Posted on 28-11-2002

Human Genetic Engineering
an Interview with Richard Hayes

Casey Walker: Will you describe how you came to realize the significance of
developments in human genetic manipulation and why you consider public
involvement a matter of urgency?

Rich Hayes: As part of my dissertation studies at Berkeley I wanted to
learn about the new human genetic technologies and their social
implications. I did course work in genetics and began attending
conferences. I was stunned by what I discovered. We are very close to
crossing technological thresholds that would change forever what it means
to be a human being. The most consequential of these involve the
modification of the genes that get passed to our children. In addition,
there's human cloning, artificial human chromosomes, bovine/human embryos,
"reconstructed" embryos using genes from three adults, and more. It sounds
like science fiction, but it isn't.

These technologies are being developed right now in university and
corporate labs, and neither policy makers nor the general public have any
idea of what's going on. These technologies are being promoted by an
influential network of scientists and others who truly believe that they
are about to usher in a new, techno-eugenic epoch for human life on earth.
They look forward to a world in which parents design their children quite
literally by selecting genes from a catalog. This would change everything
we understand about what it means to be a parent, a child, a family, or a
member of the human community. We'd come to see people as artifacts,
collections of parts assembled to achieve a particular result determined by
someone else. Once we start genetically engineering our children, how would
anything less than the "best" be considered acceptable? Once we start,
where do we stop?

Until recently these sorts of questions could be dismissed as speculative
and far-fetched, but no longer. Last year a major conference was held at
UCLA to promote the idea of how wonderful it's going to be when we can
manipulate our children's genes and finally "seize control of human
evolution." One thousand people attended and press coverage was extensive.
Just a few months later, one of the noted scientists at the conference
submitted the first proposal to begin experiments involving the
modification of heritable genes. Things are moving very fast.

Mind you, some of these technologies hold great promise to relieve
suffering and prevent disease. But we can draw bright lines to separate
benign applications from those that are likely to set the world on a
slippery slope to a horrific future.

Will you describe current genetic engineering technologies and those lines
you believe can be drawn?

Sure. First, what's a gene? A gene is a string of chemicals that codes for
and enables production of a particular protein, and proteins are the
building blocks of our entire bodies. Genetic engineering is the process of
adding, deleting, or modifying specific genes in a living cell. If your
lung cells, for example, are missing a gene that produces an essential
protein, you can use genetic engineering to try to acquire that gene. To do
this you attach copies of the needed gene to harmless viruses, and let the
viruses penetrate the cell walls and nuclear membranes of your lung cells.
The needed genes are released into cell nuclei, incorporated into
chromosomes—which are just long strings of genes—and, hopefully, begin
producing the needed protein. That's genetic engineering. However, an
important distinction must be made between "therapy," which refers to gene
modifications intended to address a medical condition, and "enhancement,"
which refers to modifications intended to improve some aspect of normal
appearance or performance. Treating or preventing sickle cell anemia or
cystic fibrosis would be therapy. Attempting to modify stature, agility,
cognition, personality, or life span of a healthy person would be
"enhancement."

A second important distinction must be made between gene modifications that
have an impact solely on a single person and those that have an impact on a
person's children and subsequent descendants. This is the distinction
between "somatic" and "germline" genetic manipulation. Somatic manipulation
seeks to change the genetic makeup of particular body (somatic) cells that
comprise our organs—lungs, brain, bone, and so forth. Changes in somatic
cells are not passed on to one's children. Germline genetic manipulation
changes the sex cells—that is, the sperm and egg, or "germ" cells—whose
sole function is to pass a set of genes to the next generation.

The critical question—perhaps the most critical ever posed in human
history—is, where do we draw the line? Somatic gene therapy for individuals
in medical need is already being tested, and few find it ethically
objectionable. Somatic gene enhancement of people without medical
conditions raises more concerns. Some somatic enhancements may be no more
controversial than rhinoplasty, while others may be profoundly dangerous or
otherwise unacceptable. But the effects of somatic enhancements are limited
to a single person, so the risk to future generations is nil.

By far the most important issues concern germline engineering. Advocates of
germline engineering invariably appeal to our compassionate desire to
prevent the suffering often associated with heritable disease, but they're
not putting all their cards on the table. Couples who believe they are at
risk of transmitting a serious disease can already employ the far simpler
technique of pre-implantation screening to ensure that their children are
free of the condition. In this procedure, a number of fertilized eggs are
created in vitro—that is, in a petrie dish—and are tested to see which ones
are free of the disease causing gene. Only these are implanted. Any child
subsequently born will be free of the disease, as will all of that child's
descendants. The current aggressive push for germline therapy makes no
sense, unless the real intent is to pave the way for germline enhancement,
designer babies, and the technological reconfiguration of human biology.

Along the same lines, will you address human cloning and other
technologies? Cloning is the asexual creation of a human being by taking
the nucleus from a cell of an adult or child and transplanting it into a
woman's egg from which the nucleus has been removed. The resulting embryo
would produce a baby that would be the genetic duplicate of the nucleus
donor, similar to a twin. If someone cloned themselves, it's not clear
whether the resulting infant should be regarded as the "sibling" or the
"child" of the nucleus donor. In fact, it's neither; it's a new category of
human relational identity: a clone. Over the past century few issues have
garnered such immediate and resolute consensus as has the issue of human
cloning. Over 90 percent of Americans oppose human cloning. The great
majority of industrial democracies, with the U.S. being the glaring
exception, have already made human cloning illegal. Human cloning is
condemned by every major religious denomination in the world. The United
Nations, the G-7, the World Health Organization, and other international
bodies have all called for a ban on human cloning.

Despite this, some scientists declare that they're going to do it anyway.
Others say that although they are against replicative cloning—the cloning
of fully-formed human beings—they support the cloning of human embryos,
which can be manipulated at very early stages to produce tissues for
treating degenerative diseases. However, success in cloning embryos would
make replicative cloning almost trivially easy. Further, the techniques of
embryo cloning are precisely those necessary to make germline manipulation
commercially practicable. This hasn't been mentioned in any of the media
coverage of cloning. It's very difficult to get a desired new gene into a
fertilized egg on a single try. To use germline engineering as a routine
procedure you'd start by creating a large culture of embryonic cells
derived from a fertilized egg, douse these with viruses carrying the
desired new gene, and transplant cell nuclei that have been successfully
modified into new, enucleated eggs. These clonal embryos are then implanted
in a uterus. Without embryo cloning, no commercial designer babies.

Currently at least half a dozen approaches to producing therapeutic
replacement tissues, none of which require embryo cloning, are under
investigation. There's no overriding reason to develop human embryo cloning
techniques, unless the intent is to produce fully formed human clones or to
make germline genetic engineering commercially practicable.

What is the significance of artificial chromosomes?

Germline engineering in which the only goal is to change a single gene is
technically feasible today. But to engineer a child for more refined
enhancements, many genes would need changing and current techniques are too
crude. One solution is to build an artificial chromosome that contains all
the necessary genes, organized in just the right way. Artificial
chromosomes have been successfully tested in mice and in cultured human
cells. The cells divide and the chromosomes are replicated intact. Now,
human beings have 23 pairs of chromosomes and an extra, artificial
chromosome pair would create 24. If you wanted to have the benefits of the
artificial chromosomes passed to your children, you could only mate with
someone who carried the same artificial, 24th chromosome pair. One of the
key characteristics of a species is that members of the same species can
only breed with each other. So you see where this is going. In effect,
we're talking about the possibility of creating a new human species,
perhaps within one or two decades. Few people outside the science and
biotech community are aware of this.

If the current pace of research and development continues, there will be an
explosion of genetic knowledge and capability over the next several years.
We will be able to transform the biology of plants, animals, and people
with the same detail and flexibility as today's digital technologies and
the microchip enable us to transform information. The challenge before us
is to summon the wisdom, maturity, and discipline to use these powers in
ways that contribute to a fulfilling, just, sustainable world, and to forgo
those uses that are degrading, destabilizing and—quite
literally—dehumanizing. Advocates of a full-out techno-eugenic future
believe we're not up to that challenge. When push comes to shove, they
believe, people won't be able to resist using a new genetic application if
it looks like it might allow their children some advantage over other
people's children. And they believe that once we allow even a little bit of
germline engineering, the rest of the techno-eugenic agenda follows
inexorably. I disagree with the first belief—I think we can be wiser than
that. But I agree that if the germline threshold is crossed, further
control becomes far more difficult.

The infamous slippery slope. Will you elaborate?

Suppose it became permissible to use germline engineering to avoid passing
on simple genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis, even though
pre-implantation screening could accomplish the same result. What would the
argument be against using germline engineering to avoid passing on
predispositions to more complex conditions like diabetes, asthma,
hypertension, and Alzheimer's—assuming the procedures were judged to be
safe and effective? It's not obvious. After that, some scientists might
offer gene packages that would endow healthy children with increased
resistance to infectious diseases. Is this therapy or enhancement? It's a
gray area. Similarly, what if genes that would predispose a child towards
being very short could be engineered to predispose the child towards
average height? How would you argue that such a genetic intervention be
prohibited, assuming it was safe? Once it's accepted that parents have a
right to use germline intervention to change a predisposition to shortness
into a predisposition to average height, could you argue that they didn't
have a right to predispose their child towards above-average height? Or
towards above-average performance levels for a variety of simple and
measurable cognitive skills? And after that, what about novel abilities
that humans have never possessed before? Even if you banned such practices,
advocates of germline manipulation say they'll just set up clinics in the
Cayman Islands.

Scenarios like this one persuade some people that resistance to the
techno-eugenic vision is futile and that we should just accept that it's
going to happen. But think of the full implications. If a couple believes
that it's desirable and acceptable to engineer their kids to be taller,
wouldn't they typically also find it desirable to have a kid that's, say,
less disposed to being overweight? Or disposed to being smarter, however
they define that? Or more cheerful and outgoing? Or likely to live longer?
Once you say "yes" to one enhancement, what rationale do you have for ever
saying "no" to any other? If you accept that it's okay to engineer your
kid, then doesn't not engineering your kid become something of a
dereliction of parental responsibility? Especially when everybody else who
can afford it is doing so? There are over 80,000 human genes. How many
modified genes do you want to put into your child? Ten? Fifty? Five
hundred? Five thousand? Where does it stop?

Imagine explaining to your fourteen-year-old that you engineered her with a
set of fifty or five hundred or five thousand carefully chosen genes. Now
imagine your child trying to understand who or what she is, and what's
expected of her. Imagine her trying to figure out what about her is really
her. Imagine her thinking about the children she would like to have someday
and of the different ways in which she might like to engineer them. Let's
take it one step further. Suppose you've been genetically engineered by
your parents to have what they consider enhanced reasoning ability and
other cognitive skills. How could you evaluate whether or not what was done
to you was a good thing? How could you think about what it would be like
not to have genetically engineered thoughts?

I think the entire scenario of genetic "improvement" is quite literally
insane. The fact that so many educated, accomplished people seem untroubled
by it is truly frightening. It's the materialist-reductionist-determinist
worldview run amok. It's what happens when people become disconnected from
themselves, others, and nature. I've been at conferences where participants
use phrases like "when we start engineering our children" as if it's a
forgone conclusion, with no indication that they appreciate the enormity of
what they're saying.

In my opinion, there are clear lines that we can and should draw: no human
germline engineering and no human cloning, ever. This is a moderate
position, because it doesn't necessarily rule out many forms of somatic
engineering, genetic testing and screening. We're going to have our hands
full just deciding which non-germline applications to allow; but whatever
we decide, we're not putting the future of humanity at risk, we're not
eroding the basis of human individuality, self-regard, and autonomy, and
we're not undermining the integrity of civil society and a democratic
political ethos. But germline engineering and cloning, I believe, would set
us on a path that leads in those directions.

I know some people argue that we don't need to be overly concerned about
germline manipulation, because, they say, it relies upon the discredited
model of genetic reductionism and thus will quickly be found to be
ineffective. It's true, obviously, that the great majority of human traits
involve complex interactions of genes, epigenetic biochemistry,
environment, societ, and free will. My guess is that over the next decade
we'll find the full spectrum of possible relations between traits and
genes: some traits will be strongly influenced by genes, others will have
little relation to genes at all, others will be influenced by genes in some
environments but not in others, and so on. But in the absence of a ban,
researchers will have no problem finding couples willing to run high
degrees of risk in order to have a "superior" child. Some procedures will
work and others won't. On balance, the techno-eugenic agenda would move
forward. If we don't want to go down that road, we need to take stronger
steps than, in effect, trusting the market.

Will you describe the world imagined by those advocating a techno-eugenic
future?

The key text is Lee Silver's book, Remaking Eden: How Cloning and Beyond
Will Change the Human Family. It's one of the most pernicious books I've
ever read. Silver envisions a world in which the new genetic and
reproductive technologies are freely and fully used by everyone who can
afford them, in order to give their children a competitive edge over other
people's children. He acknowledges that this will lead to deeper class
inequities, and then to a system of genetic castes, and eventually to
separate human species, which he calls the GenRich and the Naturals. To
those who want laws passed to ban the technologies leading to such a world,
Silver sort of smirks and says, just try to stop us. He says that today's
affluent professionals will develop and use these technologies no matter
what the majority of people may decide.

It's difficult to overstate how grotesque a vision of the human future this
is. It casually dismisses commitments to equality and democracy and common
decency that men and women have struggled for centuries to achieve. It
denigrates values of community and compassion as anachronisms ill-suited
for the new techno-eugenic era. It celebrates nothing less than the end of
our common humanity. Silver and his colleagues are quite aware of all this,
but they really don't seem to care; they just want to enable people like
themselves—smart, accomplished, aggressive, cynical—to get on with the
business of segregating their "high-quality" genetic lines from those of
the rest of humanity.

It's astonishing that few leaders in the scientific and biotechnology
community have publicly denounced Silver's vision. I've spoken with many,
and asked them to tell me how they believe his scenario can be avoided,
once we begin germline manipulation of any sort. A third of them avoid the
question by making a joke. Another third say, "I don't know." And the final
third say, "It's going to happen whether you like it or not."

Some people think scenarios like Silver's are so outlandish that they don't
need to be taken seriously. I wish I could agree. It's important to
remember that in Germany in the 1920s many people dismissed the Nazis as
buffoons. Thresholds can be crossed that change realities of power and
consciousness—we should know this by now. I'm not saying that
techno-eugenicists are Nazis—in most ways they're quite the opposite,
they're radical libertarians. Yet both are obsessed by the idea of the
planned creation of biologically superior human beings. This obsession
leads in only one direction. What would happen if the elites began
engineering their children into a separate human species? There'd be
protest, to say the least. Eventually the emerging GenRich would become
impatient and start looking for a Final Solution. This is where the
techno-eugenic vision leads. It's obscene and needs to be challenged.

Will you speak to the repeated claim that the techno-eugenic future is
"inevitable"?

I think it's pretty apparent that claims of inevitability are rhetorical
moves to rally supporters and demoralize opponents. Nothing in human
affairs is inevitable. Most Americans are surprised to find that in the
great majority of industrial democracies—all of Europe, Canada, Australia,
and Japan, for example—both germline genetic engineering and human cloning
have already been banned. The U.S. is the rogue country on these issues.
The claim that people are incapable of agreeing to fore go individual,
competitive striving in order to realize a larger social good is simply
wrong. Of course, the fact that citizenship values are increasingly and
profoundly being eroded by consumer values—in the United States and
worldwide—presents a challenge. We're in a classic danger/opportunity
situation: if we can't invoke and mobilize a sense of shared human
citizenship, it will be difficult to constrain dangerous genetic
technologies; on the other hand, the stark danger of these technologies
might be just what's needed for the importance of a shared human
citizenship to be widely understood and affirmed.

Some say that an authoritarian police state would be needed to enforce a
ban on techno-eugenics, because people will do it anyway on the black
market. That's hardly reason to accept and encourage it. Rather, we need to
say with conviction that germline manipulation and cloning are unacceptable
acts of power and domination by some persons over others, and we need to
make clear that these technologies are not about curing disease—they're
about turning people into artifacts. Strong moral suasion and effective
laws can minimize and even eliminate black market abuses.

Techno-eugenic advocates believe they will prevail if they can convince
people that bans on germline manipulation and cloning constitute
infringements upon reproductive rights. We need to be clear that there's an
enormous difference between seeking to terminate an unwanted pregnancy and
seeking to manipulate the genetic makeup of a child and all subsequent
generations. The great majority of people I work with on these issues
support both access to legal abortion and bans on human cloning and
germline manipulation. There's no inconsistency in holding both positions.

Will you give a brief chronology of the scientific developments that have
led us to where we are today?

Watson and Crick figured out the structure of DNA in 1953, and by the late
1960s the genetic code for all the proteins had been deciphered. The
ability to put genes into bacteria was developed in 1973, and transgenic
mice were created in 1978. By the 1980s proposals for genetic engineering
of humans were being put forth, amid great controversy. A large coalition
of religious leaders declared that germline engineering represented "a
fundamental threat to the preservation of the human species as we know it,"
and should be opposed "with the same courage and conviction as we now
oppose the threat of nuclear extinction." Germline engineering supporters
decided to lay low and work instead to ensure approval of somatic therapy.
In 1985 the federal government gave somatic therapy the go-ahead, and
banned germline engineering "at this time." The ensuing race among
researchers to be the first to "do somatic" was won in 1991 by W. French
Anderson, who inserted genes into a young girl to treat an enzyme
deficiency disease.

By the mid-1990s, articles began appearing with titles such as "Germline
Therapy: The Time Is Near." In March 1998 the UCLA conference, "Engineering
the Human Germline," was organized by a vocal techno-eugenic advocate,
Gregory Stock. The event signaled the kick-off of a national campaign to,
in Stock's words, "make it [germline engineering] acceptable" to the
American people. The New York Times, The Washington Post and other papers
gave the event front page coverage. A repeated theme was that germline
engineering was all but inevitable. Stock said, "The question is not
whether, but when."

After the event, Stock released a set of policy recommendations which
called on the United States to "resist any effort by UNESCO or other
international bodies to block the exploration of human germline
engineering," and for the federal government to rescind its 1985 germline
engineering ban. Three months later, the federal committee that oversees
human genetic research, the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC),
discussed Stock's petition and agreed to review its policy on germline
engineering. Simultaneously, the RAC received a proposal from W. French
Anderson, the somatic therapy pioneer and a lead figure at the UCLA
symposium, to begin a form of somatic therapy with a high probability of
"inadvertently" modifying the human germline. It was an open secret that
this proposal was a ploy. Anderson himself was quoted in the press saying
that his proposal was designed to "force the debate" about germline
engineering. If the RAC approves Anderson's proposal, it will establish for
the first time that some forms of germline modification are permissible. As
of today, Anderson hopes to be ready for human trials by 2002.

Will you speak to the challenges these issues pose for the environmental
movement?

It's difficult to see how a world that accepts the germline manipulation
and cloning of human beings will long be able to maintain, much less
deepen, any sense of respect, reverence, and humility regarding the rest of
the natural world. The techno-triumphalist vision calls for the wholesale
transformation of literally everything living—plants, animals, humans, and
ecosystems. It's not just a matter of putting a single pesticide gene into
a corn plant or manipulating a single enzyme gene in a human zygote. What's
underway is a reconfiguration of the deep structures of life. The new
genetic technologies demand that the environmental movement deepen its
critique if it doesn't want to be rapidly co-opted by an eco-utilitarian,
technological worldview.

Have you heard of the new, transgenic EnviroPig? It's been engineered by
Canadian scientists to contain both mouse genes and bacterial genes and
produces manure with 20-50 percent less phosphorus than non-engineered
pigs. It was developed to allow pork producers to raise more pigs per
hectare and still comply with Canadian water quality regulations. Should
environmentalists feel good or bad about EnviroPig? Should we oppose
EnviroPig but accept EnviroHuman? Or is it the other way around? Do we
accept neither? Or both?

Here's another: Michael Rose at UC Irvine has patented human genes that
some scientists suspect might be able to increase our life spans up to 150
years. Should environmentalists oppose this, support this, or isn't this an
environmental issue? Students at UC Berkeley protested research on
genetically enhanced life spans, claiming that it could lead to massive
overpopulation and resource degradation. But if EnviroPig can alleviate
water degradation, maybe we can engineer EnviroCattle and EnviroTree to
alleviate other types of resource degradation. And after that, why not
EnviroPlanet: a clean, green, non-toxic, non-polluting, completely
genetically engineered global ecosystem lovingly managed by genetically
transformed EnviroHumans. This is exactly where we're going. Presently,
environmentalists don't have a compelling way to say that this vision
should be rejected. We really need to get to work.

Many are aware that the San Francisco Bay Area is now called the Biotech
Capital of the world. Will you comment?

Genetic engineering proper started in San Francisco in 1973, when Herb
Boyer at UCSF and Stanley Cohen at Stanford figured out how to combine the
genes of two different species. Three years later Boyer co-founded the
first commercial genetic engineering firm, Genentech. Today the Bay Area
has the single greatest concentration of biotech firms in the country.
Besides Genentech there's Chiron, Shaman, Anergen, Clontech, SciClone and
many more. UC Berkeley just concluded a $25 million deal that gives the
drug firm Novartis an unprecedented role in deciding UC's research
priorities. In San Francisco, Mission Bay is being developed as a 120-acre
biotech theme park. Of course, much of the research going on here is
beneficial and deserves support. The problem is that the biotech industry
is incapable, on its own, of drawing lines between what's acceptable and
what isn't, and its increasing clout is enabling it to fend off attempts at
regulation.

A critical case is that of Geron corporation, based in Menlo Park. Geron is
potentially the ground-zero site for human cloning and germline
manipulation, worldwide. Geron recently announced that it had acquired
Roslin Bio-Med, the firm that held the patents to the technology that
produced the cloned sheep in Scotland. Geron has announced its opposition
to replicative human cloning, and they're probably sincere, because there's
very little money in it. What they really want is the freedom to clone
human embryos and use them to produce replacement tissues for a mass
market. Geron claims that it wants to find a way to produce replacement
tissues without having to use human embryos. That would be a good thing; I
support that. But get this: last year Geron established an in-house ethical
advisory committee of local bioethicists sympathetic to human genetic
manipulation and asked their advice concerning human embryo cloning. The
committee concluded that embryo cloning would be acceptable so long as the
embryos were "treated with respect," which Geron promptly pledged to do. So
Geron appears to be hedging its bets.

Have you heard that California has established an Advisory Committee on
Human Cloning? It's dominated by the biomedical and biotech community and,
incredibly, seems disposed to recommend that human cloning be allowed in
California as an acceptable form of reproduction. This could be explosive.

What developments with implications for human genetic engineering can we
expect in mainstream media over the next year or so?

Significant developments are going to appear in the press on an almost
weekly basis. This fall the sequencing of the fruit fly genome will be
announced. Texas A&M hopes to announce the cloning of a pet dog, Missy, at
a cost of $2.3 million dollars donated by a controversial Arizona
multi-millionaire. Dr. James Grifo of New York University hopes to announce
the birth of the first baby with genes from three parents, created as part
of an effort to increase fertility among older women. Richard Plomin in the
UK is expected to announce the discovery of multiple genes associated with
IQ scores. The big event will be the completion of the rough draft of the
sequence of the human genome next spring, with the final version due 18
months later. All these developments will be interpreted by the press
almost exclusively through the framework of mainstream genetic
triumphalism. At this time there are few effective voices offering an
alternative, critical interpretation. As a result, the scientists and the
biotech industry are controlling the development of public perceptions and
public policy.

What is to be done?

We can take a deep breath and remind ourselves of the beauty and mystery of
human life, and of all creation besides. Then we have to get to work.
Germline genetic engineering is the single most portentous technological
threshold in history, and we'll need a new social movement of commensurate
scope and scale to prevent ourselves from slipping, or being pushed, over
it. We'll need to alert, educate, and engage the general public, policy
makers, and the press about what's at stake, and we'll need advocacy and
political organizing as well. Substantively we'll need permanent global
bans on germline engineering and replicative cloning, at least a moratorium
on embryo cloning, and an effective system of oversight for somatic genetic
applications. We need to start talking about these things with everyone we
know.

Educate yourself on the issues and figure out how organizations and
networks with which you're affiliated can bring their influence to bear.
The great majority of people recoil at the idea of humanity divided into
GenRich and Naturals. We need to make it clear that the genetic
transformation of human beings is something we neither need nor want to do.
If we can accomplish that, we'll have established a new foundation for
using our tremendous scientific and technological gifts in the service of a
truly inclusive future for life on earth.