The Daily - The Ethics of Genetically Editing Babies

Episode Date: December 19, 2018

Ever since scientists created the powerful gene-editing technique Crispr, they have braced for the day when it would be used to produce a genetically altered human being. Now, the moment they feared may have come. What’s likely to happen next? We also look at the latest updates on a possible government shutdown. Guests: Jennifer Senior, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, and Carl Zimmer, a science columnist for The Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. What do you think about "The Daily"? Please fill out our listener survey at nytimes.com/thedailysurvey.

Hi, it's Michael. Every day, you listen to us. Now, we want to hear from you. We're asking you to fill out a listener survey about The Daily at nytimes.com slash thedailysurvey. Whether you're a longtime listener or a new one, we want your feedback. Again, that's nytimes.com slash thedailysurvey. And thank you. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Ever since scientists created the powerful gene editing technique known as CRISPR, they have braced for the day when it would be used to create

a genetically altered human being. What's likely to happen now that it apparently has? And the latest on a possible government shutdown. It's Wednesday, December 19th. Like every family, my family has its share of messed up genes. We have autoimmune diseases. We have cancer.

We have conditions that are so obscure they are known only by their weird acronyms. And usually when you are walking around the world, you are not thinking about this very much. But the second that you decide to have a kid, of course you do. Jen Sr. is a columnist at The Times. It's exactly what you're thinking about. All of these potential unwanted genetic inheritances that you might pass along. So when I first heard about this technology several years ago called CRISPR, I describe it as surgery for the cell. I was, of course, intrigued.

You know, it's sort of making precise changes to the code of life. Scientists say it could someday eliminate inherited diseases. Because here is a way that you could potentially individually slice out all of these culprit genes from your DNA. It means that we can control human evolution now. Essentially, anything that is alive, we can manipulate the script. But of course, as a journalist and a skeptical consumer of the news, I also understood all the concern. It opens the door to designer babies. Many scientists, including CRISPR's developer,

Jennifer Doudna, are calling for a moratorium on its use in humans. The technology was new. It was crude. Are we wise enough to tame ourselves in the presence of this awesome power? We are tampering with our heredity here. This is an uncrossable Rubicon for so many.

Congress has banned turning gene-edited embryos into babies. Hampering with our heredity here, this is an uncrossable Rubicon for so many. Congress has banned turning gene-edited embryos into babies. And that is why, as popular as it is to use CRISPR in a lab, there are many regulations both here and abroad that prohibit its use on human embryos. And then, about a month ago... The Chinese researcher has created an international controversy over science and ethics after claiming he helped make the world's first genetically edited babies. Someone did cross this uncrossable Rubicon. The researcher altered embryos for seven couples during fertility treatments. It created this international kerfuffle.

People were freaking out. Scientists were decrying it. They were declaiming it. They were calling each other on the phone. A line has been crossed that should not have been crossed. It's very disturbing. It's inappropriate. Oh, this is huge.

So I thought, okay, I want to talk to a colleague of mine about this. So we're recording here. Yeah? Yeah. Chris Patak. Yes. His name is Carl Zimmer. He has given a lot of thought

to CRISPR over the years. How are you, Carl? I'm well. How are you? And he's the man to explain it. Family is a society's bedrock. Our children are the center of family life. In China, there is a scientist named He Zhangqui. A gene defect should not take away a child's life. And a gene defect should not prevent a loving couple to start their family. And when he found out about CRISPR a few years ago, he apparently decided that he was going to tinker with the DNA of human embryos and then implant those embryos so that they would become full-blown people. Two beautiful little Chinese girls named Lulu and Nana came crying into the world as healthy as any other babies a few weeks ago.

And according to Dr. He, two baby girls were born in November who were genetically modified with CRISPR. I understand my work will be controversial, but I believe families need this technology. And I'm willing to take the criticism for them. How were they modified and why did he do this? So what Dr. He did was that he attempted to cut out a little piece of one gene called CCR5. The rare genetic mutation known as CCR5 delta 32. And the reason that Dr. He gave for taking on a tiny piece of this gene is that there are actually a lot of people walking around with this version of the gene.

They naturally are missing a little piece of the CCR5 gene. Scientists had known for a few years that people with this gene mutation had proved resistant to HIV. And Dr. Hook claimed that he wanted to do this as a way to give parents, maybe one of whom had HIV, the peace of mind that their child would not go on to develop HIV.

Did he have any reason to believe that these embryos were HIV positive to start with? No, no, no. You can't get too far into his justification for this before it all starts to get weird. It doesn't really add up and it doesn't really make sense. And it makes even less sense when you look at the speech that he gave. Professor He Jian-Kui appeared at a conference in Hong Kong to defend his work. Where he presented some of the details of the procedure.

For this specific case, I feel proud, actually. I feel proud. It looks as if he may have cut the wrong piece of DNA out of this gene. He didn't cut the piece of gene that is naturally missing from people. It looks like he cut some other part. So why he would implant embryos that weren't even the natural version of this gene doesn't make sense. And then on top of that, their children could inherit that same edited DNA as well. So not only are you playing with the lives of these babies, but you're also tampering with the future of heredity. And maybe that harm doesn't emerge until people are 30 or 40 years old and you won't be around

to fix it. And unfortunately, we are left asking these questions right now because he has not been any more forthcoming about why he did what he did and what the impact has been. So he wasn't just mischievous, he was incompetent. We don't even know what the effects are of these particular modifications he's done. Yes, a lot of scientists have condemned Dr. He.

120 Chinese scientists have penned an open letter calling the experiment crazy and saying it deals a blow to the reputation of Chinese science. The Daily Mail says British scientists have condemned it as a monstrous experiment. I quote, highly irresponsible, unethical and dangerous science akin to Russian roulette. Call this whole thing an ethical failure. It's a real mess. Taking those embryos forward through pregnancy to live children, to me, is absolutely appalling and horrifying. I can't imagine why anyone with any sort of compassion would actually do that. Is what he did legal?

Well, it depends. I mean, you know, different countries have different laws and regulations about genetic modification and so on and so forth. Certainly, the Chinese government said when the news broke that Dr. He had broken the law, that what he'd done was illegal. We haven't heard anything more of that about, you know, any sort of trial or charges or anything. In fact... Tonight, there are reports of another mysterious disappearance in China. This time, it is the controversial Chinese scientist who set off international outcry after claiming to have created the world's first gene-edited babies. Dr. He has been missing, or at least

unreachable, for days now. Officials at the university where he once worked are denying reports that he was being detained by the Chinese government. He apparently hasn't been seen publicly since last Wednesday when he appeared at a science summit. So we don't know what's going on in terms of the law. If he had tried to do this in the United States, it certainly would have been illegal. So I'm actually curious what your personal reaction was to all of this. Oh, I was appalled. Because? Well, once I could finally like figure out what had happened from the reporting, I was just shocked that someone would be so reckless and arrogant. And it wasn't just a bad experiment, but it was a bad experiment that was done that produced people. And there are two babies who have to live with the consequences.

So that just made it inconceivably worse. Were you personally also nervous that maybe this stunt of his would jeopardize more legitimate research efforts that are currently underway? Well, you know, certainly scientists have been warning about that for a while now. You know, they have been very nervous that some individual scientists might just take history into their own hands and that they would say, hey, I'm just going to go ahead and do this. I'm going to be a pioneer because that's what science needs. And they were very nervous that if someone jumped ahead, that that would put a cloud over the whole field. And I wouldn't be surprised if there is some pretty harsh,

pretty restrictive laws passed. I think that there'll be plenty of countries that will look at this and say, whoa, this is crazy. And clearly the scientific community doesn't really have a handle on this. So we have to step in and put some laws in place. Has this happened before? Well, one case that really sticks out is the episode that a lot of people aren't really aware happened. It actually happened in the 1990s and early 2000s. Also this week, an even more controversial version of IVF that could lead to what some people are calling three-parent babies has opponents up in arms. There were these fertility doctors in New Jersey, and they were trying to help women to get pregnant. And they thought maybe what they

needed to do was to inject a little bit of the sort of jelly-like substance inside of the eggs of young, healthy women into the eggs of their patients, kind of rejuvenate the eggs, as it were. And it turned out to work pretty well. So these women started getting pregnant and having children. But then it sort of dawned on people that this was actually crossing a line of genetic modification that maybe people hadn't really thought about. This new treatment solves the problem by taking the parents' DNA

and combining it with the healthy mitochondria of a third party. And so in some cases, it turned out, what these doctors were doing was that they were actually mixing together the DNA of three people. That would be the woman who is their patient, the father, and the mitochondrial DNA from the women who are donating their eggs. It's an idea that bends the mind as well as the established laws of nature. One baby with three genetic parents. They're using three parents to create a, quote, more healthy baby, certainly cause for debate.

We're actually going to have to cannibalize one embryo to help another, destroy one human being to assist another. And then where do you draw the line? Joanna writes this. Right, this is problematic from a moral standpoint, she says, in that procreation is intended to be an act between the father and mother. Any intervention between husband and wife takes God out of the equation. And so this created a big hue and cry. And the FDA actually told these clinics, you have to stop doing it this way.

You cannot just do this on your own. If you're going to even try to do this, you're going to have to treat this as a super experimental procedure with all sorts of paperwork and expenses and so on. And so basically, everybody dropped it. And did that have a chilling effect on what could otherwise have been a promising procedure? It certainly did. And, you know, the fact was that as scientists

thought more about this, they realized that this kind of procedure or something like it could actually be a very effective treatment for certain hereditary diseases. Because those genes in the mitochondria, if they're mutated, you can be incredibly sick. These can be lethal diseases. And these are passed down through the generations. And so what some scientists proposed in the United States, they said, like, what if we take out the chromosomes from an egg of a woman who has these mitochondrial disease and put it into an egg of a healthy donor? So now you have an egg with the patient's chromosomes and healthy mitochondria, and now you'd get rid of the

disease. The scientists say it can help save babies from inherited diseases that the mom would pass down. Federal health regulators are now debating a technique that would allow babies to be created from the DNA of three people, not just two. But when Congress got wind of this, they pretty much killed it. They said, no, the FDA cannot even consider any application to do this. So in the United States, this is just not allowed. Britain could become the first country in the world to allow the creation of IVF babies with DNA from three parents. Whereas in the United Kingdom, they took a totally different view of this. A British medical ethics panel judged the technique ethical last year. They were approached

by scientists there who said, look, we've done this research on mice. This looks like this could work. Order! Order! And they said, OK, well, we're going to have a debate in Parliament. It was quite a fierce debate. The ayes to the right, 382.

The noes to the left, 128. Then they voted on it. They passed a law. So the eyes have it. The eyes have it. Unlock. And now the government issues licenses to clinics, giving them permission to do this procedure. And this year... Now, Britain's first three-parent babies are on the horizon after Newcastle University was given the green light to carry out IVF using the DNA of two women. They gave their first approval to two women to have this procedure done. It's not clear if those women have given birth yet or not.

But here we are where there are going to be children who are born without inheriting the mitochondrial diseases of their mother. So your fear is that 20 years later, once again, we might react crudely and with panic rather than consider all of the good that this research could do in spite of its risks. Well, I think that it's just useful to look at history just to realize that we have been to this rodeo before. Maybe we have forgotten it. You know, maybe people never even heard about these stories. And the fact is that for whatever reason, there can be a lot of recklessness in the pursuit of new kinds of medical treatment. So you think about in vitro fertilization, for example. As John Paul II's encyclical Donum Vitae states,

from the time that the ovum is fertilized, a new life is begun. In the 1960s, you know, the Pope condemned it. The majority of Americans were against it, not because it was dangerous, but because it just seemed unnatural. There were some really bad cases where things worked out badly. And yet, this is a girl, as was expected. Baby's in pretty good condition. Then when the first test tube baby was born and was healthy, test tube baby cried at 20 seconds. Well, people sort of changed their minds, and we sort of worked our way around this.

And that idea of what was a line you could never cross, you know, like, it's not such a big deal now. Right. And so, you know, with CRISPR, I mean, there's no question that what Dr. Head did was incredibly reckless and unethical. incredibly reckless and unethical. But let's imagine that scientists got so good with CRISPR that they could guarantee you that they could do it right. In other words, they could say, look, I know that I can make the change I want to make with perfect accuracy. And I also know that there are no harmful side effects to what I'm going to do. Now is it okay? And, you know, then you start to get into an area where people can have different opinions. So I'm just saying, you know, maybe we can learn from the excesses of the past and try to find this kind

of middle road. You know, maybe in the end we'll say like, you know what, we shouldn't do this, but let's get to that conclusion in a rational way, rather than just having reckless scientists going wild west on their own, and then other people saying, like, we can't even think about these things. The commissioner of the FDA here, Scott Gottlieb, has said that, you know, scientists have really shown themselves to not be able to keep this sort of thing in check and that they shouldn't be surprised if these kinds of restrictive laws are passed. So, you know, we're being warned that this could happen again. And so it won't surprise me.

Thank you so much, Carl. I really appreciate it. Sure thing. We'll be right back. from illegal immigration, from drugs coming into this country. On Tuesday, the Trump administration backed down from its threat to shut down the federal government on Friday over Congress's refusal to devote $5 billion to build a border wall. We have other ways that we can get to that $5 billion. In an interview with Fox News, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the president would instead

try to find that money from existing sources of government funding. Well, as you may have heard, I invited the Democratic leader and Senator Leahy over to my office this morning, along with Senator Shelby. Discussion about a proposal that we offered that I thought was reasonable to both sides to give us an opportunity to, in effect, thread the needle on the border security issue. After the White House had backed down, congressional Republicans offered Democrats a compromise spending plan that included $1 billion for the president's immigration policies, a plan immediately rejected by the Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic

leader Nancy Pelosi. SEN. NANCY PELOSI, Leader Schumer and I have said that we cannot accept the offer they made of a billion-dollar slush fund for the president to implement his very wrong immigration policies. So that won't happen. JARED BOWEN, Without a spending plan in place, major parts of the federal government

will run out of money in two days. And during what was expected to be a sentencing hearing on Tuesday, a federal judge scolded former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, saying he had betrayed the United States by lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian government and by hiding his role in lobbying the U.S. on behalf of Turkey. The judge, Emmett Sullivan, delayed sentencing Flynn

so that Flynn could keep cooperating with prosecutors, including the special counsel, but refused to promise him leniency. During the hearing, the judge pointed to a flag in the courtroom and told Flynn that his conduct, quote, undermines everything this flag over here stands for. Arguably, you sold your country out. Finally,

Ms. Cantwell, Mrs. Capito, Mr. Cardin. On Tuesday night, the Senate overwhelmingly approved the most sweeping changes to the criminal justice system in a generation. Revising federal rules first passed in the 1980s and 90s, long regarded as costly and unfair. On this vote, the yeas are 87, the nays are 12.

The bill expands early release programs for prisoners and shortens mandatory minimum sentences, emphasizing rehabilitation over lengthy incarcerations. House leaders have pledged to pass the measure later this week, and President Trump has promised to sign it into law. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.