The Moral Math Of Glowing Green Monkeys

Genetically engineer monkeys to make them glow green? It’s always cool when actual scientists do what 11-year-old boys think scientists do. Next thing, the marmoset monkey team will produce a working starship for Starfleet Command.

The Japanese team got their results by encoding a fluorescent green protein (derived from glowing jellyfish) into a virus. The virus was then injected into a marmoset embryo. The marmoset was born with skin and hair that glowed green under ultraviolet light. Next, the Japanese scientists bred the glowing marmoset with a regular marmoset. The new genetic mutation was passed to a second generation — and theoretically on to posterity. Eureka.

But not everybody is delighted by the achievements of the team at Japan’s Central Institute for Experimental Animals. The Washington Post called American ethicists and found widespread dismay: “It would be easy enough for someone to make the leap to trying this on humans. If you make this kind of change, it’s passed on to all future generations. Many people think it’s hubris to have people remaking people in this way.” So remarked Lori Andrews at the law faculty of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

So — do we stand on the verge of a brave new world of glowing green humans?

Not immediately. And no our descendents probably won’t glow. Genetic manipulation of the human species is coming. In fact, it has arrived.

On Jan. 9, 2009, there was born in England the first human baby screened to be free of breast cancer genes. The girl’s 27-year-old mother had been grieved to see many of her husband’s female relatives die of breast cancer. She wanted to ensure that her own children were born free from the gene. She and her husband underwent in vitro fertilization at a London clinic. Eleven embryos were produced. Six were found to contain the genetic fault. Two of the remaining five were implanted in the mother, producing one pregnancy.

This pregnancy raises very troubling ethical issues. Nine of eleven embryos were discarded. All of them were potential people. Yes, six of those potential people carried a gene for breast cancer which might have killed them (if they had been born female) or their descendents (if they had been born male). But not all women born with this particular genetic fault get breast cancer, and not all breast cancers are fatal. Moreover, more than 90% of breast cancers have a cause other than the faulty gene for which the London clinic screened.

To do the moral math: 9 abortions in order to gain a very slightly reduced risk of breast cancer in one’s children and descendents. That seems a bad balance. What if one could guarantee that none of one’s descendents would suffer from some terrible disease by screening one’s children? There might be more takers for that idea — especially if medicine develops some less invasive way to screen.

Playing God? Already human beings have changed their own species dramatically. We are taller, stronger, longer-lived than a century ago. We have eradicated or controlled whole categories of diseases that used to shape the human condition, from polio to smallpox. From the point of view of earlier generations, these advances would have looked plenty Godlike.

The ultimate strength and wealth of nations is the capability of their populations. That’s why governments invest in education and public health. As we advance to the next stage of human improvement, can societies ignore this potential? And what if one society decides to proceed — if an authoritarian state like China, for example, were to begin systematically trying to upgrade the intellectual capability of its population through some future genetic innovation? Would other societies agree to be left behind?

Can one imagine some 21st century arms race, with the prize being not a better weapon but a more highly evolved population? Could the process of evolution, once a matter of chance, itself evolve into a process humanly willed and humanly directed?

Such a transformation will not occur immediately or even soon.

The traits that parents would want to pass to their posterity — health, strength, intellect, beauty — are not encoded in single genes. Genetic enhancement of the human race remains a far-off scientific possibility.

Even the introduction of single genes for highly specific traits carries a high risk of unintended hazards. The genetic screening done for that British mother at current technology looks impossibly expensive, minimally beneficially and morally objectionable.

Yet even so:

Our descendents — with lifespans of 200 years, with perfect vision and hearing — may someday look on those glowing green marmosets and say: Here was the beginning of the next great chapter of human history; the moment when humanity’s mastery of nature culminated in mastery of itself.

Originally published in the National Post.