Here Come The Gene Hackers

Interventions to make heritable changes to the human genome are fraught with uncertainties. There are legitimate concerns about using a still imperfect technology that can rewrite the very blueprint of life. Also, the debate on whether it’s ethical to do so is far from being settled. However, would-be baby tinkerers around the world have failed to get the message

- Deepan Joshi

Twins Lulu and Nana were born famous. They are the pseudonyms of the world’s first genetically edited babies. And if they become the subjects of the medical as well as the journalistic community then they will remain prisoners of their fame for as long as they live. The twin sisters are outliers who risk the chance of never experiencing the beauty of an anonymous life. Chinese scientist He Jiankui—a biophysicist at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China— announced the result of his experiment on November 26, 2018, in an exclusive interview to the Associated Press. The experiment using the simple yet powerful technology CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) has, in just a few years, shaken the scientific community with its medical potential and ethicists for fear of its abuse.

“The implications go beyond just these twins,” Kiran Musunuru, professor of cardiovascular medicine and genetics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine told Time magazine. “If we talk about the sanctity of human life, and the inherent dignity of human life, not much has been gained here. These babies were treated as subjects in a grand medical experiment, and we have to believe that they will be studied for the rest of their lives; it’s sad actually.”