Everyone has a father and a mother, and there's nothing wrong with that. But in the future, the situation may not be the same. Futurists boldly predict that in 40 years, newborns may have multiple parents.
Since humans mastered genetic technology, the concept of "parents" has become more nuanced. Humans can perform in vitro fertilization with the help of other people's germ cells and then raise offspring. From a genetic point of view, we can still think of the provider of germ cells as the physiological parent of the child, which seems to be no problem. Unexpectedly, as human genetic technology becomes more and more advanced, the problem is getting bigger and bigger.
In addition to in vitro fertilization, there is another technology that may be used in the human conception process in the future, that is, gene editing technology. We know that DNA is long, but each of these segments has its own expressive function. In the future, humans may be able to edit embryos through gene editing technology to choose the desired shape, such as tall, black hair, and so on. And these genes, may not be in the parents, so it is necessary to choose a part of other people's genes to add.
One of the more promising gene editing technologies is called CRISPR-Cas9.
As we mentioned before, CRISPR-Cas9 is one of the earliest functions discovered by scientists in nature. Some bacteria have evolved the ability to help the bacteria fend off viruses that invade the body and protect it from infection. The specific method is that when the genetic material of the virus invades the bacteria, it can use this method to cut off the virus's genes and prevent the virus from replicating.
Scientists are very curious and excited about this function, and have studied it in depth, hoping to use it in a wider range of fields. For example, in September last year, we said that a company called Colossal received a $15 million investment, hoping to use this technology to edit some of the genes of mammoths into Asian elephants to breed modern mammoths.
(Caption: Someone tried to revive mammoths using gene-editing technology)
Similarly, such a technology has the potential to be applied to humans. If a person wants to make their children muscles, they can add muscular genes to the embryo. And this muscle-strong gene comes from other people. From a genetic point of view, it seems reasonable to say that the person who provides the gene is also the "parent" of the newborn, because the person's genes have been passed on to the child.
It is based on this theory that Futurist Amy Webb, founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute, boldly proposed in an interview with The Washington Post that future human newborns will likely have multiple human genes, so it can also be said that they have multiple parents. According to her speculations, such a future will come in about 40 years.
But then again, despite the futurist's bold conjectures, the application of gene-editing technology to humans is still very ethically challenging.
You may recall that in 2018, He Jiankui, a scientist from Shenzhen, China, announced that he and his team had successfully trained a pair of twin babies to carry their own AIDS antibodies after birth. He was using CRISPR-Cas9 technology.
As soon as this news was released, it quickly set off an uproar, and scientists from home to abroad expressed strong condemnation of it. Later, He Jiankui himself was sentenced for illegally manipulating gene-edited babies. Therefore, whether the future proposed by Webb will appear or not, we must first pass the ethical barrier.
(Photo caption: He Jiankui)
So why are gene-edited babies so strongly resisted?
First of all, the current human gene editing technology is not very advanced, and a lot of experiments are needed. It would be very irresponsible to rush into experiments in humans until the technology was fully mature. It's as if a pharmaceutical company has developed a drug that goes to the clinic before it has finished experimenting on mice, which is a great risk for volunteers.
Gao Zhengliang, a professor at Tongji University School of Medicine and executive dean of Tongji University's Lifeng Institute of Regenerative Medicine, said in a previous interview that the only human somatic cells that can currently undergo gene editing can do some somatic cell repair attempts, and in most countries are still in the research stage, and there are almost no clinical cases. Editing germ cells directly is equivalent to gene editing of the entire body of the newborn, which is absolutely prohibited.
Second, the potential harm of gene editing is still unknown. Problems such as gene recombination, off-target effects, genomic mutations, and increased susceptibility to diseases that gene editing can lead to are still unsolvable by today's scientists.
What's even more frightening is that if gene editing technology is widely used, I am afraid that human genetic diversity will be greatly reduced. If given the choice, who wouldn't want their child to have fairer skin and bigger eyes? But who knew that small eyes wouldn't have an advantage in other ways? We always emphasize that evolution translated into Chinese should not be evolution, but evolution, and there is no advantage or disadvantage between different shapes, but only temporary adaptation to the conditions or environment at that time.
If such gene editing technology is mastered by some malicious countries or organizations, and targeted to cultivate some babies with strong abilities in all aspects to form "special forces", then it is a huge threat to the security of this world.
So, in addition to the technical problems of gene editing itself, editing babies is also ethically difficult. From either perspective, gene editing technology should not be applied to newborns. The development of human science and technology should not be based on violating the laws of nature.
According to Weber, such a future "could be very bright." But in the eyes of most people, gene editing technology may be another Pandora's box, hoping that it will never be opened.
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