Thinking outside the Punnett square
It’s the year 2035, and Crayola is releasing a new set of crayons for children who have been genetically modified to be tetrachromatic, able to see four primary colors instead of the usual three. Though the World Anti Doping Committee initially banned all “gene doping” of athletes, gene editing for improving basic health has become so widespread that the Anti Doping Code is rewritten to allow athletes to engineer any “naturally occurring genetic variation”. China, which has been petitioning for this change for over ten years, is predicted to medal in most events in next year’s summer Olympics. Designed for military use, a “smart dog” is the subject of a series of lawsuits that has finally worked its way this year to the Supreme Court. By accepting a writ of habeus corpus on behalf of the plaintiff, smart dogs were essentially granted the status of personhood. And in another court case, a now standard suite of gene edits that boost cognitive potential is deemed as essential care, and will thus be provided free of cost via the US National Health Service. On the lighter side, the passenger pigeon population in the United States reached over one million birds this year. Extinct since the early 1900’s, the bird was reclaimed via a massive series of gene edits to the related band-tailed pigeon. Similarly, the small herd of genetically reclaimed mammoths in Glacier National Park is doing well (despite the absence of glaciers in the park for the last five years).
Almost assuredly, none of those events will happen that year (hopefully we’ll have the passenger pigeons much sooner, for one). It’s hard to predict what is happening right now, let alone twenty years in the future. For that matter I’m often not even sure what happened yesterday. Nonetheless, there has recently been a lot of talk in the genetics community about the need for guidelines of gene editing. As discussed earlier, new technology is making it easier to apply a number of genetic changes to an embryo and potentially create designed people. Wisely, we’ve already started talking about where this technology will lead us, and some general guidelines on how to proceed are being discussed. The consensus is that before it can be applied to people, the technology needs to be safer, clearly benefit the recipient, and be subject to appropriate regulation.