Yes, designer babies may end inherited diseases but frankly they terrify me

AT FIRST glance, it looks like the best possible news of all: the eradication of certain hereditary diseases that have long blighted mankind, causing immense suffering to the victims and agony to their loved ones.

And that is indeed the potential offered by the geneediting technique that was unveiled by American scientists on Wednesday. In a ‘world first’, they showed how they had ‘fixed’ faulty DNA in an embryo by removing the gene responsible for an inherited heart condition.

The same approach could, in theory, be applied to around 10,000 conditions that are caused by a single rogue gene carried in the egg or sperm, such as cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, and achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism.

Nightmare

That has to be a cause for celebration, surely?

I disagree. As a science journalist of long- standing, I am urging greater scrutiny of this ‘breakthrough’.

I believe we risk paying a dreadful price for being seduced by the claims of scientists desperate to push to the limits their research into the very beginning of life — while generating headlines and attracting funding for yet further experimentation.

It takes us ever closer to the prospect of these gene-editing techniques being used on healthy embryos, tinkering with their DNA to create ‘designer babies’, perhaps to order, with characteristics such as boosted brain power or physiques.

In the process, we may unleash a nightmare that might irreversibly alter the future of humanity. It is also a terrifying weapon in the hands of the unscrupulous.

The announcement by the team at the Oregon Health & Science University sounded convincing enough, I grant you. In the journal Nature, they revealed how, in the lab, they had intervened at the moment a sperm (carrying a faulty gene) fertilised a healthy egg.

They used an emerging technology called CRISPR, which works like ‘ medical scissors’, to snip out the defective gene. The developing embryo then repaired itself, inserting healthy genetic material into the gap.

But what the team actually did was far messier, far riskier, and is emblematic of the problems that plague this field of Frankenstein science.

First off, their success rate is questionable. With natural conception, there is a one in two chance that the faulty gene will manifest itself in the embryo (it could show the mother’s healthy version of that same gene instead).

The Oregon scientists were able to get healthy genes in only 72 per cent of the embryos they created, compared with the 50 per cent that Nature achieves. Yes, their figure is higher but critics argue that it is still too ‘ hit and miss’ in what was a small study to be a bona fide medical advance.

More significantly, the research team couldn’t prove that gene- editing hadn’t harmed other crucial cells in the developing embryo. The embryos they experimented on were destroyed after three days, in accordance with legal requirements, so no one knows what other DNA damage might have been caused.

And the truth is that the scientists didn’t even achieve what they set out to do.

After removing the father’s faulty gene from the fertilised egg, they had aimed to replace it with one from a healthy male donor, but they found that the fertilised eggs unexpectedly rejected this donor gene. Instead, the healthy version of the gene from the mother was used.

It’s a golden rule of science that if you don’t achieve what your experiment aimed to do, then you have failed. And a fluke good result doesn’t change that: it’s still a failure.

In my career, I’ve seen hype triumph over truth too often. In the Nineties, scientists first managed to grow stem cells in the lab. These are the basic human cells that can develop into everything, from skin cells to brain cells to liver cells.

‘Wow,’ they declared. ‘We can grow every sort of human tissue from these stem cells. We’re made!’ Once aboard the stem cell bandwagon, scientists could be sure of research grants for life.

But 20 years on, the clinical uses of stem cells have proved limited to a handful of conditions such as multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer.

At least stem-cell medicine is generally harmless. But geneediting could ultimately bring only limited benefits — along with terrifying consequences.

The biggest fear among ethicists is that it heralds the dawn of a new human eugenics, on a par with the Nazis’ attempts to eradicate the ‘ impure’. Disability rights campaigners fear that geneediting could popularise the idea that so-called ‘defective’ human beings should be aggressively weeded out.

Amoral

Where would that end? With attempts to wipe out the short, the fat, or even those with the ‘wrong’ colour hair?

Then there is the very real fear that amoral scientists, more interested in profit than ethics, will use the technology to modify embryos to create physically and intellectually superior humans.

It is already happening with animals. Chinese scientists have created dogs with a more muscular anatomy, apparently to make them better for police work. What’s to stop them creating humans who are better adapted for police work? Or armies of modified super-soldiers?

Professor Henry Greely, a genetic ethics expert at Stanford University in California, has warned that there is ‘the very real risk of rogue genetic editing by malicious parties’.

He also fears that the wealthy might pay for genetic enhancements for their offspring, which could lead eventually to social discrimination of those not enhanced.

The point is that such DNA changes are not reversible. Once they are incorporated into the human genome, they would be passed on to future generations — altering our species and perhaps our destiny for ever.

‘ Even worse,’ Professor Greely adds, ‘ terrorists or criminals could use this science to make [lethal bacteria or viruses] for bio-warfare’ — or to blackmail institutions or countries by threatening to release them.

Curse

Indeed, last year, the then U.S. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, added gene editing to the list of potential weapons of mass destruction that may be used by terrorists and rogue states such as North Korea.

For, most worryingly, the science behind CRISPR editing is fast becoming cheap and accessible. Professor Charis Thompson, a genetic ethics expert at the London School of Economics, predicts that amateurs may even start playing with the technology in their garages with ‘relative ease’.

This is a science that could easily run away from all attempts at regulation — and the risk will be greater if we allow scientists to push open the door to gene- editing by appealing to our emotions and persuading us that it can achieve beneficial miracles such as ending the curse of hereditary disease.

In reality, we already have a medical technique that does this job well. It’s called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and can be offered to couples who carry hereditary disorders.

PGD involves using in-vitro fertilisation to create embryos which can be screened for faulty gene mutations. Only unaffected embryos are then transferred into the womb.

We do not need CRISPR editing, with all its horrifying potential for abuse. We should be shutting the lid on this particular Pandora’s box now.