“You reached
for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon.”
I know it is not what Pink Floyd was saying with this lyric from “Shine
On you Crazy Diamond”, but something about it makes me think of the Apollo One
disaster. America was trying to win the space race and perhaps pushed too hard
and tried to do too much too soon, which resulted in three astronauts dead in
their capsule. It reminded me that sometimes we push the boundaries of science
too hard.
It is apparently human nature to try to do something as soon as we
are able. History is full of examples of someone doing something just because
they can, before considering all the ramifications. The most recent example is
the Chinese scientist who claims to have created the first genetically edited
baby by using Crispr. We don’t know if he actually did it or not, that is yet
to be proven. Even if he didn’t, it is probably only a matter of time until
someone does. The problem is, we are nowhere near understanding all of the
consequences of human gene editing. There are people who have died after
undergoing attempts at gene therapy. One woman died the day after getting injected with
genetically engineered viruses to treat her rheumatoid arthritis. These
attempts at gene therapy were done under strict conditions with very limited
scope but still the doctors could not predict the outcome. Clearly we weren’t
ready.
This is why it takes the FDA years to approve new drugs or medical
procedures. Scientists understand that it takes time to understand all the
consequences (if they ever can). They understand that because there have been
so many mistakes in the past. Thalidomide seemed like a good idea at the time
to treat morning sickness in pregnant women. Nobody thought to check if it
might cause birth defects.
How does one system in the human body interact with the myriad of
other systems? The interdependencies are so complex that it verges on chaos
theory. That is not to say that we will never understand what happens when you
introduce a new gene or chemical or other stimulus to a human body, just that
it might take a very long time to fully understand it.
Hollywood is going through a phase of superhero movies. I like superheroes
as much as the next person as long as we recognize it as fantasy. Many of the origin
stories for superheroes involve a mutation (X-men, Spiderman, Fantastic Four,
etc.). If a human gets exposed to high level of radiation, will it cause a
mutation that will turn them into Spiderman? I suppose it is possible (in the
same way that if an infinite number of monkeys had an infinite number of
typewriters, one of them might bang out the manuscript for Hamlet), but it is
far more likely (almost a certainty) that they will die a terrible death. Random
mutations to individual cells happen all the time in our bodies. Usually it
just produces a cell that can’t survive, and that is the end of that mutation.
Sometimes it produces cancer. Very rarely it produces a cell that was better at
something than the original cell it came from. This is the driving force of
evolution. This is why evolution takes so long. It mostly produces dead ends.
Trying to genetically engineer the human genome is trying to take
short cuts in evolution. This is unquestioningly a bad idea until we know
everything there is to know about it, which is decades, if not centuries away.
Until then the best advice would be: don’t mess with Mother Nature.
(My novel Star Liner, is now
available as an ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, Amazon, or the other
usual online sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback
will be out soon).
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