Let’s say you take a time machine 1,000 years in the future, pick up a baby and bring it back to present day. Who would that baby become?
“That child will be Superman,” said Jamie Metzl, chief strategy officer at Boston startup Orig3n and member of the Atlantic Council. He envisions a future in line with Aldous Huxley’s projections – one in which we harness all the genetic tools we’re developing today and evolve a new race of superhuman.
“We’re having a hard time understanding that there’s a Moore’s Law for our own biology,” Metzl said as he laid out his vision at this week’s Exponential Medicine conference in San Diego. “We will very soon be in a position to fundamentally transform our species – and what it means to be human.”
Clearly Metzl is immune to the overwrought Gattaca references that irk much of the broader bioethics community. He’s unapologetic about slowly and purposefully building on the disease-eradicating tools we now have to create a more evolved species.
“We’ll start this process because people won’t want their children to suffer from terrible diseases,” Metzl said. “But the process of eliminating these diseases will open the door to all kinds of manipulations.”
This metamorphosis into Supermen will happen in three overlapping phases:
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
1. Embryo selection
An amalgam of existing technologies – in vitro fertilization and carrier screening – will allow future generations to select for more favorable traits. With the current rate of knowledge acquisition we’ll soon “know everything that’s knowable through the genome,” Metzl said. Factors like height, assorted physical traits, intelligence and so on can be prescreened and purposefully selected.
“Embryo selection is the first phase of remaking our species,” Metzl said.
2. Breaking the logjam of human female egg production
We can already do this in mice – using stem cell technology to replicate viable oocytes in the hundreds and thousands. The average male ejaculate has hundreds of millions of sperm, whereas when a woman has her eggs extracted, we’re only drawing about 15. By maximizing the production of mammalian eggs, we
“The cost of all this processing is going way, way down,” Metzl said. By creating a larger pool of eggs to select from, mothers will be able to select more judiciously for the traits they may want their future children to have. And while this may help in sifting out embryos that carry disease-causing alleles, this variety will also open up the option for selection bias based on physical and intellectual attributes.
3. Precision gene editing
Tools like CRISPR, CPF1 and Cas9 are rising in prominence quickly – and scientists will soon unravel their power to harness gene editing technology with extreme precision.
“We’re going to get good at this,” Metzl said.
Some countries, communities or individuals will choose to opt out of using these powerful genetic tools to shape society’s inhabitants – Metzl cites anti-vaxxers as an example today. But competitive pressures will push humans forward in terms of remaking our species.
“Our knowledge of the genome is still imperfect, and it will be hard to do this on future children,” Metzl said. “But we as a species will get there.”
