Gene Editing - Will China Set the Course?

As James Metzl wrote in his book, Hacking Darwin, worldover, gene editing is not banned. Or well-regulated. Thus we had China’s He Jiankui announce he had edited the genomes to produce the world’s first such babies. And as later day checks into what had been done showed:

“The first application of genetic engineering to future humans was sloppily planned, poorly executed, medically unjustified, secretive, and potentially dangerous.”

And UK based scientists declared that they had created the world’s first living organism with an entirely synthetic genome.

 

Some might ask:

“Why wouldn’t we just take the safer route of trusting nature and our own biology – even with all its bugs, shortcomings, and sometimes even dangerous mutations – that’s evolved over billions of years?”

The short answer is that nature is red in tooth and claw:

“Nature conspired to kill us through hostile weather, predation, starvation, and disease, and we fought back with everything we had… We would have no need to “play god” if the world we found ourselves inhabiting was less hostile.”

 

There’s the historical aspect to how things are viewed. The West, with its history of Nazism, tends to lean towards one extreme of “paint(ing) all human genetic engineering with the brush of Nazi eugenics”, as bioethicist Diane Paul wrote:

“(The term ‘eugenics’) is wielded like a club. To label a policy ‘eugenics’ is to say, in effect, that it is not just bad but beyond the pale.”

 

The religious component of this topic acts as a check in the West to varying degrees. Embryos and fetuses are a lightning rod in the US, so it has far more restrictions on such research. The UK has far fewer restrictions.

 

And China? They have no religious constraints on the topic unlike the West. China has decided to sequence the genes of all newborn babies, which means it will have the largest dataset in the world. It is aggressively establishing a single, shareable format for all electronic health records, which would make it easy to access records across the country. And unlike the West, China’s policy is that “privacy protection (does) not impede access to the data by researchers, companies and the government”. Add to that, Chinese parents, like most Asian parents, will do whatever helps their children have a better future.

 

The way I see it, China has made a choice, will almost certainly execute against it, and unless things go horribly wrong for China, the world will have no choice but to follow since the alternative (be left far behind) is not really an option. Because China is pursuing this not only to build the perfect soldier or the most obedient citizen, but also the smartest citizen, the most creative citizen… you get the idea.