In today’s installment of “hey please don’t do that,” the Wall Street Journal reports that a clandestine startup named Preventive is trying to usher in the first known birth of a genetically-modified baby outside China.
First, a little background on human gene-hacking, also known as germline gene editing. On top of being wildly unethical — and we’re talking Frankenstein levels here — human gene-editing has also been strictly prohibited in the US by an act of Congress. However, and this is a huge caveat, the congressional ban only affects research done with federal funds, meaning privately-funded germline gene editing is technically allowed, though anyone caught doing it runs the risk of becoming a pariah in the scientific community.
In genetics circles, anxiety over germline gene editing is so palpable that leading scientists and trade organizations have called for a 10-year global moratorium on the practice. The Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui — one of the few to ever risk a career on the practice that we know of — was sentenced to three years in prison and a lifetime of scientific exile after he admitted to producing genetically modified twins back in 2018.
With that said, it’s probably no surprise that Preventive is a strictly private commercial venture underwritten by a lineup of some of the tech industry’s wealthiest figures, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, per the WSJ.
For the last six months, Preventive has been working to create a child born from a hacked embryo, which has been tinkered with to erase a hereditary disease. As the paper tells it, the company’s executives have recently identified an anonymous couple worried about that very issue, and who are interested in Preventive’s services.
The company’s CEO, Lucas Harrington, denies any such talks are taking place. He adds that Preventive is “compelled” to do its research outside the US, as the congressional act prohibits the Food and Drug Administration from even considering commercial applications to run human trials involving gene-hacking.
Preventive is just one of a “growing number of startups” in the area of germline gene editing funded by wealthy tech billionaires, WSJ reports. Similar ventures are already well under way, like Herasight, a genetics company which claims it can predict an embryo’s IQ, and Nucleus, a venture-capitalist backed startup offering polygenic screening at the price of just $9,999.
While post-birth gene-therapy is a budding medical practice in the US, the use of germline gene editing to alter sperm, embryos, or eggs before birth is much more taboo; our best understanding of genetics is still shaky, the health risks associated with germline edits are poorly understood, and it would be easy to accidentally introduce a change that could affect multiple generations.
Philosophical objections also abound. In our profit-driven world of haves and have nots, the ethics of the practice are too dubious for words.
For starters, there’s the nagging issue of racial eugenics, a significant blemish on the foundation of wealthy Western democracies like the United States, where some eugenicist polices and attitudes remain unaddressed to this day. There’s also the very real threat of eugenics as a tool for the wealthy to wield against the poor, another problem with a nauseating amount of historical precedent in the States.
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