Clearly some genes have particular purposes – like the ones that make mice horny. Scientists are keen to work out what the various human genes do, and claim to have isolated numerous genes which supposedly make up our personalities, including the gluttony gene, the long-life gene, the psychopath gene, the susceptible-to-flu gene, the genius gene, the infidelity gene, the suicide gene and even the liberal gene. Imagine having all of those. It would be one hell of a ride, albeit ultimately tragic.1
These efforts bring the fear that we will not just muss with genes to banish illness, but to positively engineer in boosts to intelligence or looks, or even personality types. Designer babies could be created by gene therapy – inserting genes into the cells of an embryo – encouraging or discouraging certain predispositions. This might be used to phase out cancer, or it might be used to phase out liberals.
Anyone trying to do either will face difficulties. Genes, unsurprisingly enough, work together in ways of fiendish complexity. Boosting up one seemingly positive gene might cause some unwanted side-effects; the Cleveland supermice were great lovers, yes, but were also highly aggressive. ‘Why this is the case, we are not really sure,’ admitted Professor Hanson.
But for some, the potential profits are unignorable. In 2009, a Los Angeles clinic – LA Fertility Institutes – run by controversial IVF pioneer Dr Jeff Steinberg, offered would-be parents the chance to select their kid’s hair and eye colours – making sure to offer no money back guarantee. ‘I would not say this is a dangerous road,’ Dr Steinberg said. ‘It’s an uncharted road.’
But a road that is uncharted is, by definition, a dangerous road because it is uncharted. You do not know whether it is a safe road or one that is beset by marauding blonde-haired superchildren who see you as a source of cheap fuel. That’s the main worry here. And one that saw public opinion force Steinberg to, at least temporarily, withdraw the service. We weren’t ready for the master race quite yet.
Strange about the Cleveland mice, though: you’d have thought a mouse that was getting it that often would be pretty relaxed. But that’s genetic complexity for you.
Is all this genetics just eugenics under another name?
There is a question underlying all this genetical jiggery-pokery and that question is this: is all this genetics just eugenics under another name? Stamping out impurities in the human gene pool? Many are touchy about this kind of thing. If we did manage to phase a ‘psychopath gene’ out of the gene pool, would that not be a good thing? Or are you some kind of psychopath fan? Then again, mastering nature to breed a race of supermen: isn’t this just a teeny bit Nazi? It does sound a bit Nazi. It’s probably the words ‘master’, ‘race’, ‘breed’ and ‘supermen’.
The word genetics replaced eugenics as the name for the field after certain mid-twentieth-century embarrassments. The word ‘eugenics’ is derived from the Greek for ‘good in birth’ and was coined by Victorian polymath Francis Galton who believed inherited physical problems caused much misery. If we bred from the best specimens and made people happier and cleverer, life would be generally better. But the ‘best’ of humanity, it turned out, were the gentryfolk like Galton while the ‘worst’ were the urban poor, who drank and swore and wore clogs and suchlike. (He wrote some hilarious blogs about ‘chav scum’).
And it’s not just Nazis who have been a bit Nazi about all this. By 1927, many US states had eugenics laws permitting them to sterilise people deemed ‘imbeciles’. They rowed back from – but thoroughly debated – the idea of gassing people. In Britain, in 1913, the Liberal Government passed the Mental Deficiency Act which early supporters, like Winston Churchill, had initially hoped would sanction sterilisation of ‘the feeble minded and insane classes’. The last time the USA sterilised someone was … 1972. (On US soil, that is; attaching electrodes to Iraqi nads doesn’t count.) In 1995, good old ‘socialist’ China passed a law limiting the right of low-IQ people to reproduce.
So is all gene-related work essentially ‘eugenics’ under another name? Well, yes. But there is clearly a difference between hindering the spread of cancer and hindering the spread of alleged imbeciles.
We have moved on from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s jolly pronouncement about the twenties US laws: ‘We want people who are healthy, good-natured, emotionally stable, sympathetic, and smart. We do not want idiots, imbeciles, paupers, and criminals.’
I mean, he’s right in a way: who does want idiots, imbeciles, paupers and criminals? Not me. Not after last time. But most would now agree that fascistically stopping people breeding is not really helping anyone and the USA for one has a far more enlightened attitude to imbeciles – sometimes even making them president.
But trying not to slip into being a teeny bit fascist remains a big issue with genetics. Most are pretty careful to avoid muddying the waters, though this cannot really be said for James Watson, the American genetics legend who, with Francis Crick, discovered DNA in a Cambridge pub in 1952 and now runs one of America’s leading scientific research institutions. In 2004, pondering genetic engineering’s potential uses, this figurehead wondered if there was any harm in breeding ‘pretty girls’ (he really likes pretty girls).
More controversial was his contention that being ‘really stupid’ is ‘a disease’ that we could also try banishing from the gene pool. Still, at least he wasn’t being racist or anything. Oh, no, hang on …
He also claimed that black people were less intelligent than white, which definitely sounds like the sort of thing that people call racist. Yes, he did acknowledge that modern science claimed all human groups were intellectually equal, but ‘people who have to deal with black employees find this not true’.
Man alive.
Transhuman express
Of course, your genes do not determine everything. Anyone who thinks individual genes mechanistically decide our fates is onto a loser. Have they not even seen Trading Places? ‘It’s a miracle – I’ve got legs! I can walk!’ Great days.
But neither do your genes determine nothing. It’s tricky. What more greatly determines our characters: our intrinsic, genetically inherited natures, or the conditions in which we are nurtured? We could perhaps call this debate one of ‘nature versus nurture’. It’s a snappy phrase that really should catch on.
Even so, genetic enhancement (boosting ourselves at the genetic level) is one of the ways some starry-eyed Silicon Valley zealots, the world’s newest elite, believe humanity will push past its current incarnation – transgressing our limits to become transhuman, or even eventually post-human. Genetically enriched – or GenRich, to sound more techy – humans could have better intellectual and physical capabilities. Oh yes, and they will not have to die.
As well as genetic engineering, the transhumanists look to emergent techniques like stem cell research and growing replacement organs in the lab. Stem cell research offers the possibility of potentially banishing many diseases (Parkinson’s, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis) by getting diseased parts of the body to repair themselves from stem cells, the cells from which other cells develop. (It also freaks out the religious right, so it’s the gift that keeps on giving.) The transhumanists bundle this all in with medical nanotechnology (of which more later … it means ‘small technology’) to create a vision of the future where the human body’s ageing processes can be halted, or bits of us renewed (or even robotised). Basically, they reckon they can live for ever.
There is even a World Transhumanist Association which holds conferences called things like ‘Living For Ever’. One leading transhumanist is Natasha Vita-More, the glamorous chair of Humanity+, a libertarian group dedicated to utilising everything it possibly can to stay trim.