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My Letter to Lulu and Nana, the world’s First CRISPR Gene Edited Babies
Dear Lulu and Nana,
Welcome to the world, very special girls!!!
You are very special, not because of your DNA, but simply because you are human. While you will (likely) hold the distinction of being the world’s first CRISPR gene edited children, it is your humanity that makes your arrival worthy of praise, love, dignity, and celebration. There is nothing particularly special or unchangeable about our human DNA. We share thousands of base pairs of sequence with the oldest known bacteria. Your genome has by now been shuffled around countless times; that little CRISPR’d piece is an insignificant drop in a bucket of genetic change that started with the homologous recombination in your parent’s egg and sperm, to the mutations that you acquired as you grew in your mother’s womb due to her diet and her environmental exposure, to the viruses that have you have already encountered, and the vaccines you have probably received.
You may know by the time you can read these letters, that your arrival caused waves of concern all across the world. Were your parents lied to? Were they consented properly for the treatment? Will the scientists who helped create you be punished? How will that knowledge (that you were potentially conceived in deceit and someone “disappeared”) affect you when you are a teenager? Will you grow up as normal girls, or will there be negative, and unforeseen consequences to your gene surgery…but probably more likely from your un-asked-for celebrity?
Humans have been tinkering with the genetics of crops, animals, and yes, even human babies (so called 3 person IVF, or mitochondrial replacement) for many years- albeit never with the precision and targeting of the bespoke CRISPR/Cas(n) systems.
Human assisted reproduction is a consumer driven process. It is not standard in the industry to wait for clinical trials to prove the safety and efficacy of treatments; for example, ICSI, ooplasm transfusion, embryo biopsy followed by pre-implantation genetic testing, and sperm selection (to name just a few) were essentially translated directly from the research laboratory to clinical practice without undergoing randomized clinical trials (RCT), the gold standard of medicine. “Gene surgery” may not be viewed…
