Chinese scientists are changing what it means to be human. We need to think about the downsides.

Disconnect is a weekly column in which Tech in Asia’s Charlie Custer pokes at holes, plays devil’s advocate, or otherwise attempts to rain on the tech industry’s parade.

The cutting edge of the most world-changing technology in development today is in China. That’s an assertion that would be tough to argue against after a Nature article last week revealed that Chinese scientists successfully edited the genes of human embryos to make them resistant to HIV. This sort of thing has happened only once before: last year a different Chinese team genetically modified human embryos for the first time ever.

They’re doing this using a technology called CRISPR, short for Clustered Regularly-Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. It’s really complicated, but basically, CRISPR is a piece of the genetic code in many bacteria that scientists have discovered can be used to edit genes by inserting or cutting a specific strand of DNA.

What these scientists are working on could change the very meaning of “human.”

Right now we’re in the very early stages of being able to use this. In the experiment Nature wrote about last week, for example, the Chinese team took a total of 213 fertilized (but non-viable) human eggs and managed to implant the desired gene sequence in only four of them – and even in those, the implementation wasn’t perfect.

Still, this experiment and last year’s are a proof of concept: CRISPR could be used to introduce desired genetic mutations into a human embryo. And if that embryo was viable and was implanted into a uterus and carried to term, the resulting child would be something out of science fiction: a genetically-enhanced human being.

It’s not hyperbolic, then, to suggest that what these scientists are working on could change the very meaning of human. And in a best case scenario, that’s a wonderful thing. If we can master the use of CRISPR for human embryos, we could probably eliminate genetic diseases, and in the long run, we could do a lot more. We could quite literally enhance ourselves by producing humans with consciously-designed genes to ensure that every child born is highly intelligent, athletic, attractive, and disease resistant.

The dark side

CRISPR has the potential to be the greatest and most important technology of this century. But as with every new technology, there is a dark side to CRISPR’s potential, too.

To be clear, I don’t think that CRISPR is likely to be used to create supervillains or anything like that. What it does for humans is likely to be mostly or entirely good. The more likely problem will not be with the technology itself, but rather with who has access to it.

Once CRISPR gene editing is perfected, it’s still likely to be quite expensive. In-vitro fertilization, which is a much simpler process, has been around for years and still costs (at a minimum) around US$10,000, so you can imagine how expensive getting your child’s genes custom-edited will likely be. The price will almost certainly push access to CRISPR treatments outside of the reach of most of the world’s population. As gene editing grows in popularity, it’s even possible that commercial labs will develop proprietary, “designer” gene sequences that could be sold at a profit. The poor would be even less likely to be able to access these.

The potential problem there is obvious: the wealthy will be able to afford to make their children genetically perfect. In time, the upper classes could make themselves into a genuinely superior race of beings. That’s great if you’re a part of that class, but for the rest of us, it’s likely to be less pleasant. Upward mobility is going to be damn near impossible in a system where rich kids are by default smarter, prettier, and healthier than you are.

Moving carefully forward