It's a CRISPR January
Gene editing technology is in the air, and the pigs, and the people. What does it mean?
I heard about CRISPR technology years ago, but it was completely sci-fi freaky nonsense to me. Precise gene editing? Editing to make minute changes in DNA sequences? It didn’t sound real. I wanted to better understand the technology, so a few weeks ago I watched a fascinating documentary about CRISPR, Human Nature (2019), streaming on Netflix. The documentary is excellent. It frames the conversation on either end with the story of a boy who has sickle cell anemia, a disease that could be remedied with a small edit to a DNA sequence. I highly recommend it if you want to dig into some of the big ethical questions that this technology poses: Should we do this? How far is too far in gene editing? Should we make “designer” children/athletes/soldiers? Is that even the right framework for how to think about this technology? When is it ethical to test on humans? What about editing DNA within eggs and sperm?
I was so glad I had watched the documentary because just last week, the first pig-grown organ (achieved through CRISPR technology) was tranplanted into a human, in this case a terminally ill man. So far, he is living. In the documentary, we meet the team that innovated this technology (adorable, geeky young scientists) and their pigs, the first of whom they named, quite tragically I thought, after another animal who died in service to science: Laika, the dog sent into space by the Soviet Union in 1957 to orbit earth, who died while the world watched.
But there was a huge, glaring, asteroid-sized ethical question that was not asked in the documentary, and that is so often not asked when we talk about technological innovation. This is the three-part question: who funds it, who owns it, and who profits?
CRISPR is not easy to understand or explain. The acronym signifies a family of DNA sequences found in bacteria and archaea, a kind of single-cell organism. In the documentary they repeatedly use the example of writing. DNA is portrayed as a series of letters, but for the sake of this example, I prefer to think of them as words. Each DNA sequence, then, can be conceived of as a song. Picture the lyrics written out in a long line. In this song, the chorus repeats at even intervals, but between those choruses are the verses, and they are each distinct. It turns out the verses are bits of information gathered as viruses attack the bacteria and it learns to respond. These virus verses are unpredictable, non-repeating content. A scientist discovered that a protein called Cas9 could edit our DNA to match this song. Imagine removing one lyric and sticking in a new one. Having just watched The Beatles documentary Get Back (forgive the wild jumping) I cannot help but think of John Lennon telling George Harrison, who is trying to work out the lyrics to the love song “Something,” to ad lib. And so we hear John sing, “Something in the way she moves attracts me like a cauliflower.” That was later edited to “attracts me like no other lover.” If it had remained, this romantic song would have been tangential to grocery shopping. Such is the power of small edits. CRISPR-Cas9, as the actual technology is known, is about changing the lyrics to the songs that make us who we are, and doing it on a word by word basis. I find this mind-blowing. This new technology is likely to proliferate because it is so powerful and its uses staggering. Expect a lot more CRISPR news in the years ahead.
The first time I heard about CRISPR was in the context of food, and specifically, genetically modified apples. I thought it was funny because it sounds like crisp—just how we like our apples! Food is barely touched on in the documentary, to my surprise, with the exception of a brief scene about Syngenta, a multinational corporation that sold $11.2 billion in what it calls “crop protection” in 2019 (aka herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, and GMO seeds).
CRISPR is one tool for genetic modification—it is not the only one. A more well-known and older tool is transgenics, the movement of genes from one species to another. GMOs as a whole are a topic almost everyone has outsized opinions about, although recently it’s been outside the limelight. In fact, I saw almost no coverage of the fact that the USDA’s GMO-labeling rules went into effect on January 1, 2022. Soon, we will see products list when they contain genetically modified ingredients. The logo that the USDA is requiring companies to use will be quite adorable, like a merit badge you might sew onto your backpack in middle school. (When I first glanced it, I almost expected it to read “Camp Kiwanda.”) Many people put a lot of money into this fight to make GMO labeling happen, and I am certain this is not the warning sign they had in mind:
This news, alongside the pig-organ-in-a-man and this documentary, has me thinking a lot about genetic modification and editing. It’s not a topic I enter lightly because the conversation of GMOs gets really heated really fast, especially among people in the food industry. (I suspect the same must be true in the medical field.) On one side, generally, are people who believe in Science and think much of the dislike of GMOs is quackery. They think of themselves as rational people. They believe in the altruistic messages about GMOs: There is world hunger; why would we stop the technology that could create plants with higher yields? There is drought; why not modify or edit genes to create more drought-tolerant varieties? There is vitamin deficiency; couldn’t GMO foods provide missing vitamins to those who need it?
On the other side are people of many stripes with many reasons for coming to the debate. Some of them are concerned about what the science means for our complex ecosystems in the long term. They quote the Precautionary Principle. Some are perhaps anti-vaxxers who see their body as a temple. I cannot speak for the array of positions here because they are not uniform. But I can speak to my own thoughts on the topic, which are actually pretty simple. They are the reason I was not surprised but nonetheless disheartened by the ethical questions not asked in the documentary Human Nature. Quite simply, they are: Who funds it, who owns it, and who profits?
In theory, genetic modification could be used for all kinds of fascinating research. In reality, to date, it’s primarily performed by corporations that are driven by a profit motive. (CRISPR alone was a $7.4 billion industry in 2021 and is expected to grow at a 21.7% clip over the next seven years.) GMO food is a perfect example of the gap between marketing and reality. Theory tells us scientists could address pressing problems. Reality tells us that the companies that have heavily invested in transgenics for agriculture are chemical producers. What genetic modification allows, more than anything, is patenting. Companies like Syngenta have patents on seeds; they control them, wholly. Farmers have to buy them annually. These seeds often, though not always, require other inputs conveniently sold by these same companies (like herbicides, pesticides, and insecticides), and farmers end up in a John Deere-like situation where they cannot control their own tractors, or in this case, more insidiously, their own most fundamental ingredient, seeds. What’s more, farm workers and rural communities bear the brunt of the chemicals required, which have serious health impacts. It gets complex really fast because some GMO seeds are designed to be insect resistant. All examples have a counter example, but one thing is perfectly clear: Syngenta and its ilk are not curing blindness or ending world hunger because those are complex problems that cannot be solved with a silver bullet. They require farmer and worker empowerment on a local scale and distribution systems built for equity. These companies are building dependence in their customers so they can sell more products and make more money. Dress that up however you like.
I am always staggered by how easily companies sell their stories as altruism when in fact they are principally profit driven. Another choice example is the fake meat industry. It is venture-funded with the specific goal to sell fake meat, but it markets itself as a climate-change solution. Ironically, as fake meat has become a billion dollar industry, meat consumption has continued to rise. It turns out that fake meat does nothing to curb meat consumption because we live in a protein-obsessed culture. However, as designed, it does make some people very rich. (H/t Alicia Kennedy who writes about this often and well.)
I am inherently skeptical of altruistic messaging coming from the for-profit sector. I hope others are becoming this way as well. Investors expect a return on their investment, the more the better. Does this mean I think this technology is inherently bad? I have no idea. CRISPR is much newer than transgenics and its full suite of uses is not known. Some examples are atrocious. Others are perhaps benign. And yet others may be beneficial. It’s not one thing, with one outcome. Do I think multinational corporations or even startups are doing noble work because they tell me it’s noble? No. They aim to make money. That’s what they exist to do.
At the height of the Portland debates about GMO labeling, I found myself shying away from most online conversations. People became too heated, too moralistic. They accused each other of the wildest unrelated things. Social media is not a space for nuance. (Is a newsletter?)
I’m not afraid of technology in a public context where the purpose is the public good. But let’s be honest, outside of a few rare exceptions, that’s not the norm in our current world. (And do we have consensus on the public good?) I would like to ask the people who think of themselves as rational, who “believe in Science,” to also start paying attention to capital. We cannot accept marketing campaigns about altruism at face value, because those faces are masks.
Do I like the new GMO label? No, not really. It does allow me to make a decision. Perhaps some people assume that my decision is about what I put into my body, but for me, it’s not. (I just ate shrimp chips filled with the craziest preservatives the other day so I am no purest.) The decision is about who I want to give my money to. I want as much information as I can have that allows me to choose who I support. To the best of my abilities, I do not want to fund companies that make money on the backs of farmers and the health of farm workers and the environment under the banner of new age technology. That adorable, misleading GMO merit badge tells me that at the end of that supply chain is one of a handful of companies designing seeds to sell more of their noxious products and enrich themselves. Count me out.
But what you or I can do in a grocery store is almost nothing. And sadly, if anything, I think this logo will have the reverse effect, normalizing GMOs. What I actually want is a whole new operating system, one that funds science in the public interest, breaks up monopolies, invests in soil and water health, regionalizes seed supplies, penalizes companies that pollute, empowers workers. I’ll tell you what new investment isn’t going to do that: CRISPR!