Gattaca is Here
The rich and determined already select genes in their children… how long before it is the norm for everyone?
In a future “not too distant” from 1997, the genetically enhanced assume elite positions in society. The naturally conceived are relegated to menial jobs, their fates sealed by their risky, raw genomes. This is the dystopian world of widespread eugenics as depicted in the 1997 sci-fi film Gattaca. Although it was not a commercial success, the film remains a cultural template for the promise and peril of a world of designer babies.
When Gattaca was released, the technology was not yet quite there. Today, it pretty much is. First, In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is the technology that enables doctors to retrieve a woman’s eggs, fertilize them, and transfer an embryo back into her womb (or another’s). This technology has been around for a long time, with the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, being born in England using the technique in 1978.
IVF has initially been used as a treatment for both male and female infertility; this was the reason in the case of Louise, whose parents struggled to conceive. The IVF procedure involves a few broad steps, and it is basically straightforward. First, the woman receives hormone injections, stimulating the release of eggs from the ovaries. The doctor then retrieves the eggs either transvaginally, or using a needle which goes directly into the ovaries. Next, the eggs are fertilized with the male’s sperm in a lab. Typically, the eggs are simply mixed with semen and fertilization occurs naturally. If the sperm is of low quality, the doctors can inject a healthy sperm cell directly into an egg using a glass needle. Once the embryo has developed for a few days in the lab, it is transferred back into the woman’s uterus. If all goes as planned, the woman is now pregnant.
The more recent and controversial advancement is called Preimplantation Genetic Testing (PGT). PGT adds an additional step to the IVF process. In the lab, many eggs are fertilized, and the genomes of each embryo are analyzed. Using statistics (called polygenic scoring), scientists can estimate the probability that traits will appear in each embryo after he or she is born. In some cases, scientists will know with certainty if an embryo will develop an illness. The eventual diagnosis of Huntington’s Disease, an ugly, fatal, and incurable illness, can often be known with certainty from the genome of an embryo. In other cases, it can be determined if an embryo is disposed to developing an illness.
One newer company specializing in Preimplantation Genetic Testing is Orchid Health. Their website shows that they can detect a wide range of potential illnesses and genetic conditions prior to the implantation of the embryo. The company looks for a higher-than-normal probability of intellectual disability, autism, epilepsy, cancers, birth defects, chromosomal abnormalities, Alzheimer’s, bipolar, schizophrenia, heart disease, Celiac, IBS, diabetes, and other conditions. The embryo with the highest probability of healthy development is then transferred back into the womb.
The technology almost certainly exists to select for other non-health-related traits. That is, if push came to shove, firms such as Orchid Health would be able to select embryos with a higher probability of being above average in height or intelligence, having a certain appearance, or even having certain personality traits. However, the idea of selecting embryos based on non-medical traits remains highly controversial and is generally not supported by the existing ethical frameworks guiding reproductive genetics. Most countries maintain strict guidelines that limit the use of PGT for the prevention of serious genetic disorders and diseases, emphasizing ethical considerations.
One wonders, however, if a couple was very rich and very determined, they couldn’t find a company somewhere in the world to select embryos based on traits beyond just disorders and diseases. One further wonders how long the consensus on PGT will hold—the line between disorders and traits is not always so clear or indeed easy to isolate. It may be that reducing the likelihood of severe cognitive impairment also “inadvertently” reduces the likelihood of merely below-average intelligence. It seems plausible that the genes correlating with severe cognitive impairment are also associated with merely lower intelligence—indeed, selecting an embryo with a likelihood of high intelligence would reduce the likelihood of severe cognitive impairment. Moreover, any laws forbidding PGT from selecting such traits appear rather flimsy in the United States. Professional bodies such as the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) or the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) could revoke their accreditation, but this would not legally forbid a firm from offering such a service. The slope is slippery.
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On the one hand, the technology is clearly full of promise. Who wouldn’t want to reduce the odds that their child is born with a debilitating, life-altering illness, or will develop one later in life? Many parents would also choose, if given the opportunity, to give their child an advantage in height, intelligence, strength, beauty, or any other characteristic that is at least partly determined by genes. But it is not for nothing that selecting for these traits is not widely offered in the market. Ethical concerns abound—Gattaca offers one warning, but history offers another. The 20th century was scarred by the legacy of eugenics, and many fear that this technology will exhume this dead monster.
What do the Critics Fear?
The term ‘eugenics’ was coined by British polymath and Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton in 1883 (who also invented techniques in forensics, psychology, meteorology, the concept of “correlation,” and terms such as “nature versus nurture,” and “regression to the mean”). In the early 20th century, eugenics had a far better reputation than it does today, with a prominent slice of society’s elite endorsing policies prescribed by the young “science”. The subject became an academic discipline at many universities, and conferences and societies were formed to promote its findings and ideas.
These days, it is surprising how popular the ideas of the eugenicists were among the elite of the early 20th century. In 1927, the US Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Buck v. Bell that states could medically sterilize the intellectually disabled in order to prevent the births of disabled children. The case is tragic. Carrie Buck, who was alleged by the state of Virginia to be promiscuous and feebleminded, was compulsorily sterilized. We now know that Carrie’s illegitimate pregnancy was probably the result of rape, not promiscuity. She was likely institutionalized by the family to save face, meaning that she was probably not even ‘feebleminded.’ In fact, she was deemed an ‘average student’ by her teachers. Nevertheless, famed progressive Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr wrote in the court’s decision that “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” siding with the state.
The decision was a boon for the eugenicists, and sterilizations subsequently rose from 6,000 per year in the 1920s to 12,000 by the late 1940s. Worse yet, these American eugenics programs of the 1920s apparently inspired the National Socialists of Germany, who cited Buck vs Bell at the Nuremberg trials when defending their own sterilization programs. The Nazis had already sterilized 80,000 people before the Second World War even began.
This is an incredibly nasty history and explains why the term eugenics contains a profoundly negative connotation in the modern world. With new technologies emerging that enable parents to select the traits of their children, how worried should we be? How much does it have in common with eugenics as practiced a century ago?
Is PGT Eugenics? Is it Unethical?
Maybe? It depends on the definition. Eugenics of the early 20th century was so nasty because of its coerciveness. The state determined who ought not to reproduce, often preventing them by forced sterilization. Imagine undergoing coerced surgery, where doctors open your body and remove your fallopian tubes against your will. It’s not a pretty thought.
But grappling with early 20th-century eugenics also puts things into perspective. Preimplantation Genetic Testing is frankly not in the same moral ballpark, due to the lack of coercion. Genetic selection does not stop anyone from having children however they please. It certainly involves no “forced surgeries.” And it doesn’t discriminate, except perhaps by excluding some who cannot afford it. If the primary concern about PGT is insufficient access, then clearly we are discussing something of limited nastiness. No one complained that the eugenics of the early 20th century was not accessible enough to them. For this reason, it seems unfair to categorize PGT under “eugenics,” a term imbued with such irredeemable moral baggage that we are forced to condemn and forbid it in all its forms.
This is not to say that the moral fears of such technology are completely unfounded. The technology may not be coercive or violent, and it may even be beneficial to those who access it, but still be harmful to society as a whole. Science fiction has covered this territory well, with films like Gattaca depicting the risk of a two-tiered society, with a caste of the genetically enhanced running everything and the naturally conceived beneath them. Others fear that we will simply lose our humanity. Who knows what is at the end of a process where traits are deliberately selected by parents, or perhaps more accurately, by that egregore that governs us? It seems likely that governments will quickly have ideas and then imperatives about the characteristics of citizens; as revealed by the era of the early eugenicists, the interests of government and the interests of its subjects do not always align. Humanity may quickly come to be unrecognizable in appearance, personality, and character in both desirable and regrettable ways. The technology is undeniably pregnant with risk.
The Accelerationist and Transhumanist Case
Sometimes it feels that our culture is overly focused on the risks of technology. Just look at the proportion of utopian to dystopian science fiction—perhaps a writer needs conflict to make a story, but if one takes fiction as a bellwether, the future is grim, and new technology usually backfires or comes at a moral cost. The Matrix, The Terminator, Bladerunner, Alien, Minority Report, Her, Moon, Ex Machina… the list goes on. In classic literature, including the Tower of Babel, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Faust, Frankenstein, and Greek myths of Icarus or Prometheus, technological hubris leads to disaster. It is a powerful archetypal theme: do not trifle with powers beyond your comprehension.
But humanity is also the story of progress, discovery, creativity, achievement, and self-made abundance. From the perspective of the past, life today in most of the world is closer to utopia than dystopia. Perusing the graphs on OurWorldInData.org can dispel excessive gloom over the fate of humanity—almost everything really is getting better, and remarkably quickly. Our natural human inclination to fear change, power, and apocalypse is perhaps not unwise… maybe it is what has kept us around this long. But this must be tempered by the understanding that modern life is built on thousands of Towers of Babbel, welded together by Promethean fire and Faustian magic. It is dizzying to gaze down from such a trembling structure, and we understand that any new technology could topple it all, revealing itself as our own Great Filter. But remaining in the mud also can’t protect us from the hurtling asteroid either, or indeed, from some minor tooth infection. Regardless, Pandora’s Box cannot really be closed, nor can genetic selection be indefinitely prevented. So, let’s appreciate the positives as well—let’s pitch the most optimistic case.
1. Eradication of Eradication of Many Diseases.
Curing diseases is hard. Prevention is a lot easier. Take cancer: doctors may be able to cure lung cancer at a considerable cost by blasting the patient with radiation. But not smoking during life and not developing cancer in the first place is a better strategy. Likewise, curing cancer as a society is not easy. We have conservatively spent hundreds of billions of dollars on cancer research, and while some progress has been made, the disease remains at large. Genetic Selection may be a backdoor cure for cancer and many other diseases analogous to prevention. By understanding the genome, doctors can predict which embryos are likely to develop cancer and other illnesses in adulthood. If genetic selection is perfected and made widespread, we may find that the general disease burden drops dramatically and life expectancy leaps. You don’t need to cure a cancer that you never acquire.
2. Happy and personable people
Studies on twins, particularly those raised apart, have shown that genetics can play a significant role in determining an individual's baseline level of mood and general happiness. With gene selection, we will be able to select embryos that are naturally happier. More broadly, the estimated heritability of other personality traits, such as the Big 5 of neuroticism, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extroversion, ranges from around 40% to 60%, indicating that about half of the variation in these traits among individuals can be attributed to genetic differences. Parents could choose embryos that are more likely to be happy and personable.
3. Cognitive Superpowers
Selecting for intellect is the most controversial, and presently not available on the market. Perhaps the most quintessentially human trait, it turns out that intelligence is probably at least 50% heritable. The technology, therefore, exists to deliberately select embryos with higher intelligence. Perfection of this technology, and compounding this process for a few generations, brings us into the realm of fantasy. We don’t really know how intelligent people could become; a world of John von Neumann’s might yield unimaginable benefits. This could catalyze the greatest golden age of all time, making us unimaginably cooperative and productive. It is a truly Nietzschean vision… the civilization of the self-crafted Übermensch.
The “not-too-distant future” depicted in Gattaca is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. It is likely that many of the rich and determined already avail themselves of the technology to select for traits like intelligence; after all, it is not illegal and there is no requirement to tell everyone about it. Would it be shocking to learn that the Zuckerbergs, or other Silicon Valley elite, carefully selected their embryos? Firms like Orchid Health have an interesting slice of the tech elite counted as investors, including Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum fame, Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe, and Brian Armstrong of Coinbase. This implies that a competitive process is already underway. Once some are selecting for genetic traits, those who do not are falling behind. But this technology enables a notable step in the progress of an advanced species; where traits were once selected by sexual selection, survival, chance, mutation, and Darwin’s invisible hand, the characteristics of humanity in the future may be chosen deliberately by the very human mind that is being shaped by such selection. The risks are clear—refer to science fiction, or our own human past, for ideas of how things could go wrong. Genetic selection is inherently exponential since traits like intelligence will be a function of the level of the trait itself—we all intuit that this is a horse that will not reenter the barn. But it is a mistake to ignore the potential for unimaginable benefits. Just as the present is, in many ways, a technological utopia compared to the past, genetic selection may enable a future that those of us in the present can scarcely imagine. If we proceed carefully and deliberately, there is every reason to believe that genetic selection can enable of future of incredible happiness and abundance for our species.