In the last eight years, geneticists have figured out how to edit humanity’s genetic code using an innovation known as CRISPR. As a result, humanity is approaching the ability to cure horrible genetic diseases and to genetically engineer plants and livestock to improve food supplies. But we are also approaching the question of how far we should allow this technology to go. Do we allow scientists to edit the human genome, or would that be a step too far? And if we do begin editing genomes, do we stop at preventing genetic diseases, or do we begin to augment humanity with superintelligence or extended lifespans? I discussed these, and many more, questions with Kevin Davies on the latest episode of Political Economy.

Kevin is the executive editor of The CRISPR Journal and the founding editor of Nature Genetics. He is also the author of several books, including the recently released “Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing.”

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, including brief portions that were cut from the original podcast. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

Pethokoukis: Your book’s title is about the “CRISPR revolution,” but I don’t hear about this technology as much as I do about artificial intelligence, for example. So how far along are we in this “revolution”?

Davies: CRISPR really has only been around as a technology for editing DNA and genomes since 2012 and 2013. That was when a series of seminar papers were published in the leading journal, Science, from teams at Berkeley and in Europe and at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. These papers really put in the hands of researchers a tool that is widely available, easy to use, requires no expensive equipment, and gives every researcher the ability to edit the DNA of any organism they wish.

These organisms include bacteria and viruses, plants, animals, extinct animals like woolly mammoths, and human beings. We already see the impact in engineering crops and foods, which made them a bit more drought-resistant, while improving their nutrition. But the area that I focus most on in the book is its medical potential. This is not the next version of gene therapy, where we just add a healthy gene to compensate for a broken gene or replace a broken gene. We’re actually going into cells and using these molecular scissors — fixing and stitching in the appropriate or correct gene sequence to hopefully restore health to patients with cancer, with sickle cell disease, and a growing list of other disorders. It’s an incredibly exciting time.

How far along are we to actually curing things? I don’t know if I see many diseases which have been plagues to humanity being cured.

Yes, you’re correct, but I think you have to give everyone just a little bit of a break because the field is still so new. There’s no miracle cure. Even CRISPR isn’t quite that, and I’m not suggesting that. But given that clinical trials usually take years to proceed, the fact that less than eight years after this technology was first published we’re actually seeing companies now with billion-dollar valuations launching clinical trials and using CRISPR as a gene-editing tool to treat, if not cure, sickle cell disease is breathtaking. It’s absolutely breathtaking.

I hesitate to use the “cure” word, because I think even the most ardent CRISPR supporter will be very reluctant to breathe that word until all the evidence is in. But we are already seeing — particularly, in sickle cell disease, a really debilitating, painful, underfunded, neglected disease that affects millions of people worldwide and thousands of patients in the United States — we’re seeing volunteers with the disease putting themselves out there to take this therapy, and seeing great progress in the first nine to 12 months of receiving their gene therapy. It’s breathtakingly wonderful news.

Do you think the potential of this technology may be greater than artificial intelligence, even if we don’t hear about CRISPR as much? If people a hundred years from now look back, will they look back at this as the beginning of the AI era, or the CRISPR era?

I don’t profess to be an expert on AI, and I think it’s somewhat of an apples and oranges debate. But there’s a reason I call this the “CRISPR revolution” and don’t feel ashamed in calling it a revolution: that’s because this is a fundamental technology. This is the word processor for DNA.

Moreover, there are really other exciting uses beyond curing diseases. I mentioned agricultural biotechnology. New companies are coming up, including companies like Calyxt and Pairwise Plants that are engineering plants, because we’ve got to feed the planet. Our population is growing, and unless we do something to improve the robustness and the nutrition value of crops and staples, we’re going to be in trouble.

Other exciting applications include other spheres of medicine. One of the companies launched by George Church, an outsized figure in genetics and a prominent figure in the book, is called eGenesis. They’re based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They are engineering the DNA of pigs, not to make crispier bacon, but to provide a safe vehicle for organ transplantation. Pigs and humans, physiologically — believe it or not — are incredibly similar. If we could render pig organs safe from some of the hidden sequences in their DNA, they would, in principle, be a wonderfully abundant source of organ transplants. eGenesis has been created to make the pig genome safe to really begin to exploit that possibility.

I’m going to spend some time in our conversation addressing fears people may have. But first, I want to make sure that people have a full understanding of the potential here, which I agree is vast. What would you say that you think is more likely than not to be possible in 10 or 20 years down the road?

Well, I think the reason that people are so excited about CRISPR — just to reinforce a point I made earlier — is that labs around the world in South America, Southeast Asia, Africa are using this. CRISPR is a democratizing technology.

For other genetics branches, like DNA sequencing, the human genome project required really well-funded groups with warehouses full of high-end machinery to crank out the first human genome, for example. CRISPR can be done literally by a high schooler with an internet connection. You have the tools in a test tube at your disposal. The question then is which piece of DNA do you want to edit? There are all kinds of software programs online where you can type in the gene or the sequence you’re interested in targeting and order the primers and reagents you need to begin, and do those experiments.

So that’s exciting, and I would hope and think that in 10 years, we’re going to see some of this true medical potential, where trials are beginning for hereditary blindness, liver diseases, and heart disease. A recently launched company called Verve Therapeutics will be applying CRISPR to tackle heart disease. The list of diseases we are talking about does not consist of just ultra-rare, obscure genetic diseases either. We’re talking about sickle cell disease, heart disease, maybe in a few years diabetes, and maybe eventually mental illness in some form being tackled. This is amazingly exciting.

You write about the accessibility of CRISPR with enthusiasm, but some people will say that the democratization of this powerful technology is pretty alarming. Can we create terrible diseases? Could we alter people permanently in ways that would actually affect the future of humanity? Anyone who’s watched enough science fiction can spin out some scary scenarios.

That’s why I hope the book will interest a wide readership, because it really shows how science fiction is becoming science fact. I think you brought up two really great examples.

One is about “designer diseases,” if I can use that term. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time talking about that in the book, because look we’re already dealing with the ravages of a pandemic that, despite what some may believe, arose in nature. However, the interconnectedness of our world means that these viral crossover events are more and more likely to happen. We had all kinds of warning signs about this pandemic, maybe not this particular virus, but we knew that this was going to happen years and years before it actually struck, but that’s where we are.

There have been fears for a decade or two now about scientists’ potential — if they wished, for nefarious purposes — to synthesize or resynthesize the smallpox genome or something like that. That risk is always with us, and CRISPR potentially makes that a little bit easier. I’m not overly concerned that some rogue agent or country is in a lab somewhere trying to recreate smallpox given where we are.

I also want to quickly talk about the other element you mentioned regarding editing permanent changes into the human genome. I spent a lot of time on that in the third part of the book, because I was in the front row in Hong Kong at a conference in 2018 when a Chinese scientist named He Jiankui made the shocking announcement that he had edited the DNA of two babies that had been born a few weeks earlier named Lulu and Nana.

The reason this was so significant and literally headline news around the world is that he had edited the DNA of human embryos. Every edit that he had introduced into that DNA had grown and multiplied and replicated as the embryo grew into the babies that were born nine months later. Those babies, if and when they have children, will pass on that edited gene. That was a red line that 99.9 percent of the world’s citizens and the world’s scientists did not think should be crossed for many reasons: ethical concerns, medical concerns, safety concerns, and technology concerns.

We just don’t know yet enough about CRISPR because the technology is still so young to say hand on heart, that it is 100 percent safe and 100 percent accurate. I think we’ll get there soon, but we’re not there yet. We don’t completely understand how to edit the human embryo’s DNA, even if we really wanted to, even if we felt that we had a couple with a severe genetic disease that had no other options to have a biologically related child. That episode, I spent several chapters discussing it and looking at it at different angles, the politics, the ethics, and where we go from here. I hope people will look at the book for that reason.

I do want to get back to that in just a moment, but you mentioned what we know and don’t know. I’m sitting here looking at an article from June, and it says three new studies show unwanted changes in the human embryo genome after CRISPR editing. Do you have any concern that this will end up being found to be just too dangerous, and technology will stop?

Well, I don’t think it’s going to be stopped. It’s dangerous to apply now, but that’s why scientists are doing these experiments under ethically and regulatory-approved conditions with non-viable human embryos: to understand how embryos develop. These experiments can tell us many things that maybe have nothing to do with gene editing. Remember, we’re using CRISPR as a tool to understand the biology of human development at its earliest stage so that we can, for example, prevent miscarriages or make IVF completely as safe as can possibly be.

The other ramification of the three studies that you just cited are that they give us pause. It tells the scientific community, even if you were thinking about following in the footsteps of the Chinese scientist who did these notorious experiments two years ago (and who incidentally is now in jail in a Chinese prison, serving a three-year prison sentence), “Please stop! Do not pass go!” As those studies from the three leading human embryo genetics labs in the UK and the US showed, when you try to do a gene-editing experiment on a one-day-old human embryo, we can’t predict exactly what is going to happen.

Those studies found a variety of other DNA rearrangements. So no responsible scientists could look somebody in the eye and say, “We know how to do this.” It’s going to take probably several years just to understand the biology and genetics. However, once we reach that point — which I’m sure we will — whether it’s using CRISPR or some other form of gene-editing technology (because they’re always iterating and improving that technology), then I think we’ll be one step closer to deciding whether we, for instance, want to offer gene editing for rare couples who have no other option to have a biologically related child. That’s where we pretty much where we stand at the moment.

We’ve mostly been talking about fixing problems with gene therapy? But what about enhancement? It seems highly unlikely that this is going to stop at therapy. I’m sure when a lot of people heard about that story in China, they figured that this was actually a Chinese government experiment to try to create a new race of hyper-intelligent super people, and that this will lead to a CRISPR arms race that the US will have to join in on. So could you speak to the debates around genetic enhancement?

Yes. Well, let me puncture somebody’s balloon right away. Anybody who thought the Chinese scientist who is now languishing in a Chinese prison was trying to increase the babies’ intelligence is flat out wrong. That doesn’t mean what he was trying to do was appropriate, ethically sound, or even medically sound. Very briefly, he was recruiting couples for his trial where one of the parents had HIV. HIV is still a rampant disease in parts of China, and there’s a huge social stigma to having HIV. So he felt there was a medical need for what he was doing. If he could have engineered those babies to be essentially genetically immune to developing HIV from their father, he would be setting the stage for treatment for hundreds of thousands of other Chinese couples in the same boat.

It was a naive notion. He didn’t talk to enough people, and if he did talk to them, he didn’t listen. He was 34 years old when he did these experiments. He was dreaming of becoming not only the next Nobel Laureate but the next hero, not only for Chinese science but almost for world science. He wanted to be someone who would go down as a hero like a Louie Pastor or Bob Edwards, the British scientist who helped develop IVF. We now have 5 million IVF babies since the birth of Louise Brown in 1978, and that was who He Jiankui was trying to emulate.

Briefly, elements of trying to enhance individuals or huge groups of individuals to enhance intelligence, at least based on our current understanding of science and genetics, are just doomed to fail. There is no on-off switch for intelligence. If you were trying to understand and modulate the human being’s intelligence, and I say this in the most theoretical abstract sense, you would have to potentially tweak the genes of hundreds if not thousands of genes. We just wouldn’t know where to begin to start. I’m really not at all concerned by that, and the reports that just came out from the National Academy of Science has really charted for people who want to explore genome editing in human embryos to engineer changes that would be then inherited and passed on through generations. They have charted a very narrow course, purely for serious medical conditions and really very rare circumstances. The scientific community, I think, has come down pretty hard on that.

Could CRISPR extend lifespans, in some fashion, so that we’re all living to be 150?

At the moment, I would say no. Still, I am aware that many companies and many philanthropists are very interested in understanding and exploring the genetics of extended lifespan. I’m not aware of any magic gene that says, “If you want to extend lifespan, one thing you want to do is to remove the risks of falling off the wagon,” so to speak, because you succumb to Alzheimer’s disease or heart disease or cancer.

One way to answer your question is if gene-editing — not just editing embryos, but the whole repertoire of gene-editing — can provide us ways where that we can tackle genetic diseases, certain types of cancer, and perhaps eventually things like Alzheimer’s disease. In that case, then yes, genome-editing will absolutely help us extend the lifespan.

To add to that, we want not just to live to 150 (and have that last 60 years be racked with illness), but also to make the current lifespan healthier and then add on more healthy years. So I certainly can imagine there being plenty of 60-something billionaires right now thinking about projects they could fund.

We already see that, to some degree, with stem cells. Do you remember, maybe 20 years ago, when scientists made big discoveries in stem cells? And we had the whole debate when George W. Bush took office about whether federal funds should be used to engineer new stem cells, because of the fear that it promoted the destruction of embryos. A lot of stem cell clinics and offshore clinics were set up. I know some philanthropists who’ve funded some of these themselves because, pretty much as you suggested, they want to give themselves the secret of near-everlasting life — and live to 120 playing a couple of sets of tennis every day.

I’m as skeptical about that as I am about genome-editing, providing these sort of magical and fantastical theories. Then again, this book is about a revolution in science technology, and the amazing thing about our field is that you can never predict where the technology is going to go. So I can wax and wane about how this is the greatest technology since sliced bread, and five years from now, somebody may well come up with something that makes CRISPR look quaint and outdated.

I’ve thought a lot about the pushback against technologies that automate jobs, and it seems we’re in for similar pushback here. Are you concerned about backlashes against CRISPR or similar technologies?

I’ll give you two anecdotes. One, in Hong Kong, during the media frenzy over the actions of He Jiankui, I overheard a prominent American scientist who looked pale and ashen-faced say, “This is an existential threat for the gene-editing community.” He was really scared that the backlash from this rogue, Chinese scientist trying to edit embryos who became a couple of Chinese babies. He thought it would have a perilous knock-on effect that would hamper perfectly appropriate efforts to treat patients with muscular dystrophy, Huntington’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease by purely treating the patient with a form of gene therapy.

That thankfully hasn’t happened, and I think we’ve seen enough 60 Minutes episodes and enough magazine cover stories and documentaries. However, there is a wonderful documentary called “Human Nature” that I urge people to look for and watch that I think shows you how this is a new responsible technology in the medical arsenal.

Still, we see some pushback among regulatory agencies. For example, when it comes to regulating plants, in some countries, there’s fierce opposition to genetically modified foods. In Europe, in particular, the regulators have said that CRISPR, even though it’s the most precise form of gene-editing — where we’re like a surgeon knowing exactly what we’re doing — they’ve said that’s no better than genetically modified foods where you stick in a foreign gene. So many people, many are very upset by the current stance of European regulators.

Thankfully, things seem a little bit more enlightened here. Why would we put our head in the sand and ban a technology where we can, like a molecular scalpel, go in and fix the single letter of DNA that is potentially rendering corn or something susceptible to a parasite or a fungus? We’ve got to use technology to our advantage and trust the science, and I hope we can continue to do that.

To wrap up here: What does the government need to do? You mentioned not squashing this technology with regulation. Is this a technology that needs more government funding? There’s a lot more research to be done. Does it still need that basic research to be done and funded at the public level? And also, to what degree is this a result of that public funding?

Yes, a great note to end on. This is a point I tried to bring out in the early stages of the book. This technology arose from the study of a handful of obscure microbiologists in far places, studying some of the most obscure questions you could possibly imagine regarding bacterial immunity to viruses. Most people would scratch their heads and say, “Please, I don’t care about that. Why would I possibly care about how bacteria arm themselves to fend off viruses?” But that was the origin of the basic fundamental biology, investigator-driven research funded by organizations like NIH that led to this spectacular breakthrough, where we took these fundamental understandings of how bacteria work and then use them to our advantage.

We did this 30 years ago with the birth of the biotech industry. We took another family of enzymes in bacteria and said, “These have fantastic properties for manipulating DNA. We can use them to give rise to recombinant DNA.” And that was the birth of genetic engineering. One lesson from this book and from this story is that we have to continue to impress upon governments worldwide to fund basic research. Applied research is great. Big biology projects like The Human Genome Project are great. Still, there’s no substitute for smart, driven investigators following their heart and their passion, because you just cannot predict the discoveries that they’re going to make.

My guest today has been Kevin Davies, author of “Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing.” Kevin, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

This article first appeared at the American Enterprise Institute.

Image: Reuters.