Experiments can already be done on directed, sped-up evolution in a test tube using bacteria or viruses. Metzl shows that, coupled with gene editing and standard IVF procedures, this same technique could in theory lead to a designer baby beyond our wildest nightmares. This technique has now produced live mice from adult skin cells.
He gives it a fiendish twist: in 2012, John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize for showing how adult cells could be reprogrammed to become germ cells and hence potentially able to create a new adult. Jamie Metzl is a futurist focusing in his book on the genetic enhancement of human beings. “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” T. This ability to manipulate genes has gone hand in hand with the revolution in genome sequencing - a single genome now costs around $700 (and in recent promotions has been sold for as little as $199) against the three billion dollars spent (over 13 years) to produce the first reference Human Genome. More accurate than any previous technique, CRISPR is also cheap and easy to use. Such techniques are developing all the time, the latest being the precision gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, discovered in 2012 and already transforming pure biology and therapeutics. Genetic engineering has been with us since 1982 - when insulin, instead of being extracted from the pancreases of cows, sheep, and pigs, was made in bioreactor vats from the human insulin gene inserted into a bacterium or yeast. But there’s hacking and hacking: these books are about the deepest cuts of all - into the heart of life itself. I wrote those words before I had seen Nessa Carey’s book, and was pleased to note that she uses the same trope in the introduction: “A human is a person who hacks stuff about.” Her mock name for the species is Persona hackus.
Those who yearn for humans to return to something like a natural state should recognize that being human means “not natural” - we are a rogue species that has always flouted every natural norm. We have bent the electromagnetic spectrum to carry our voices, text, and pictures to any pinpoint on the globe. Long before we ever saw the image of an atom, we were making molecules never intended by nature, like those pesky plastics now contaminating the planet. From our earliest days, we saw trees and thought, “Hack them down and we can make shelters” wool on a sheep, hide on a cow? - “They’ll do for clothing.” With time, our hacking has become more subtle. TWO BOOKS THIS YEAR with “hacking” in their title - Hacking the Code of Life and Hacking Darwin - prompt the thought that this might be the defining trait of Homo sapiens.
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