Superhumans

“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). 

Star Liner