Where would you draw the line on editing human embryos? Joseph Vukov, a philosopher, and Michael Burns, a biologist, have been colleagues at Loyola University Chicago since faculty orientation ten years ago, and they come at this question from different starting points — one drawing on Catholic thought, the other on a secular, left-of-center view. In this Heterodox Conversation™ at Johns Hopkins University, Burns first explains how CRISPR-Cas9 cuts and edits DNA, including an FDA-approved CRISPR therapy for sickle cell disease. Vukov then lays out why most ethicists accept treating body cells while nearly everyone opposes editing embryos today, along with the practical and moral objections.
The four cases run from editing embryos with today’s technology, to a world where no one can have children, to cheap and safe “strip mall” genetic engineering, to treating eggs and sperm before conception. After audience members weigh in on each, Vukov and Burns show where they land — including where they agree, but for entirely different reasons. The conversation closes with audience questions. A transcript of the conversation follows below.
Joseph Vukov: All right, good evening everyone. I’m going to be presenting today, as has already been said, on in what cases is it ethically permissible to genetically modify human embryos. So we wanted to start out with just a little bit about ourselves. We represent a couple of different ways of coming at this question. I am a philosopher by training, did a PhD in philosophy, currently work in a lot of ethics of technology, and because this is relevant for the discussion tonight, I am a Catholic who tries to be a pretty by-the-books Catholic and lean a little bit more conservative when it comes to ethical issues like what we’re going to be discussing tonight. And Burns is on the exact same page, right buddy?
Michael Burns: That is absolutely not true my name is Dr. Michael Burns. I am in the biology department and bioinformatics program at Loyola University Chicago. I’m an associate professor there. I’m also the director of the artificial intelligence and human flourishing program — brand new minor program. And it says artificial intelligence, since you must be like, oh, you love data centers. I mentioned there’s a second part of it, which is human flourishing. Okay, so there’s like a part of it we’re like, care about people. Anyway, you have a whole bunch of other titles, don’t you?
Joseph Vukov: I do. So I also am an associate director for, we’ve got this place called the Hank Center for Catholic Intellectual Heritage. So I help direct that center as well.
Michael Burns: The other piece, so you mentioned he’s a Roman Catholic and vaguely conservative. I’d say you’re pretty conservative, Joe.
Joseph Vukov: I’m pretty conservative, yeah.
Michael Burns: I’m an atheist.
Joseph Vukov: I got my best conservative suit on.
Michael Burns: That’s right. Yes. We tried to look the part. We also don’t wear suits very often, by the way. This is all code switching. I’m an atheist. I lack a belief in any gods. And I’m also pretty left-leaning.
Joseph Vukov: You’re very left-leaning.
Michael Burns: I’m basically like your stereotypical, awful, I’m going to indoctrinate you children into being communists professor. That’s me.
Joseph Vukov: Yeah. So we’re going to dive right in. But just one other thing is that so Michael and I, even though we come from very different disciplinary perspectives, very different political and ethical orientations, we go way back in doing collaboration. So in fact, we go way back to day number one. We both started at Loyola University Chicago 10 years ago. Not our births.
Michael Burns: Not our births. We’re not born on the same day.
Joseph Vukov: Although it turns out we both were raised in southern Minnesota, about 30 miles away from each other. So the accents are very similar that you might pick up on. When we go back to day one at Loyola, we actually met at faculty orientation. And from that day forward, started doing first extracurricular stuff. We now teach a class together and end up, we’ve done fellowships, like residential fellowships together at different places. So we’ve ended up hanging out a lot together and traveling the country and doing these kinds of talks. Yes.
Michael Burns: Anyway, take it away, Joe. What’s the proposal?
Joseph Vukov: So here’s the proposal. There are circumstances in which it is morally permissible to design human embryos. And I want to note that we’ve sort of made a few little changes to the initial title of the talk. So one thing is that instead of just talking about genetic engineering, We’re going to widen things up just a little bit. Genetic engineering of human embryos is still going to be our primary focus. We’re also going to gesture to a couple of other ways in which it’s possible to design human embryos. That’s the first thing. The other thing that we want you to get to by the end of the discussion today, and we really do want this to be a discussion. So we’ll have some things to say to you.
We’ll be giving you sort of some lecture content for the next while. But by the end, this is a fair warning, is we want you all talking with each other and with us as well. So we’re going to have some interactive portions to the presentation by the time we get to the end of it. And what we want you to see, among other things, is that when it comes to thinking about ethical issues, especially ethical issues that have to do with emerging technologies, it’s very typically unproductive to think about answering those issues in a yes or no or black and white kind of way.
Instead, what we want to do is to introduce you to the issue of genetically modifying human embryos in such a way that we can identify different kinds of circumstances such that the ethical considerations might be different, the science might be different, and the context might be different that might actually change where you lie on that issue. And we’re going to demonstrate the way in which it changes the place that we lie on that issue. It turns out there are places where Michael and I completely agree with each other, places where we completely disagree, and places where both of us kind of put our hands in the air and are a little bit undecided.
It also explains sort of that nuance that we wanna get to you to, also explains how we’ve structured our discussion with you tonight. So what we wanna do is we want to introduce you, first of all, to the relevant science. So we think it’s really important that to tackle an issue like this, you can’t just go into this as the ethicist. So I’m the ethicist, the humanist guy in the room without knowing about the science. So it’s one reason why Michael and I love presenting together is that he keeps me honest about the science and he’s going to keep us honest about the science.
Michael Burns: Don’t believe anything Joe says about science.
Joseph Vukov: No, you absolutely shouldn’t. You absolutely shouldn’t. And that’s why Burns is here. On the flip side, don’t believe anything Burns tells you about ethics. That’s my job is to tell you about the most relevant ethical considerations that you have to do to make decisions about genetically engineering human embryos. And then only then will we get to actual case studies. So again, what we want to get you to is to see it’s not black and white to say, yes, I’m in favor of genetically engineering embryos. No, I’m not in favor of it. Rather, you need to look at very specific case studies and we have some realistic ones. We have some more science fictional ones.
The idea will be to tease apart your ethical intuitions, your ethical reasons, to see where you land and to see where you differ than me and Michael and where you might be on the same page. So as Michael said, without further ado, you do not want to hear about science from me. So I’m going to turn the clicker over to Dr. Burns.
Michael Burns: All right. Hello, everybody. Just out of curiosity, how many of you are like STEM, biology, biomedical students and/or faculty? Okay, that’s a pretty healthy chunk of you. That’s good. And these people in the house — hey, they exist. Excellent. So what we’re gonna talk about is some of the science. So just as a heads up, this is going to be for a general audience. So for those of you who have most recently are currently taking genetics, I know that you know the difference between non-homologous end joining and homology-directed repair. We’re going to gloss over that for today. Okay, this is going to be important. All right, first off, the genome is a very big place.
And when I say the genome is a very big place, I mean it is a very big place in that when we say the word big, we basically mean the size of it is actually not intuitively understandable to you. Okay? It turns out that human brains are not very good at depicting very large and very small things. So in this context, this is capital B. In order to try to put this in context, a typical human cell will have 46 chromosomes, so just 46 pieces of DNA. And if you took those 46 pieces and you stretched them out and then stitched them all together into one giant piece of DNA and stretched it out, it would be about two meters long, so a little bit taller than me. So all the way from here, all the way down to the floor would be one DNA molecule.
That’s the DNA that you find in one cell. Now it would be incredibly thin because a double helix of DNA cannot be visualized with even light microscopy. Some extra fancy techniques if you want to see it. And then you take all that, you can ball it back up and you stuff it inside the nucleus of a cell, which you probably do need a microscope to see. And that’s going to be relevant in a moment. All right. Again, for those of you who just need a brief refresher on this, What we’re talking about here is a human cell, because we’re focusing on humans tonight. All human cells contain the same DNA in your body, with an asterisk. Okay, there’s a couple asterisks.
One of them to bring up, for instance, is that one of the most common types of cells, I think the most common cell type in your body, are your erythrocytes, which are red blood cells. Red blood cells don’t have any DNA. There’s no DNA in red blood cells, which is always funny because you watch like a true crime show and they see a blood stain, like, ah, we got to swab the blood stain and we’re going to figure out who it is. All the red blood stuff that’s in there, that’s just a contaminant. You have to work to get rid of it because you’re actually going to focus on the cells that actually have DNA in there, which are going to be mostly immune cells. Immune cells have them. All right. So red blood cells don’t, but all the rest of your cells do.
There’s the cell. There’s a thing in the middle called the nucleus. The nucleus contains all the chromosomes and there’s little regions of the DNA in the genome that are the genes which do stuff. So here’s the central dogma of biology, which I’m sure you’ve all been exposed to before, but we have DNA. It encodes the genes in a series of A’s and C’s and T’s and G’s. These are the alphabet of DNA. It can be transcribed into messenger RNA and other types of RNA. Messenger RNA gets translated into protein. And proteins are the little nanomachines that get stuff done. Okay? So proteins are the things that get stuff done in a cell and, therefore, in your body.
If you care about changing the function of your body or your cells, like, well, we need to change what these little nanomachines do. And how are we going to do that? You don’t want to just target the protein. You’re going to go all the way back here. You’re going to identify a gene. You change the gene. You change the RNA that gets made from it. And you change the protein. Okay? This is just setting the stage for everything that we’re going to talk about here. All right. So how can we alter it? How can we do it? Well, it turns out that human cells spend a lot of effort maintaining their genomes. Okay, we’re going to anthropomorphize them and say that they care very much about keeping their genomes intact.
And I also highlighted that each individual cell contains an actually a huge amount of DNA, right? Again, this big, huge, long string of DNA. And your cells want to keep that in. They don’t want it to get cut. They don’t want it to get tangled up. They don’t want to lose track of it. They don’t want to make more copies of it than they need. So they spend a lot of energy surveilling it and making sure everything’s hunky-dory with it. And it turns out that these two ladies, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier, discovered that there are ways that you can hijack it. So they’re the pioneers of the CRISPR-Cas9 technology, which some of you may have heard of. They won the Nobel Prize in 2020 for that work.
If you’re interested in scientific soap operas, you can dig into this particular story. The good news is that these two actually did discover this. They got the Nobel Prize for it. But I believe there are still lingering court cases related to the patents because a bunch of dude bros at the Broad attempted to sort of steal valor from these two by sneaking the patent out from underneath them. Anyway, CRISPR-Cas9. So what we can basically do is we’re going to take the cell’s energy while it’s trying to maintain the genome and hijack that effort to change it. All right. So we’re going to start with something simple. Here’s a piece of DNA, double-stranded DNA. These little lines in the middle here indicate A’s and C’s and T’s and G’s. Those are some DNA.
And we’re going to have another piece that we put in here. This is something that you can make in the laboratory. It’s called a guide RNA. It’s a short piece of RNA. We talked about RNA before. It’s different than DNA, but it’s also made up of letters. And this guide RNA, when you make it synthetically in the laboratory, you get to pick what the letters are that you put in here. And what you’re going to try to do is if you say, I want to target a gene that’s got a sequence of A’s and C’s and T’s and G’s. All you have to do is make a guide RNA that is complementary. It basically has the same sort of sequence that’s going to match there. You also introduce a Cas9 protein. Again, a protein that’s a little nanomachine that does something.
In this case, the protein binds to this guide RNA and will sort of follow it around in the cell. If there’s a region of the DNA that your guide RNA matches with, Because again, you’re hoping that this is going to match here. What happens is the Cas9 that it brought along for the ride is going to make a cut right at that spot. It’s going to cut the DNA at that spot. And then bing, bang, boom, you have a cut in the DNA. Who cares? What does this have to do with editing the genome? It turns out, remember, cells are paying very close attention to what’s going on with the DNA because there’s so much of it needs to make sure that it’s nice and intact. What ends up happening is three different possible outcomes.
Once the DNA is cut, the first thing that can happen is the cell just repairs that cut correctly. But CRISPR, the CRISPR guide RNA and the Cas9 haven’t gone anywhere. So they’re just going to cut it again. And then the cell will repair it. And then it’ll just get cut again. And then your cell will repair it and it’ll just get cut again. It’ll just keep going back and forth. That’s how that works. And that’s really boring. The interesting stuff starts happening is when the cell makes a mistake.
So if the cell tries to fix it, but can’t quite fix it, and it changes the sequence, it changes the letters that are here, the A’s and C’s and T’s and G’s don’t quite work out, this one no longer matches to your guide RNA, which means that the cutting cycle stops, and you have introduced a mutation into the cell. There’s another even fancier, kind of harder way to do this, where in addition to your guide RNA and your Cas9 nuclease, which is just an enzyme that cuts DNA, you can actually introduce some DNA that’s like a new gene, for instance, that you want, that you would like to incorporate into the genome, and the cell can at some level introduce this as a type of mutation.
So you’ve actually introduced a new function into this part of the genome using this technology, and because this region now no longer has the sequence of the guide RNA, this also will stop the cycle. So these are three different outcomes that you can get from a CRISPR-Cas9 event. And this also explains why it’s so efficient, because if it doesn’t do it the first time, it’s gonna just keep going over and over again until there’s a change. This is groundbreaking. This is the reason, there’s a reason they won the Nobel Prize. When I was in graduate school, I actually made transgenic animals, but it was before the CRISPR era, which means I did it the old fashioned way, and it sucked. It took forever. It was incredibly tough to do.
I would have been much faster if I had access to the CRISPR technology. All right. Now that we have this, it turns out this is actually pretty cheap, pretty straightforward, pretty easy to do. Again, there’s a reason they won the Nobel Prize. It turns out that one of the hard parts is actually how do you get all this crap inside cells? How do you get this Cas protein and the guide RNA and then maybe some extra DNA into a cell? How do you deliver it? Here are a couple different ways. There are more ways than this. Is just a couple. One of them is using an approach called ex vivo manipulation. So ex vivo just means outside of the organism. So if you’re talking about humans, maybe there’s a human who has some sort of an immune disorder that’s genetic.
So you’re going to take some immune cells out of the person. You’ll pull their blood out. You’ll filter out the immune cells. And then you can manipulate them in cell culture, which is much easier to do than in the context of doing it inside their body. So you can manipulate them there. You can use a viral vector. So in this case, a viral vector is just using a virus to carry something. That’s what the vector is. You may have heard, like, there’s all sorts of interesting science articles and pop-sci news things where they’re like, scientists cure brain cancer using herpes virus. And you’re like, that doesn’t sound right. I don’t know what’s going on with that one. They’re not actually using literal herpes virus.
What they’ve done is it turns out that viruses infect specific cell types. And that means that they probably have like a spike protein or a surface protein that will only infect, for instance, neurons. It’s not going to infect any other cell type; it’ll infect neurons. And scientists are likely going to steal that piece of the virus, and then the other pieces of the virus they’re going to replace with stuff that they want. Okay, so that’s an example of a viral vector. In this case, you could make a virus — for instance, like, you could steal the surface protein from hepatitis virus, for instance, that infects liver cells, and then have it deliver whatever you want.
And the thing that maybe you want to deliver is a CRISPR-Cas9 toolkit to a bunch of liver cells. And therefore you’re using a virus to carry that into your body. There are problems with this one, which we might talk about later. The other one is direct embryo injection. All right, so this is where you literally just say, there’s one cell that amounts to roughly what’s going to turn into a whole human being. Let’s just inject that, okay? Turns out this one’s the easiest. And here’s an example. Here’s a video. So this is a fertilized egg. This is an embryo. It’s being held by a pipette. So there’s a little vacuum here that’s sort of grabbing it.
And then there’s a little itty bitty glass needle that they’re using and they’re injecting it straight in there. It goes. Baby’s first vaccine. It’s not a vaccine. We’re just delivering it directly to where it needs to go. And then now 100% of the cells that are formed from this particular embryo will have that genetic change carried forward. Easy peasy, right? In other words, it’s easier to manipulate just one big cell because it turns out that human egg cells are actually pretty big. You can actually see them with the naked eye if you were to find one. That’s the hard part. Versus the 30 trillion or so cells that make up a human body. Okay. An adult human is literally roughly 30 trillion cells if you’re just counting the human cells.
If you start including bacteria and all the other stuff, it gets up to 60, 70 trillion. So one cell versus several trillion cells, which brings us to an ethics break.
Joseph Vukov: A quick ethics break, folks, brought to you by the philosopher. Sorry, there you go. So the distinction Michael just introduced between these two methods of doing genetic modifications, right? So on the one hand, you have modifying either a group of cells or a targeted tissue, and the other one you’re modifying an embryo directly. It turns out for reasons that will become apparent as we continue talking, but that’s one of the most crucial distinctions not only for the science, but also for the ethics of doing genetic modifications to human cells. Because it turns out that when we are doing modifications to groups of cells or to targeted tissues, sometimes called somatic genetic modification in contrast to embryonic or germline modification.
Michael Burns: Somatic just means body cells. And germ cells are? This is a pop quiz. No, it’s sperm and eggs. Sperm and eggs and then fertilized together will make germ cells. Yeah.
Joseph Vukov: Yeah, so it turns out that modifying tissues or modifying collections of cells is almost universally agreed upon to be ethically permissible as long as you meet certain conditions. We’re gonna work through these more as we go, but number one, it’s permissible as long as, again, it’s somatic. You’re doing it to clusters of cells, to tissues, not to human embryos. Number two, it’s therapeutic. So you’re doing it to try and fix some genetic disorder or to solve some disease, and you’re not doing it for the sake of increasing height or making somebody more intelligent. We’re gonna get to that as well. Something you could totally do, but people will say, well, no, that’s a little bit dicier.
Michael Burns: Some of those things you can actually do.
Joseph Vukov: Some, yeah, it’s a little iffy whether it actually works, but people promise that they can do that. They do. And then finally, if it is in fact well-regulated. So it turns out that when it comes to therapies, we have very good mechanisms already in place by which to approve certain therapies. Think here just about FDA regulation and approval process. And most ethicists will say, look, as long as you are just targeting tissues, as long as you are doing it for therapeutic and not enhancement reasons, and as long as it’s properly regulated, totally fine ethically. Again, ethicists are a weird bunch. You could probably find somebody who’s against it, but for the most part, all the humanists—
Michael Burns: You guys are the worst
Joseph Vukov: Exactly. Everyone lines up on one side of the room and says, yeah, we’re fine with that. And it’s a good thing, too, because it turns out that the therapeutic cases of somatic genetic modification are absolutely not just a hypothetical thing, not a thing that we could do that ethicists are saying, oh, that’s okay, we should do that. It’s actually something that’s going on right now. And Michael’s going to introduce you to one application here that is currently FDA approved.
Michael Burns: Yeah, so this is one that’s FDA approved. There are several other that are currently in trials for FDA approval, but this is using CRISPR-Cas9 technology to treat a disorder. Okay. This is the website for the pharmaceutical, which is apparently normal. It’s called exagamaglaginatotimil. I can’t say it. Doesn’t matter. That’s the brand name. It’s totally fine. It’s a CRISPR-Cas9 approach. Okay. It’s treating sickle cell disorders. So sickle cell disorders are like people, for instance, that end up with sickle cell anemia will often have a mutation in a gene that is responsible for the shape and function of red blood cells. We remember red blood cells from before, right? It turns out that red blood cells don’t have DNA.
So this becomes tricky, because you’re like, how in the heck are you gonna treat red blood cells with CRISPR-Cas9 if red blood cells don’t have DNA? The trick is they’re not going to. What they’re going to do is they’re gonna go back a couple steps, and they’re going to apply an ex vivo approach and target stem cells. So they’re gonna target the progenitor cells or the cells that themselves are not red blood cells, but as they grow and divide and mature, they turn into red blood cells. So for patients with this disorder, what they do is they’re going to stimulate the release of a bunch of these hematopoietic stem cells into the bloodstream. They’ll collect them by filtering them out of their blood.
Once they have enough of them, they will genetically modify them with the CRISPR technology outside of the patient’s body. While that’s happening, they’re going to take the patient and treat them with a chemotherapy drug not because they have cancer, but they’re going to treat them with a chemotherapy drug to basically kill off any of the remaining hematopoietic stem cells. So they’re going to clear out the compartment that these cells live in to make a nice home so that when they transplant the engineered cells back in, that the transplanted cells engraft, and then when they make new red blood cells, they’re able to function slightly better. This is not a cure because it’s not a cure.
They’re not actually specifically targeting the mutation that’s found in the red blood cells. They’re targeting a regulatory switch that makes it so that these patients have a higher quality of life. And all for the low cost of $2.2 million. It is an incredibly expensive therapy. The chemotherapy is also no joke. It is very unpleasant. But it is an option. And it is an FDA-approved therapy for these sickle cell diseases.
Joseph Vukov: All right. So another ethics pause. If on the one hand, interventions like that are largely thought to be ethically problematic by most ethicists, again, I’m sure you could find a naysayer, but most ethicists would say, look, it’s FDA approved, it’s a therapy, we’re improving somebody’s quality of life, seems a-okay. On the other end of the spectrum, again, for reasons that will become more apparent as we go through this, when it comes to modifying germline cells, when it comes to modifying human embryos, nearly everyone stands opposed to it. So it doesn’t matter if you’re progressive or conservative or libertarian or take your pick of ethical or political orientation.
Basically, everyone right now thinks that going in, and like Michael showed you the video, is using genetic modifying techniques directly on human embryos is an ethical no-go. We’re going to get to some of the reasons why this is the case and why most cellulose synthesis are totally fine with tissue modification, with somatic modification, and why they’re totally not okay with embryonic modification. The good news is that no one, right Burns, has attempted to modify human embryos yet.
Michael Burns: Except for this guy, Joe. Yeah. This guy. This guy actually - Anyone seen this guy before? Yeah. He Jiankui, I’m probably saying his name wrong, genetically modified a couple human embryos. And he didn’t hide it. He actually released a YouTube video in the year of our Lord 2018 he’s like you should watch the video that’s great kind of
Joseph Vukov: See the smug smile there you can tell the dude thought I am getting a Nobel Prize like yesterday yeah that’s the way it turned out right Burns
Michael Burns: Very strange. Yeah, so he had a YouTube video, he presented at some conferences, and basically he almost squeaked by. Okay, it’s one of those things where I believe at the time there was not, like, this strict— like, there wasn’t a law that said that, you know, you can’t modify— well, it was the point where there—
Joseph Vukov: Was such consensus that no one thought you needed laws or actual moratoriums because everyone thought it was a horrible idea until this guy did it like
Michael Burns: Why would you do it? So he basically almost squeaked by on, like, the Air Bud version of science, for like, there’s no rule that says that dogs can’t play basketball, so therefore a dog can play basketball. That’s a very dated reference, sorry. Anyway, but it turns out that he did go to prison for three years. But he went to prison not specifically because he genetically engineered a human embryo, or two, or three. It’s because he committed a whole bunch of ethics violations, where he didn’t fill out the appropriate ethics paperwork. He lied, either directly or by omission, to the donors and the parents of these children, which is a no-no. Yeah. He spends three years in jail, is a huge fine, etc. We’ll circle back around to this guy.
It turns out that even though that was the state of the field, again, about eight years ago, the field is still moving quickly. So there are still researchers who are really interested in improving the technology — not that, of course, we would ever use it on embryos, but they are interested in looking at this technology. This paper came out yesterday, although there was a preprint, for those of you who know what a preprint is, that have been on for several months. But what this research group ended up doing was an advanced version of CRISPR in human embryos. But this is a special type of embryo that’s not able to be re-implanted and form a person. They’re just using it as a model system to demonstrate proof of principle.
And what they ended up doing was taking that little molecular machine that is the Cas9 protein, again, the thing that’s the scissors, and what they did was they took the part of it that actually is the cutting part, took that off and threw it in the garbage, and they replaced it with something that instead of cutting the DNA into two pieces, all it does is it chemically modifies the letters at that specific site. So it will change an A to a T or a C to a G. So it actually doesn’t cut the DNA. It just changes what the letter is. And it turns out that’s actually much less dangerous for a cell because it’s not as catastrophic as actually breaking the DNA. And they demonstrated that it actually works and seems to be somewhat safer.
There’s fewer off target effects as they call them with that new technology. So the field is moving forward. This is done by academics, but don’t worry. Industry is to the rescue. Industry is paving the way forward. There’s a company called Preventative, which was formed last year. This one is interesting because one of the co-founders of this is Jennifer Doudna, the aforementioned 2020 Nobel Laureate for discovering the CRISPR-Cas technology. She actually has been very vocal in her skepticism toward using this in human embryos. She’s very like, there’s obviously ethical challenges here. We’ve got to slow roll this. So it’s interesting that she’s involved in this industry effort. But I think that could be a good sign.
You have people who seem to be thinking clearly about this also working in the space with industry groups to work on that. In contrast, we also have two groups. This one’s called Bootstrap Bio. This one started in 2024. They openly claimed that they were aiming at enhancing intelligence and strength in embryos. So this is not therapeutic. This is just boutique stuff.
Joseph Vukov: Not doing it, to be clear.
Michael Burns: Not doing it, of course. They’re just aiming at hypothetically making a product that would do this, which is why the FDA shut them down this year. And then Manhattan Genomics, which was originally named the Manhattan Project.
Joseph Vukov: I love how they did not consult with their marketing team before branding that project.
Michael Burns: I think they do. I think tech bros for some reason haven’t quite figured out that when you name your company, you don’t want to name it after something catastrophic. Palantir, right?
Joseph Vukov: I mean, that was a great name.
Michael Burns: Palantir. Meta, for any of you who have read Neal Stephenson’s book Snow Crash. Yeah, anyway, they basically named themselves after the bad guys for some reason. Anyway, this is funded by a Peter Thiel fellow. Again, this was around for a very short period of time. Basically doing the same thing. Interesting. So, good thing there’s no problematic designer babies that are on the market, right, Joe? Except for these ones. Okay. So, there’s other designer babies that are out here. These are just three examples of companies. One’s called Orchid. One’s called Nucleus. One’s called Herisite. There are others, I’m sure, that are out there. These ones are not doing genetic modification. They’re not going to use CRISPR. They’re not going to do anything.
They’re gonna do, like— I just— as a big loop around to try to get a byproduct that they want. So, for instance, if you’re like, “I would like to have a kid, and I want my kid to be really tall, I want to make sure that we get rid of all autism in the field” — like, let’s do that, let’s figure this out. There’s a couple things I want to highlight. These are claims that are being made. Some of these guarantees are really far fetched. The likelihood that they will be able to do this is questionable. Even though Herisite, for instance, I believe they have like a I don’t know if it’s a money back guarantee or something. So don’t quote me on this.
But I believe they in some of their documents, they’re like, we guarantee that if you select intelligence as a product, your child will have a nine IQ point higher difference than what? I don’t know. Maybe they have you have twins and then you’ve got to figure out which one is the smart one? I don’t know. Anyway, how do they do it? So what they end up doing is when you normally end up having in vitro fertilization, which is what all these companies rely on, they will collect sperm, which is a pretty trivial process. And you can collect a lot of them. That’s fine. Collecting the eggs is substantially more involved.
It involves getting hormone treatments and then having eggs drop and then getting a saline flush of the uterus, et cetera, so that they can collect a whole bunch. So they’re not just going to collect one. They’re going to get a whole bunch of eggs. What these companies will do is do in vitro fertilization, not for just one egg with one sperm. They will do a panel. So they’ll do a whole bunch of eggs and a whole bunch of sperm. And then once they have a whole bunch of these embryos, they’ll allow them to divide once, twice, not very many times. They want to keep them still in the embryonic stage, but they will harvest one or two cells from them and then do single cell whole genome sequencing.
One from each one of the different embryos that they have, and then they will use the genome information there to try to figure out which traits are correlated with which one of these embryos. So they’re doing, it’s called a polygenic score because you’re not just looking at one gene, you’re looking at all of the different genes that you’ve sequenced at the same time. And then as a parent, you get to go to a web form and make your pull-down menu of whatever you want, and then that one gets implanted. It. I believe Elon Musk, for instance, had several children using the Orchid company for doing this stuff.
So again, not genetic engineering, but is an interesting way to get designer babies without having to deal with the monkeying around with the genome.
Joseph Vukov: All right. So now that Michael has introduced you to the science of all this, I want to run through not all of the ethical considerations in the same way that Michael didn’t give you all the scientific background you might need to do to answer some of these questions, but rather kind of give you an ethics 101 crash course in what you need to know to start deciding where you land in the genetic engineering of human embryos. And I’ve divided up these comments. I’m going to give you four ethical considerations. The first two are what I’m going to call practical objections to genetic engineering of human embryos.
And these are practical in that, as you’re going to see, they are real ethical considerations, because they have real-world effects of some of the things being proposed. Yet at the same time, they are things that ultimately could be practically solved. So we’re going to see what we mean in just a second. But there are things that have to do, for instance, with the risks of the procedure, such that if we were to mitigate those risks, then the ethical objection would go away with it. So that’s really the first one, is this idea that germline gene editing, so again, the gene editing of human embryos, carries significant individual level and population level risks. So where do these come from?
Michael’s already introduced you to where these risks come from. So remember that when we go in and modify a cell, whether it’s a tissue cell or whether it’s an embryo, there’s the off chance that rather than affecting the change that you were trying to affect, you instead end up with a random mutation in that cell. Remember that slide where he showed you? At the individual level, that’s a real risk. I might go in and try and modify an embryo that’s characterized by Huntington’s disease or something like that, and I’m trying to fix it. And I do that, I get the genes out, but in the process, I introduce a novel mutation that in fact is way worse than Huntington’s would have been. So that’s an individual level risk.
What’s even more important in these conversations, though, are the population-level risks of this kind of procedure. Why? Well, think about it. So if you’re merely modifying tissue, those modifications could have adverse effects for the individual, but they stay with the individual because it’s only a localized tissue that’s been modified. If you go in and modify embryos, every cell in that organism is going to have that modified DNA, which means that their gametes are going to have that modified DNA, which means that if that child eventually grows up and reproduces, and if that child had genetic mutations that were problematic, all of a sudden, all of those mutations enter into the gene pool.
Now, multiply that by several generations and even, like, a couple of hundred genetically modified babies. All the sudden, you could have hundreds of genetic mutations into the gene pool, and you’ve got a real problem on your hands on the population level. So if there is no other reason against genetic engineering human embryos, this is the reason near everyone points to and says, that’s way too risky. Whenever we do new research, we always do some form of cost-benefit analysis, and nearly everyone, again, except for our buddy, Dr. John Cui, has pointed to this and been like, you do the cost-benefit analysis.
If this goes south even a little bit, and all of a sudden, all these genetically modified babies start reproducing, and they pass along these mutations, we could have species-wide chaos in the gene pool. Better not to start down that path until we get things perfected. So that’s one significant objection. In some ways, the most significant, because it’s the reason why we’ve seen such consensus in the ethical community against genetic modification of human embryos is the huge risk at the population level. There’s also though a different kind of risk at the population level. And it’s one that’s illustrated well by this picture. Now you might look at this picture and wonder why are Joe and Michael showing us a whole bunch of people in their underwear?
Anyone know what this picture is of or any guesses? You might not recognize any of these people, but what might you guess these individuals have in common? That wasn’t just rhetorical, any guesses? Yes. Exactly. Not only are they athletes, they are in fact Olympians. And Michael and I were talking before this, we don’t know which year team it is, but it’s one of, there’s a javelin thrower in here. So it’s a summer Olympic team. I don’t know which year it was. Maybe you recognize some of the Olympians. And as you look at these people, what stands out very quickly is that this is a genetically diverse group of people, right?
We have very large people, very small people, very tall people, very short people with very long torsos and very long legs and sort of all over the place, right? As you know, every time you watch the Olympics, part of the reasons people that succeed in the Olympics at that high of a level is genetically determined. So like Michael and I were not destined to be gymnasts.
Michael Burns: I mean, I was in gymnastics for several years when I was very young. Okay. But it did not take, it did not take, and it wasn’t meant to be. I was only in there because my older sister was there and my mom didn’t want to drive me anywhere else.
Joseph Vukov: As a parent of four children, it’s a classic parenting move. You just, you sign all the kids up for one activity
Michael Burns: And I was the only boy in the class yeah I got very flexible though it was nice
Joseph Vukov: There you go. You had a future, Burns. So what this goes to show is that genetic diversity plays into human achievement, right? If we start modifying human embryos, there’s inevitably going to be a kind of leveling effect in which certain traits are selected for over others, and certainly certain genetically outliers are not even considered. Well, what’s a group of Olympians, but a group of genetic outliers in many ways? And this generalizes beyond athletics, right? Many times it’s precisely genetic outliers in different ways, whether it’s IQ or ability or nurturing, but there’s sort of all these different ways where you could look. And it’s often genetic outliers that for our species, really great benefits across the species.
It’s sort of what human achievement looks like a lot of the time. So there’s also this risk at the population level that if we go down the road of modifying human embryos, we end up eliminating a lot of the benefits that come from genetic diversity. There’s also a purely evolutionary reason to think that genetic diversity in a population is good. Suppose, for instance, that a superbug comes into this population that selects precisely for really tall people. Tall people are fine. Cataclysm. Yeah. Or selects for really short people. Right? You could pick your trait, but everyone gets wiped out except for one genetic outlier.
This is precisely why genetic diversity is really important for selective fitness at the population level, is it turns out — for those of you who have done some evolutionary theory, you know that the more genetic diversity you enjoy in a population, the more that you’re able to resist selective pressures. So it actually turns out that modifying embryos would have this leveling effect that, at the population level, would have these risks, both associated with introduced mutations, but would also be risky in that it would make our species as a whole more susceptible to outside dangers and selective pressures.
So all this goes to show, right, is that there’s these really significant individual, but even more importantly, population level risks of modifying human embryos. They are risks that could be overcome. So there’s ways that we could figure out to advance the technology and overcome the problems with random mutation. There’s ways we could try and ensure the right amount of genetic diversity in a population, but there are risks that so far have been significant enough that have basically led everyone with the exception of a few people to say, not a good idea to go down that road. Here’s a different kind of what I’m thinking about as practical objections to genetically modifying embryos.
And that’s this problem of the fact that genetic modification of human embryos will inevitably be very unfairly and unjustly distributed. Michael mentioned the therapy that is approved and has the $2.2 million price tag. I guarantee you that if we go down the road of starting to do genetic modification on embryos, it’s not your average person in the street that’s going to have access to designer baby technology. It’s going to be the billionaire class, the Silicon Valley class, and the rest of us are left with just our regular old ways of reproducing, which isn’t actually that bad. But it’s a technology though that clearly, if it’s made available, is going to be made available in an unjust and unfair way.
We’ve all seen the Netflix mini series about the society in which all the resources and new biological technology are given to one class and everyone else is left down in the streets to scrap whatever they can have. Now, this is a really important ethical consideration. I also, when I teach this to my students, I always emphasize that it’s not a knockdown argument against genetic engineering. Why? Basically, any technological or medical intervention, sometimes forever, but almost always at its inception, is unjustly and unfairly distributed. When we first had organ transplantation, did everyone get an organ? Of course not. Novel chemotherapies. Do particularly vulnerable populations get them?
No, it’s people with really good health insurance that are getting those. Yet we think that it’s good to develop new chemotherapies. We think that organ transplantation is good and so on and so forth. So this is a really important ethical consideration, but it’s also one that I really would encourage you to think is not a knockdown one just because there’s going to be injustice in distribution. It’s obviously something we should be concerned about. It’s also something that is true of almost any new intervention, any new technology, any new breakthrough. It winds up being distributed in unfair ways. All right, so those are the first two objections, considerations I want you to think about when it comes to editing human embryos.
They are also both solvable objections. If we’re able to mitigate the risks at the individual and population level that come with genetically modifying embryos, and if we’re able to figure out just patterns of distribution, both of those two objections largely go out the window. So that’s call purely moral objections to genetically modifying human embryos. So these are concerns that apply even if we were able to mitigate all the risks, even if we were able to figure out ways of justly distributing the technology that still apply nevertheless. They’re sort of internal to the process itself. Here’s the first one.
Is that when we think about the sorts of paradigms and value systems that would inform a society in which we are genetically modifying human embryos, it can get very dark very quickly and very eugenics seeming very quickly. Michael already showed you the slide in which people are selecting for things like intelligence and height. And you could sort of add, right, what other things might people try to select for? Athletic ability, IQ. Maybe people are selecting for things like race and hair color and sort of these other things. And what you end up is this view of human flourishing and view of what you want for your children that ends up being a very reductive and very limited view of what it looks like to have a good human life.
Potentially winds up being a racist and sexist and ableist view of what it turns out to be a good human life. But it for sure winds up being something very thin and limiting from the sidelines of what might count as a flourishing human life. I actually think this for sure applies to sort of the enhanced designer baby conversation, right? Because, again, the things that won’t come up in those conversations — we want athletes who have really high IQs and look in a particular way that’s a standard of beauty right now — and that really smacks of eugenics right away. I actually think though that this also applies in therapeutic contexts. What if we start genetically modifying embryos at a large scale and start eliminating things like Down syndrome?
We start eliminating ADHD, autism, sort of you can go down the list. What does that wind up with? Well, in some ways we’ve cured some disorders, but we also have this very flat society and a flat way of understanding human flourishing. If you know anyone with Down syndrome, you know that people with Down syndrome are capable of a flourishing life. It’s maybe a life that looks different from people who don’t have Down syndrome, but it’s absolutely still a flourishing life. Think about people with autism who are capable of making great contributions and flourishing as well. So even in therapeutic contexts, I do worry about sort of this flattening effect of modifying embryos that ends up saying, that’s what we mean by a flourishing human life.
And all these other kinds of human life, we don’t want that. And that’s deeply problematic. Here’s the last one, and this is probably the most controversial one, so it’s one I’m going to spend just a few minutes on. I want to run an objection for you to modifying human embryos that suggests that modifying human embryos genetically is always morally problematic because what it winds up doing is treating human beings as a product or commodity rather than as a bearer of dignity. When we genetically modify human embryos, we quite literally make babies.
And in doing that, we’re treating a human being as something to be produced, to be bought and sold on the market, which is something that undermines our status as beings that bear infinite and inherent dignity. So this idea is coming out of my own Catholic tradition and way of approaching ethical issues, but I wanna motivate it for you in just two different ways that might land if you’re part of that tradition, but also if you’re outside of it. So the first one comes from our previous Pope Francis, talked a lot about what he called - Not from Chicago. Not the Chicago Pope, in case you’re wondering. We never cease to tire of reminding people. Chicago Catholics especially, that— yeah, he’s— he’s our Pope, right?
Pope Francis, so the previous Pope, talked a lot about the technocratic paradigm, and the technocratic paradigm he thought was a bad thing. It’s a way of understanding our relationship to technology in the world that we live in that he thought was pervasive in modern culture, and ultimately a very bad part of modern culture. At the heart of the technocratic paradigm is the understanding of ourselves as primarily manipulators of matter. Like what we do as humans is manipulate the world around us, and the world as nothing more than matter to be manipulated. And Pope Francis thought that understanding of ourselves and the world around us is what was at heart of the environmental crisis.
He also thought it was at the heart of sort of a diminished understanding of ourselves. We ruin the environment because we think it’s just our thing to manipulate and play with, but we also degrade ourselves because we understand ourselves as merely the people who sort of mess with nature and do what we want with it. I propose that genetically modifying human embryos is the absolute pinnacle of the technocratic paradigm because with genetically modifying human embryos, we both are the manipulator and the matter to be manipulated. We reduce ourselves to nothing more than just matter and genes to be played around with. And in doing so, we turn ourselves into products and commodities and that fundamentally undermines our status as dignified human beings.
One other analogy, and it is an analogy, it’s not a perfect one, but I think it’s one that might get you to think a little bit about this idea that genetically modifying human embryos is always wrong in any case. And that’s an analogy that we can draw with human slavery. So I think all of us can agree that human slavery is morally horrible, and is so for a number of ways. One of the ways that it’s horrible is the fact that we think it’s just simply wrong for one human to be a product or something that can be bought and sold, that’s a fundamental undermining of our dignity as a human being. Now, suppose, though, that we could imagine someone in a pro-slavery camp. I don’t even know. That is still a thing, unfortunately, right?
But you could imagine someone who says something like, but what if, what if I could prove to you that in these conditions, you could be a slave and also live a perfectly happy life? We’re going to do a whole bunch of psychological measures and prove to you this person is genuinely happy. Moreover, what if this person’s owners were loving and caring and nurturing? You would, I hope, look at that and say, okay, I guess it’s better to be happy than not happy, and it’s good to have loving relationships. Yeah, but that’s not the problem. The problem here is one person owning another person. That’s the problem. The problem doesn’t have to do with psychological flourishing. The problem has to do with treating a person as a commodity or as a product.
I think you can run a similar argument when it comes to genetically modifying human embryos, right? Because you might run the argument and say, well, what if I could prove to you that a genetically modified child could grow up to have a perfectly happy and flourishing life? What if I could prove to you that we’re only going to allow parents who are going to love that child and nurture that child and be kind to that child to undergo this process. What I would argue is that’s a similar kind of argument to the happy slave argument. So, yeah, of course it would be good for someone to be genetically modified and live a happy life and have good parents and all, but that’s not the point.
The point is that the process itself treats that person as a product, as a commodity to be bought and sold. So from the very beginning, the process implicitly builds in a demeaning of human dignity and an undermining of human dignity. All right. That is the ethics that we wanted to introduce you to. It is not all the ethical considerations of modifying human embryos, but it’s enough to get us started. We have now reached the point in our presentation where things get more interactive. So look at the people sitting next to you. You’re about ready to start chatting with them a little bit. Condolences. Yeah. What we have for you is a series of case studies that start out more realistic and get progressively maybe a little bit weirder.
What we hope that they do is that they’re able to both tease out where Michael and I are on the same page as each other and differ from each other. Because it turns out, again, kind of go back to the framing, we not only come from different disciplines but very different political and ethical orientations. We don’t agree with each other on a lot of these cases. But also, just as importantly, for you to tease out where you think you lie to see, oh, I agree with those two guys, or I disagree with both of them, or I agree with one, I’m team Joe or team Michael. So we really want you to discern where you lie on some of these cases as well. We’re going to start out with an easy one and one in which you do not have to discuss.
And that’s this case, which is in some ways, maybe the case you thought you were going to come here to hear about, which is right now, as in given current technology, we should start tomorrow, like over at the hospital, we’re going to do this. We’re going to do this tomorrow. And right, we’ve got the tech. We absolutely could do it. It’s been done before. We’re going to start modifying human embryos right this second. The reason that we’re not giving you this as an actual case study is that, here we have some pictorial depictions of Michael and I and our buddy, Dr. He Jiankui, is that when it comes to this question, for reasons that you now understand, basically everyone except Dr. He is against it.
Michael Burns: By the way, he’s back. I mentioned that he got out of prison. He’s out of prison and then he almost immediately sort of got his hands on about $10 million in dark money.
Joseph Vukov: So somebody is into this and is giving him money, but we don’t know who these people are.
Michael Burns: Either he’s crowdsourcing this and there’s a whole bunch of people giving him five bucks, or there’s like one or two tech billionaires that are just funding development of this tech. He’s made, I think, three announcements in the last several years about starting a laboratory. No new baby announcements. But nothing’s really actually materialized.
Joseph Vukov: Although he’s learned what happens when he makes the baby announcement is it’s not a good outcome for him. So he might be keeping it under wraps.
Michael Burns: No more YouTube videos for him.
Joseph Vukov: Yeah. So this is, again, maybe the question you thought you were coming here to discuss, but hopefully what we’ve said so far is enough to show you that basically everyone agrees that this is just not a good idea right now. And Michael and I, for reasons that we’ve gone over, if nothing else, for the reason of the tremendous population level risk that this would cause, are against it. And we don’t even need you to discuss this one, because we assume that, based on what we’ve done so far— I don’t know, if you’re really for it, we’d love to talk to you— but we assume that you will stand with, like, 99% of the world’s population and say, seems like a really bad idea to do that right now. Yeah.
Michael Burns: One other point to put on this is that Joe just finished up the ethics discussion, which is very convincing, Joseph. I do disagree with him on a bunch of that stuff. Even in the cases where we agree, we’re hoping that what we’re going to get across to you is that even when we agree, oftentimes we agree but for totally different reasons. And this is actually one of them.
Joseph Vukov: So actually, the risk thing I obviously think is important, but the train already left the station, because I think it’s just always wrong, and Burns thinks that it’s sometimes okay, maybe. As we’re gonna see, there’s gonna be some cases that tease us apart a little bit. Okay, so that’s case number one. We’re just gonna skip over the rest of it. Case number two: the reason Michael and I are in the middle is not that we’re wishy-washy, it’s that we want you to discuss where you lie before we do the grand reveal and show you where we are at. Yeah.
Michael Burns: So this one — has anybody ever seen the movie Children of Men? It’s about 10 years old now. It’s a really good movie.
Joseph Vukov: All of our cultural references—
Michael Burns: We’re getting too old. I apologize. They need to splice it up into a whole bunch of little teeny TikToks or YouTube Shorts, and then you can watch it. That’s a ding against your generation. Anyway, in the movie Children of Men — spoiler — the population has hit a catastrophe, and the catastrophe is that no one is having babies anymore, not because they don’t want to, but because everyone, for some mysterious, serious reason, is suddenly sterile. Like they just can’t have babies. They can’t figure it out. The population is aging, but like no one’s having any babies. Okay. This is a population level threat as in like humanity is going to go extinct because at some point, if you don’t have kids, there’s no replacement. Suppose this is us. Yeah.
Suppose this is us. And then hypothetically, if you’re a biological scientist, you’re like, we have the technology. We could probably fix this. We can do all sorts of, we actually skipped over some of the more wacky stuff that we can do. For instance, they’ve made, they’ve had mice where they actually have had mice that have had two mothers, which is an interesting thing to think about. And they do that by doing all sorts of interesting swapping of nuclei and genetic material and so forth. So we can do all sorts of cool stuff. We just don’t because of the cost benefit analysis in terms of risk. Let’s say that hypothetically some scientists figured out a way to make babies happen by genetically modifying embryos. Bing, bang, boom, problem solved.
What we would like for you to do is turn to the person next to you and sort of chat and see do you think that is a good idea? We should do that to save the population. You don’t know or absolutely not. This is a terrible idea.
Joseph Vukov: And one thing to emphasize here is this is given current technology. So all the risks remain the same. All the stuff remains the same that we just talked about. It’s just that if we don’t do it in this case, the species is likely toast. Yeah.
Michael Burns: All right. Chat with your neighbors. You might want to say hello. What’s your name, et cetera. Yeah. All right. We’re going to come back together and we’re going to figure out what the actual true correct answer is for this one.
Joseph Vukov: Do we have any volunteers? We’ll tell you what Michael and I think, but we want to hear from at least one or two people first. We want to hear from you folks to see if you get it right.
Michael Burns: Any hands. This is the important thing. Yes.
Joseph Vukov: Yeah, whatever you talk about.
Michael Burns: And again, I’m being sarcastic about saying what’s right or wrong. A lot of this is just sort of like, what did your group think and maybe why? Where did you folks land?
Audience Member: Okay, so there was four of us and we’re split 50-50.
Michael Burns: Perfect.
Audience Member: So I said against just because that argument you made at the end where in general, like if you could, obviously this is a very grim circumstance and no one would want the human race to end. But if you employ that technology and actually use it just to make us happier and to feel better about the human race continuing, you are still at the end of the day, treating other humans like a commodity and making them to fulfill your own pleasure. And yeah, I think that just undermines inherent dignity. So I would say against even though that would suck
Joseph Vukov: Good. So you also layered in, sort of, you’re making very important decisions for somebody else based on your own, like, “I want to see my species continue.” Good. Did we have anyone that either disagreed on the total opposite or had a different take? Yes, there’s a microphone back there
Audience Member: So we discussed the sociological impacts of an entire our species going extinct. So you kind of see this in populations where they have an aging population and no new generation to replace the workforce. So what would the sociological impacts be if we all knew we were going extinct? Would there be new resource wars? Would there be an extreme—
Michael Burns: You should watch the movie.
Audience Member: I think I’ve seen it. Oh, you have? Hugh Jackman?
Michael Burns: It is somebody that is the same flavor of actor, yeah. Okay.
Joseph Vukov: Same kind of era too.
Audience Member: Yeah, but what kind of hedonism might happen? We can be very self-destructive. We’re destroying the Earth right now. If we all knew we were going to go extinct, what would happen to the rest of the planet?
Joseph Vukov: Yeah, good. And I think too, sort of the sociological angle is one that we didn’t touch on here. The sociology of having, in this case, a whole generation of designed children, but even sort of injecting some design children into society — it is sort of— I think you could argue either direction, potentially, but there’s definitely going to be sociological changes if all of a sudden new generations are relating to previous generations in a way that they know they were designed by them, right? Very strange stuff. Do we want to do the reveal, Burns?
Michael Burns: Sure, let’s see.
Joseph Vukov: This might not be that surprising. Yeah. Ah, and we were very careful about exactly where we put our floating heads here. So again, I’m against it, for reasons that should already be clear. I just think there’s— there’s basically no justification for it, and this is even population-level extinction. I think we can never justify the end by saying— we can never justify the means by point looking to the end. And if the end here is some sort of violation of human dignity, we shouldn’t go there. Burns, why are you where you’re at?
Michael Burns: I would argue that it is acceptable but not required. So I’d say if people are like, yes, we should do it, that’s fine. And the reason that I would bring this up is because people aren’t doing it for boutique reasons. They’re not doing it for design reasons. It’s for survival of the species, which is literally already why people oftentimes will end up having kids, is that they would like to have offspring. They would like the continuation to happen, which makes, in this context, making it a fancy version of reproduction and not the same type of thing that you would see if you were doing other types of in vitro fertilization coupled with genetic engineering. That’s my argument anyway.
Joseph Vukov: New case study. So in this case, we are going to fast forward. We’re not worried about Children of Men. So we’re going to sideline that one. We are no longer facing a species-level extinction event. This is just plain old us. And we’re going to fast forward two or three decades, to the point— to, our number one, we have mitigated the risks. So it’s probably not CRISPR-Cas9 anymore; we’ve figured out a better technology that doesn’t have the same individual or population-level risks. We also have sort of controlled for genetic diversity, so we make sure that we’re not going to have sort of a very, you know, just one kind of person, and we’re going to make sure we’re safe at the population level.
And we’ve also developed a technology far enough that it is wildly inexpensive. So the idea, I think, Michael and I had here coming up with this scenario: this is like the strip mall genetic engineering, where you go to your local strip mall and you pop into Chipotle, you get your burrito, then you pop into the next store. Is there a Hot Topic? I don’t know if Hot Topic— it was a big thing when I was in high school. You’re going to Hot Topic, and then you go to the next door, and somebody gives you an iPad when you walk in. It says, oh, you want a baby? Here you go. You get to select your features, and you can select, yeah, medium height, strong, that sounds good. And, oh, we get some, like, bonus options: I want my kid to have some feathers. Yeah.
Pick whatever you want, right? You basically can select your kid from an iPad. It’s wildly inexpensive. And however many months later, there the kid shows up on your door from your new Amazon delivery guy. So this is the next scenario. Wildly inexpensive, wildly accessible. And we’ve solved the basic risk kind of problems. Are you OK with this one or not? I’m going to give you, again, just like two or three minutes. You can just turn to the same group and chat about what you would do with this one.
Michael Burns: All right. Let’s come on back together. And we’re going to, again, figure out what the justifications for or against this might be.
Joseph Vukov: We need a couple more volunteers. Anyone have a hot take? Or even if you don’t want to share your take, what somebody else in your group said that you thought was particularly insightful.
Michael Burns: Yeah, if somebody next to you said something funny, you should do it. Yeah, there you go.
Audience Member: So when I was thinking about this question, I think of a lot of modern technological advancements and the fact that they do happen. So if I am in favor for it or against it, that’s not really a huge consideration. What I think of more is that a society’s values. You were talking about the idea of, I forget the exact term, but the idea that we are manipulating matter. If we’re in, you know, a couple of decades out, we’re in a society that views, you know, ourselves as like we’re imposing our will and manipulating matter, then no, I would be against this sort of technology.
But if we’re able to develop as a society to have something more, maybe, empathy-based, where it’s, let’s design the baby based on empathy for its future experiences and how it’s going to live, I feel like in that sort of society I would be very much in favor of it.
Michael Burns: So are you saying— and I’m just going to echo back to you what I think I heard you say— which is, if the technology is here and there are people using it, could be that the underlying motivations and how it’s implemented, like the rationale for it, might really color where you’re— you’re going to land on this. Yeah.
Audience Member: Cause if you have like Hollywood type, make everyone look hot and that’s not hot. Exactly. But if you have an idea where it’s, you know, certain conditions like sickle cell anemia, that’s never going to improve someone’s life. It’s only ever going to really—
Michael Burns: Giant asterisk. Good. There’s— yeah. Good.
Joseph Vukov: Good. So, I mean, we, again, we can imagine the Netflix series of both those directions, right? The one where it’s like, this is sort of with a super dark gloss and there’s this sort of eugenics-tinged kind of strip mall genetic engineering. But you can imagine the one that’s maybe not as fun to watch, but the one that you’d be more willing to embrace. The one that’s like, no, everyone’s got benevolence and we want to get pass on as good of traits as we can to the next generation. And we’ve defined those good traits in a way that’s empathetic and not sort of smacking of all the bad sort of stuff.
Michael Burns: By the way, this is actually epitomized by the contrast between Brave New World and 1984. If any of you are science fiction nerds. Yeah. Any other volunteers? We’ll get one more. Another one over here. Hey, there we go. Easy peasy.
Audience Member: So I was thinking, like, to me, this question kind of boiled down to natural selection versus artificial selection, which I think helps me figure out my overall view on the topic. But to me, when I think of like, natural selection, and if I compared that to like the type of artificial selection that’s in this situation, I would think like nature is so much wiser because nature chooses based on survival, whereas, you know, artificial selection or sexual selection is, you know, more prone to features that are not necessarily going to benefit us as a species. And so for that reason, that makes me think that we should try to preserve natural selection over artificial selection.
Joseph Vukov: Good. Yeah. And it turns out that the science bears this out. This is, don’t take my word with science, but I love that I have Burns here to correct me if I’m getting it wrong. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you when you’re wrong. Yeah, good. But it turns out that a lot of traits that you might think were selectively advantageous or desirable turn out not to be. So being very tall turns out to have bad effects on like your hips it actually kind of sucks
Michael Burns: I mean I say that I actually like being tall but my back hurts all the time but
Joseph Vukov: Yeah, it turns out that— it also turns out that one hypothesis of why Homo sapiens beat out Neanderthals is that Neanderthals had too much muscle and that they took more caloric intake. Is this true?
Michael Burns: There are hypotheses that Homo— well, there’s a couple— oh my god, how do I not go off on a wild tangent here? Neanderthals were way more muscular and higher bone density, which means they would require a higher caloric intake, which means they were at a slight disadvantage in one of the more recent ice ages, when it was harder to get calories. Okay.
Joseph Vukov: So all I have to say is that like being taller and super ripped might be something that people would want to choose, but I think this is the point that you were making, right? Where nature is actually wiser and says, actually those two traits have some advantages, but they also carry disadvantages as well.
Michael Burns: Maybe you need short svelte people with low muscle mass because you’re easy to maintain. Your back probably doesn’t hurt.
Joseph Vukov: So where do we lie Burns? Here’s where we’re at. It turns out we’re basically, we’re more aligned on this one. So again, my reasons are pretty boring. I just think it’s always bad. Burns, why are you over in my camp for this one?
Michael Burns: Mostly, I think probably related to some of the stuff that you were saying and a little of the stuff that you were saying. So we hit on both of these. The big one I think has to do with what it looks like for the population. One of the arguments I have against it that I don’t like is because it’s— it’s, on its surface, it’s just kind of superficially gross, and it would look gross. Because you know how there’s this weird thing where people talk about, like, Boomers and Millennials and Gen Z? Imagine if— what that would look like when you’re ordering boutique babies as a generation. Like, the generations would literally be physically, genetically distinct.
Joseph Vukov: Yes when you called somebody a millennial or because they had like giant eyebrows or something because that was in for a couple there would be some weird
Michael Burns: Thing that popped up, which is probably going to be a strange thing for society. That is a kind of a trivial superficial thing. I think the bigger one is that it’s the same reason why the eugenicists are wrong and have been wrong forever. The reason the eugenicists are wrong is because they’re presuming that they know what the optimal human being looks like. And the piece that they’re leaving out is the optimal human being under what circumstances in which environment. And if you may have heard like evolution has stopped or the idiocracy theory where like evolution has stopped because every human being, no matter how bad your vision is or whatever weird thing is going on with you, they’re just in the population now, evolution’s not doing its job.
And that is completely backward. Evolution is absolutely doing its job, which is when there are not selective pressures, when like you don’t have half the population dying at childbirth. The thing that evolution does is it diversifies. You diversify the population as much as possible. You want every kind of weirdo you can get in the population because you don’t know what the next selective pressure is going to be. If we do this type of stuff, we’re probably going to be introducing some weird artificial selections to reduce the diversity of the population, which means as a society, as a species, we’re probably setting ourselves up for failure.
Joseph Vukov: And here’s where I actually agree with Michael on the overall conclusion, and even agree sort of with the framing, but maybe disagree with the reasons. So I’m less concerned about selective pressure, even though I think that’s a real thing. I am more concerned with the idea of the flattening of accounts of human flourishing to just certain kinds of lives and certain kinds of individuals. So even if the selective pressure thing wasn’t there, I would still say I think you can flourish as someone who might be selected out of this kind of framework, right? Again, somebody with Down syndrome, or somebody with autism, or something. I would say, no, there’s multiple kinds of human flourishing.
And the danger here is that we have one particular kind of human flourishing that we’re selecting for and then eliminating all the diversity of human flourishing from the picture. Okay.
Michael Burns: I just want to, before we move on, just one thing. I want to make this very clear. When people talk about diversity in modern society right now, especially in the news, oftentimes they use the term diversity derisively, like, oh, stupid diversity, blah. What they don’t understand is that from a functional perspective, diversity is actually a superpower for biological organisms. The fact that we have diverse populations is the reason that we’re able to even exist in the first place. That’s it. You want case study foreburns? Sure. All right, we’re going to fast forward again. We can genetically engineer gametes with a therapeutic cocktail.
So when prospective parents reproduce naturally, so there’s no in vitro fertilization here, there’s no monkey in with stuff in a petri dish, they pass these protections on to their offspring. So a couple pieces. It’s therapeutic only. So we’re not going to do any boutique stuff. And then the second thing is when we say engineer gametes, that means that I would go to the doctor and say, fix my boy parts so that when I have babies, the babies now have repaired whatever the hell is wrong with me. And same thing for ladies. You go in, get your ovaries fixed so that all of the eggs that you have now have that so that when you have babies, again, you have fixed that in the population.
Joseph Vukov: Yeah, so this is a bit of a twist because we’re no longer modifying embryos, we’re modifying gametes, and we’re no longer doing anything enhancing. We’re just, you know, we’re gonna go in, no more Huntington’s, we can kind of eliminate all these things that are nasty genetic diseases. And maybe like, you know, include some like immunity to the flu and COVID and stuff too, why not? All right, what do you think about this one? Take another three minutes. Chat away. Yes, question.
Organizer: We’ve got five minutes left.
Michael Burns: All right, we’re going to go real quick here because the last one’s a doozy. We got this one and then one more. Does anybody have any strong opinions about this one? Yes, no, yay, nay? One volunteer. This fella over here.
Audience Member: Okay, I think for me this was one of the easier ones to say yes to, or even come up with a position in the first place, because I think the restriction that it’s strictly therapeutic, with none of the boutique stuff, is really, like, narrows down the problems I would have with this. So I am fairly in favor of this, because I imagine this as, like, if it’s like kind of genetic counseling plus steps. You know how a lot of people, before having kids, have like a marriage genetic counseling to figure out if there’s a risk that their kids might have some genetic disease or the other? So this is like, oh, they might have this, but you can, like, get this injection, get fixed before you have kids, so that they don’t have this genetic disease.
Michael Burns: True.
Joseph Vukov: Good. Yeah, and actually, I think maybe for this reason, this is the one where I am maybe okay with this one. It strikes me like, in this case, you’re primarily treating parents rather than creating children. So I have to think about this one more. Burns and I were kind of coming up with these scenarios, but this is the only one where I thought, maybe I’d be okay with that. Yeah.
Michael Burns: This is a tough one. Yeah. Let’s do one more and then see what you... Oh, sure. What’s the question?
Audience Member: Yeah. I was just thinking about that as this... I do have a little bit of an issue. I think if this was done in a widespread way, you would eradicate certain disabilities, which might be various ways of human flourish. So I do take a little bit of pause on this one.
Michael Burns: My suspicion would be that there would be an awful lot of ethical wrangling by ethics boards in the same way that there were for the somatic CRISPR cell therapies that are already available. So for instance, sickle cell disease might be something that they target with this type of thing. I don’t know a lot of people are gonna be like, no, it’s vitally important that we keep this disease. In the population. And there are probably a short list of diseases that fall within that category, but the stuff that’s at the gray area where we might not quite know whether or not it’s a good idea to get rid of would be where there’s a lot of argument.
Audience Member: That seems right.
Joseph Vukov: Okay, do we wanna do the last one or do a couple questions, Burns? We’re basically at time. So we had one more that’s really fun, but we’re gonna save it. If anyone’s really interested, we can tell you about it.
Michael Burns: We’ll have a real juicy one if you stick around afterwards.
Joseph Vukov: But if anyone has a question or two, we’re also gonna hang out. We’re from Chicago and are not spending the night in Chicago tonight so we can stick around and chat with anyone who wants to stay
Michael Burns: All night long because our flight is at 6 o’clock in the morning it’s gonna be great strategy there just don’t go to bed. Also we both woke up at 4 o’clock this morning.
Joseph Vukov: All right any one or two questions we have time for officially but unofficially we will linger afterwards. Yes.
Audience Member: Well I thought your position in favor of this case study was quite interesting because I would, I guess the Catholic Church says that is against the domination of technology over the creation of human life. So if any tinkering happens with that creation process, regardless of whether it is, for example, IVF, which includes two gametes coming together, they would be opposed to that. So I’m just trying to hear your rationale for being in favor of this proposition as a Catholic.
Joseph Vukov: Yeah, thank you. So this is where I think I would have to wrestle with it more.
Michael Burns: Defend thyself.
Joseph Vukov: Yeah, no, I think my initial take is that you are not actually, you are more like vaccinating gametes than you are interfering with reproduction in ways that the Catholic Church is opposed to. I don’t know. So I don’t know if Catholic ethicists have weighed in on this to see like, is this actually permissible given the framework that’s been defined so far? And I try to be as faithful as I can to those teachings. I just, this strikes me as more of a case of treating parents and then allowing them to naturally reproduce in ways that the Catholic Church hasn’t explicitly taught against.
Michael Burns: Well, the next time the Pope’s in town, you can ask him.
Joseph Vukov: I can ask him. Yeah, everyone in Chicago knows each other, so we’re buddies. But it actually does go to the comment in the back is my worry here is less about those teachings almost and more about the respect for human dignity across the board that might sort of be implicitly rejected by certain of these applications. So if we sort of, again, level the genetic pool, I think the church would have things to say about why that would be possible.
Michael Burns: That’s a tricky one. Last question, then we’re gonna have to call it quits formally.
Audience Member: So this goes off of a question and then that dialogue you had about where you draw the line with certain conditions like autism and Down syndrome. And it got me thinking, and this is more just a question because I’m curious where you both stand on this, but the difference when the mind is introduced to the question where it’s like if you have something that affects them on like dementia, Alzheimer’s, I mean you could go like ALS, Parkinson’s, that sort of route where it’s still technically the mind. Do you think that sort of deserves its own question compared to more non-mental diseases and conditions?
Michael Burns: Yeah, that’s a great question and I think what you brought up is something that is actually a pretty striking difference between Joe and I from our ethical frameworks. You are a, how do you, deontologist? I don’t know what I want. He’s more of a deontologist for those of you who are nerds, which he believes that there are rules and we follow the rules for the rules sake and you’re not, and that’s basically it. They’re good rules though, they’re good rules. Right, I fall more along the utilitarian perspective, which means that I would be more concerned about like, what is the level of suffering that you are either causing or reducing as a function of these technologies. And those inform how we think about these things.
Joseph Vukov: I mean, I would also say in response to that is when it comes to specifically mental disorders or disabilities, I think this isn’t like a perfect test, but there are certain things where you would say, when I got the treatment, I’m more fully myself, right? So you would think that like, you know, I had depression or whatever, and then I went to medication and I felt like for the first time in years, I was back to being fully myself. I think it’s a nice test versus other kinds of things that might affect mental life. So again, something like Down syndrome affects your psychological life, but you’re altering who the person is, right? It’s not like they become more fully themselves by getting rid of that. I don’t know.
It’s not a perfect test case, but I would say that’s one of the things I ask: is the treatment making them more fully who they are, or is it changing them into somebody else? And I’m more okay with when it’s restoring personhood and less okay when it’s undermining that.
Michael Burns: We are at time, so we’re going to formally call it. But like I said, we’re not leaving — we’re not leaving, so we’re gonna stick around. If you have questions and stuff, feel free to check — thank you very much for coming.
