scalpel on a search past thousands of genes until it finds and fixes itself to the precise string of nucleotides it needs to cut ... The day after Zhang heard about CRISPR, he flew to Florida for a genetics conference. Rather than attend the meetings, however, he stayed in his hotel room and kept Googling. ‘I just sat there reading every paper on CRISPR I could find,’ he said. ’The more I read, the harder it was to contain my excitement.’ It didn’t take Zhang or other scientists long to realize that, if nature could turn these molecules into the genetic equivalent of a global positioning system, so could we.”
- PLAY: The New York Times did a fun little quiz to explain what gene editing already can, hypothetically could, or simply can’t, do. (Spoiler: altering traits and diseases determined by collections of genes, rather than single ones, is currently more fictional than theoretical.)
- READ: Last month, researchers in Oregon announced the first successful editing of early-stage human embryos in the lab using CRISPR, “fixing” a single gene known to often lead to heart failure in adults. Dina Fine Maron at Scientific American discusses the current ethical debates happening in the genetics community as a result:
“So far, preventing disease by employing CRISPR–Cas9 to alter the human germ line—a human embryo, egg or sperm—has remained extremely controversial, due to concerns about unwittingly introducing errors or leaving stowaway unedited disease-causing mutations that would put future generations at risk of disease. And until now CRISPR had not been tried on human embryos in the U.S. But Shoukhrat Mitalipov at Oregon and his colleagues went further than the earlier Chinese works, editing dozens of embryos with much greater efficiency.”
- WATCH: Gattaca!
Once you’ve watched it, come talk about it in the Human Machine group on Facebook, where all are welcome. No genetic screening to join and talk, that’s a promise.
Until next time,
Ian
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