technology
philosophy

The Ethics of CRISPR

Arizona State University
Stanford University
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale

Ben Hurlbut

Arizona State University

June 17th, 2021
In the last few years, a debate has unfolded about using the genome editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 to alter the human germline, making genetic changes that would be passed down through the generations. The influential scientific voices in that debate have mostly treated technology—what can and cannot (yet) be done—as the starting-point for ethical deliberation. What germline editing might mean for the meaning of human lives and relationships—parent to child, medicine to patient, society to its members—has been sidelined by debate about whether germline editing is premature “at this time.”
Framing matters. Focusing debate on the state of technology empowers agents of scientific and technological change to play arbiter of the human future. In empowering themselves to declare the trump-all ethical judgment “not yet,” scientists likewise have empowered themselves to eventually declare “now is the time.” This narrowed ethical deliberation has disproportionately elevated scientific voices over others.
These are the ways of thinking that drove He Jiankui to create the “CRISPR babies.” A few months earlier, He was at a conference with the legendary James Watson. He accosted him and asked: “Do you think it is acceptable to modify the human germline for protection from disease, not just to treat disease?” He’s accent is thick, so Watson asked him to write it down. Watson responded in three simple words: “Make people better.”
Like a commandment from on high, that scrap of paper hung prominently on the wall of He’s lab during the months that the babies were conceived, edited, gestated and born. Although He understood the words as Watson intended them, as an authorization, those three words capture the ambiguity—and the hubris—of the project of heritable genome editing. The power to (re)make future people also empowers the makers to declare which lives are better.
The mandarins of science reacted to He’s experiment by condemning it as “medically unnecessary.” Yet that judgment itself echoes He’s hubris. In declaring what is unnecessary, they presumed also to know when it is necessary to make people better. That way of knowing reduces human life to molecular life, legible to science’s roving editorial eye, stripped of meaning that lives in culture and context.
The debate has tried to skirt such complex arenas of meaning. “What is it permissible to do,” has superseded the question “what compelling human need does this technology address?” Like a hammer in search of a nail to legitimate its place in the tool kit, heritable genome editing is a solution seeking a problem. Deliberation has been oriented toward discovering a justification, a reason to wield the power to edit.
That editorial aspiration reaches beyond the molecular text of the genome into the very vocabularies with which we make sense of and value human life. If being human is not merely a biological state, but lies also in the shared conceptions of the human condition that guide how we live with and care for one another, then germline genome editing as it is currently taking shape will be a technology of dehumanization.
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