I think it’s - I’m a believer in the precautionary
principle as I’ve just said, and I think
we have to worry about possible consequences
of things that we do, and the ability to edit
our own genomes is one thing we ought to worry
about.
I’m not sure it’s so much an ethical problem
as a more practical problem.
What would the consequences be?
Would the consequences be bad?
And they might be.
I think it’s worth noticing that long before
CRISPR long before it became capable of editing
our genomes in anyway we have been editing
the genomes of domestic animals and plants
by artificial selection, not artificial mutation,
which is what we’re now talking about, but
artificial selection.
When you think that a Pekingese is a wolf,
a modified wolf, a genetically modified wolf—modified
not by directly manipulating genes but by
choosing for breeding individuals who have
certain characteristics, for example, a small
stubbed nose, et cetera, and making a wolf
turn into a Pekingese.
And we’ve been doing that very successfully
with domestic animals like dogs, cows, domestic
plants like maize for a long time, we’ve
never done that to humans or hardly at all.
Hitler tried it but it’s never really been
properly done with humans I’m glad to say.
So if we’ve never done that with humans
with the easy way, which is artificial selection,
it’s not obvious why we would suddenly start
doing it the difficult way, which is by direct
genetic manipulation.
There doesn’t seem to be any great eagerness
to do it over the last few centuries anyway.
A lot of people have problems with what they
call designer babies.
You could imagine a future scenario in which
people go to a doctor and say, "Doctor, we
want our baby to be a musical genius.
Please edit the genes so that we have the
same genes as the Bach family had or something
like that to make them into a musical genius."
I mean that horrifies many people.
It’s got totally obvious why that’s anymore
horrifying than parents who are ambitious
for the musical future of their child forcing
the child to practice the piano three hours
a day.
There are differences, of course, forcing
it to practice is maybe unpleasant for the
child but it doesn’t go into the next generation,
changing the genes does so there is a difference
there.
But at least people who shudder with horror
at a designer baby who’s a musical genius,
people who shudderat horror at that, why don’t
you shudder with horror at forcing a child
to have music lessons when it doesn’t want
to or practice music when it doesn’t want
to?
I think although there is an analogy between
technological evolution and biological evolution,
it’s dangerous to push that analogy too
far.
I’ve just been decrying the view that everybody
is an expert.
And I’m not an expert in technology and
I think that every scientist needs to admit
when they don’t know.
The analogy is there, things change gradually,
the evolution of the airplane starting from
the Wright brothers in the beginning of the
20th century until the present, it’s been
spectacularly fast but it is gradual evolution
and it looks, to some extent, like biological
evolution.
But whether it occurs by natural selection
that’s open to argument.
You could say that it does occur by a form
of natural selection, but it’s not the same
kind of natural selection.
So I don’t regard myself as a biological
evolutionist as qualified to talk about technological
evolution.
I’m interested in the analogy but I think
it only is an analogy and it doesn’t go
too far.
