Right To Life.
The Movement, 2.0.
This is the second in a series of “columns” that look at emerging issues in American politics. The first one — about the race for AI and quantum computing supremacy— is here. This one is about science and the Right to Life movement and their coming collision.
This from an editorial that was posted at nature.com yesterday (January 8, 2025):
Scientists know about tens of thousands of DNA variants that are associated with human diseases. On their own, the vast majority of these variants have small effects. But taken together, the result can be substantial. The effects of modifying multiple variants at once, known as polygenic genome editing, is the subject of an analysis published this week in Nature.
The study reveals that polygenic genome editing in human embryos could substantially reduce the likelihood of certain diseases occurring, but it raises concerns, not least the renewed threat of eugenics. There are other caveats too, the researchers report. Nature is publishing this work because it is important to start a conversation about what could happen if more-sophisticated gene-editing technologies become available, which could be the case within 30 years, the authors say. Societies need to consider relevant benefits and risks before that day comes.
Peter Visscher, a statistician and geneticist at the University of Queensland, Australia, and his colleagues modelled the consequences of simultaneously editing specific variants linked to a number of diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease and major depressive disorder (MDD).
Gene-editing tools currently in development, called multiplex technologies, are projected in the coming decades to enable rapid precision DNA editing at tens, or even hundreds, of locations. The researchers found that, in some cases, editing a single variant associated with a polygenic disease can have strong effects, and, with the exception of MDD, editing up to ten genes associated with a disease can reduce its lifetime prevalence by an order of magnitude.
This would be a huge achievement. However, the authors also include an extensive discussion of the study’s limitations and challenges. The fear that polygenic gene editing could be used for eugenics looms large among them, and is, in part, why no country currently allows genome editing in a human embryo, even for single variants. (Source: nature.com, italics mine)
This was an “item” from a recent edition of News Items:
Doing CRISPR gene editing while fetuses are in the womb could make it easier to treat inherited conditions, especially those affecting tissues such as the heart or muscles. Kiran Musunuru at the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues have tested gene editing in monkeys, and found that it was far more effective when given before birth. “What we found was astounding,” he says. “It opens up the opportunity to treat diseases that have been very hard to treat after birth.” Musunuru wants to tackle inherited metabolic disorders that mean, say, the liver is unable to break down certain toxins. These conditions can cause irreversible damage to organs like the brain the longer they go untreated, and for many there are no effective treatments. In these cases, it would be best to do gene editing before birth, he says. There is precedent for fetal interventions: some physical problems are now corrected by surgery on fetuses as early as 16 weeks into pregnancy because the outcomes are better. (Source: newscientist.com, italics mine)
At the moment. “doing CRISPR gene editing while fetuses are in the womb” is not controversial. The medical community embraces it. The academic community endorses it. The science and mainstream news media approve of it and write stories about its promise. Indeed, there’s a widely shared hope that “CRISPR gene editing while fetuses are in the womb” will eventually be widely available (and accessible), “editing out” inherited diseases and rogue genes of all kinds.
The editorial from Nature, quoted up top, anticipates that “CRISPR gene editing” will become controversial and argues that it’s better to debate the merits and the ethics now, based on a shared set of facts, rather than later. That’s good advice. Whether it will be accepted is an open question.
An under-appreciated fact of our time is this: We have reached a point in the history of humankind where scientists are capable of controlling the evolution of all living things, including ourselves. They can make wheat grow more productively. They can make rice more nutritious. They can make trees grow faster. They can make insects extinct. They’ve created mRNA vaccines that tell our immune systems how to deflect and combat disease. They can genetically modify fetuses in the womb, as noted above. In theory, perhaps in the not-distant future, they can genetically modify fetuses in the womb to produce smarter babies, more athletic babies, longer-lifespan babies. Gene-edited babies already have been born in China.
It is, truly, a brave new world. Darwin’s model is reversed: Natural selection becomes un-natural selection. Random mutation becomes engineered mutation.
In the political realm, after 50 years of concerted effort, the right-to-life movement succeeded in over-turning Roe vs. Wade. It was a triumph of political persistence, especially since a very large percentage of lawmakers who publicly supported the cause could not have cared less about it. They were “in it” for the votes. They never imagined that Roe v. Wade would be over-turned. It was “settled law.”
The right-to-life movement kept at it, and despite repeated “mainstream” declarations that Roe was “settled law”, never took “no” for an answer. Their success in creating the conditions for Roe’s overturn is one of the most remarkable political stories of the last half-century.
In the wake of the Dobbs decision (overturning Roe v. Wade), 24 U.S. states have either banned abortion or significantly restricted access to it. In other states, laws were passed protecting “abortion rights” or preventing their reversal.
Referenda on the issue in Kansas (2022) and Ohio (2023) ended in defeat for the pro-life movement. The loss in Kansas, in particular, was “definitive.” An attempt to amend the state’s Constitution to enable an abortion ban was defeated, by a wide margin, in one of the nation’s most conservative states. In political terms, the end of a road had been reached. The right-to-life movement had gone as far as it could go. The smart play was to declare victory and go home.
After the Supreme Court, in a landmark 5-4 decision, granted same-sex couples in all 50 states the right to full, equal recognition under the law, Andrew Sullivan suggested the gay community pocket the win and go home. He might as well have suggested that all concerned take a midnight swim in the Arctic Ocean. Scorn and scoldings hailed down upon him. Long the most articulate advocate for gay marriage, he was quickly cast out as a heretic.
Movements don’t pack up and go home, they keep moving. One reason they do is movements employ an army of activists, organizers, advocates, lawyers, public opinion researchers, “message strategists,” political consultants, and — first and foremost — fund-raisers.
In the 50-year campaign of the right-to-life movement, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars were raised and spent. Some of the margins on the money spent were hefty; as much as 15% on a television advertising buy (a $10 million TV buy would produce a fee of $1.5 million). The Right-to-Life movement also filled the coffers of thousands of churches all across the country (and all across the world). There weren’t just vested interests in carrying on the fight, there were (and are) livelihoods embedded in it.
So: what to do? How to keep the great machinery running and the money coming in?The obvious play is to refocus the right-to-life movement on the editing of fetuses or, in the political vernacular: scientists playing God.
This has a lot of political potential. It features elite scientists from elite universities and major medical institutions intervening in God’s realm, with the explicit support of Big Pharma and Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party. There could hardly be a more target-rich environment.
If you believe that life begins at conception, then “gene editing while fetuses are in the womb” means that babies will be edited alive. It’s not a leap to argue that this is the first mile on the road to eugenics. Once you start editing human beings in utero, someone, somewhere, with the right skills and AI-powered knowledge, will start “producing” smarter, healthier, stronger human beings. As noted above, gene-edited babies have already been born in China.
Gene-editing in utero is an issue you can build a movement around; an issue that will keep the fund-raising machinery humming. It’s a profoundly moral issue. Reconfigured for political purposes, it becomes an issue of “scientists playing God.” Scientists playing God makes for thousands of righteous sermons from countless church pulpits.
It’s not clear that the scientific community has a clue about what might soon hit them. They assume they’re doing the Lord’s work, not playing God. They assume that their work will be honored and cherished, especially by those whose lives are transformed by it.
It’s not a safe assumption. What’s coming is a 21st century do-over of the Scopes trial. Urban vs. rural. Blue vs. Red. Educated elites vs. “common folk.” “Expertise” vs. “common sense”. This is already well underway in other “venues”, as the growth of the anti-vax movement attests. But not getting a Covid booster shot isn’t an issue that ignites fund-raising. Gene-editing babies will.
Not so long ago, consensus formed around expert opinion. The Surgeon General advised that smoking caused cancer. Vast numbers of people quit smoking. Various vaccines are required by law in Mississippi’s public school system. Fluoridation of water is good public health policy. The list goes on and on.
Expert opinion is no longer highly valued (or trusted) by tens of millions of Americans. We live in an anti-expert political environment, a by-product of the pandemic, at least in part. Campaigning against experts and expertise is now smart politics in at least half the country. Science may soon learn that the hard way.