No group of researchers, aside from geneticists, have ever voluntarily paused their work because they feared the consequences of what they might discover….this has happened not just once, but four times – in 1971, in 1974, then again in 2012, and most recently in 2019.
Thus writes Matthew Cobb in As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age. Some of these pauses were to develop better techniques; some also developed ethical criteria and limits; some explicitly declined to do so. A professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester and a researcher for 40 years, Cobb is concerned about three general developments: CRISPR, the ability to change heritable genes; gene drive, which can cause genetic chain reactions; and creation of strengthened pathogens which can cause them to be more dangerous than before (gain of function such as COVID). This is a history of such research, both technical and social (rollicking accounts of research activity and conferences caried on by small groups of people under the influence of various substances). It is written from inside many of these efforts.
Cobb provides detailed accounts of the history and the technical information which, notwithstanding his writing for the layperson, is much too detailed for me to absorb. I cannot hope to evaluate that material, so I have elected to think carefully about his conclusions and his descriptions of the resistance by some researchers to demands for ethical guidelines and greater attention to potential consequences.
It is this resistance that bothers me. A member of a university Research Ethics Board (humans and human tissues) for seven years, I am well acquainted with how detailed the issues involved in research can be, and I know that it is no easy task to carefully examine the possibilities. But I also, along with Cobb, see the need to do this thinking beforehand. As Cobb recounts the controversies, he often cites experts who insist that the public must be allowed to know and understand what these explorations are and what they may portend, and must have a say (informed consent). With my background, I agree with the need for transparency, education, and informed consent. We have the processes; we need them to be in place in government, commercial, and private research everywhere. He quotes Sheila Jasanofff, a “scholar of technology and its implications” as he describes the benefits and problems with different lines of research: “If the ‘hope people’ {who see the potential benefits} are the warriors, then the ‘fear people’ are the worriers. I think we might need both….” Cobb declares that he is both, then explicitly asks the reader for their choice.
Siddhartha Mukerjee, in The Song of the Cell: an Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, tells us about a girl in Tacoma, Washington in the 1960s, whose bone marrow was not producing blood. She was treated in a new way by transplanting blood from someone else. It was an experiment, one of many. It was a success, but Mukherjee interviewed nurses who attended the patients over the earlier years of experiments, and recounted the patients’ and the nurses’ suffering. In the early days 90 percent of the patients died. It was a steep price which nonetheless, led to more frequently successful procedures. Mukerjee is a researcher in this field: his critiques are from the inside, and written with a profound understanding of the effects on science, the researchers, and the attending staff and patients. Each of his sections include accounts of the history of a particular discovery about cells, from very ancient days. It is also punctuated by philosophical musings and poetry, all, the wonders of the cell to behold.
It is also accompanied by analogy: after recounting the recent discovery of an ability to create new stem cells from a fibroblast (a cell that contributes to the formation of connective tissue), he writes
The allure is this: you take your own cell – a skin fibroblast or a cell from your own blood – and you make it crawl backward in time and transform it into an iPS (induced) cell. And from that iPS cell you can make any cell you like…
I sometimes think of the Greek story of the Delphic boat…built of many planks. Bit by bit the planks decay, and are replaced by new ones, until all of them are new. But has the boat changed? Is it even the same boat?
These musings seem metaphysical today. But they may soon become physical.
I see too much danger in the lack of preparation of ethics and planning, to view things hopefully. When or whether all those monitoring structures are in place, and the rest of us have been consulted in some way, I am willing to hope. But I think hoping without those in place, is being too risky with our futures.
Upon reconsidering... 