Free markets and gene editing
tl;dr: A thought experiment where in a free, unregulated market:
- Money buys us new ways to edit our genes.
- Those with edited, transmittable genes might acquire an evolutionary advantage against those who rely on natural selection.
- Eventually, the population equipped with edited genes might become a majority – “flipping” the un-edited rest.
As a result, the wealthier minority might decide on behalf of mankind on whether gene editing should be applied to humans or not, regardless of the opinions of the majority of other individuals.
This piece collects my WIP thinking about the second-order effects of gene
editing on mankind. After procrastinating about it in my drafts’ folder
brewing about it for a few months, I decided to try drawing conclusions and
publishing them here. As with most of my writing, I am not fully satisfied with
it. Yet, I do it to explore what I don’t know, build mental models, and guess
what will happen next. Mistakes are not only likely, but part of the growth
process. If you find any, or you want to discuss this piece, please reach out!
# Introduction
I became curious about gene editing while learning about the work by Jennifer Doudna and others on the CRISPR gene editing system. The possibility of engineering genes raises a few moral dilemmas. As humans, can we collectively agree on where to draw the line about what should be editable?
Because gene edits (especially those transmittable through reproduction) would affect the species as a whole, answering such question would require an impressive coordination effort for mankind. Or would it, really?
I believe that regardless of individual opinions, the “line” will be drawn by a few wealthy individuals, that will effectively overrule all the others by deploying their wealth and acquiring some significant advantage, that long term will lead them to grow into a majority.
# Gene editing
Recent advances in gene editing enable us to shop at a genetic supermarket. We can ensure that our children will be healthy and resistant to diseases, or even pick how they’ll look like, their physical traits (e.g., height), and their features (e.g., their smarts).
Gene editing creates worlds of unprecedented opportunities. We can engineer better cures, targeted to specific maladies, preventing, eradicating, or granting us immunity from diseases.
But we have also suddenly gained the possibility of scientifically enhancing ourselves and our proles. Someone might want to be stronger, taller, etc. Where should we draw the line between treatment and improvement? Should we stop at treating existing conditions on living beings?
In particular, the ability to engineer germline mutations (i.e., modify genes so that they can be passed on to offspring) opens up a great deal of ethical and moral issues. We have suddenly learned a way to seize power from evolution and take it into our hands. Deciding which genes we want to pass to future generations and which, instead, to mark for extinction. Picking between improvements that would benefit the community (improved general intelligence) vs improvements that only benefit the individual (being taller).
Germline mutations are a big deal. Wrong mutations could turn humankind into a less diverse species – where less diversity reduces the ability of adapting to change, usually a bad thing. In addition, today we might not be able to foresee side effects that might have long-lasting consequences for the specie.
All such issues warrant thoughtful reflection and raise extremely complex topics. It would take our species quite some time before we figure things out and reach an agreement. We would need to collectively discuss and agree on where to draw the line on gene editing. Unfortunately, we are not equipped with a global, decentralized governance program (as shown by the troubles dealing with the other global challenges we face, e.g. climate change).
Instead, there exists a decentralized set of entities (nations, companies, individuals) that if not regulated will pursue their interest regardless of the others’. As it turns out, a few of those entities might decide for the whole group.
# Free markets
Gene editing, as it often happens with emerging technologies, will most likely be expensive when initially brought to market1. In a free, minimally regulated market, the wealthier will access gene editing first, and before any global agreement can be reached on the topic. This is already happening. Clinics in exotic places around the world propose gene-editing therapies to lower body fat, increase muscle mass and even improve longevity and IQ.
What will happen next? We can attempt an educated guess and find out.
Our hypothetical scenario starts with some proportion of mankind favorable to gene editing and the rest against it2. Critically, among those favorable there exists a wealthy minority that wants to embrace such new practice as early as possible and is willing to deploy significant capital to achieve it.
If we assume that gene edits improve some individual trait, then “edited” individuals might have better chances of survival (for instance, they might live longer) and of reproduction. Therefore, their genes will spread further. If we also assume that favorably adopting gene editing gets passed to children (e.g., through culture or social pressure), then the overall number of edited individuals will grow faster over time. In other words, all other things being equal (and with lots of “ifs” and caveats) individuals would get an evolutionary advantage against the others, eventually outgrowing them.
Taken to the extreme, edited individuals might develop into an entirely new subspecies, with different (better) individual fitness. Eventually, the two species might reach an equilibrium, or one (most likely the new one) could push the other into oblivion.
Regardless of oblivion, after a few generations the original wealthy minority has now become a majority of gene-edited individuals. Such an outcome has overruled the original majority of contrarians by leveraging and exacerbating the inequality in wealth and access to resources that originally divided the population.
This outcome is extremely different from what would have happened through a democratic vote. In that case, if a majority of the population was against gene editing, the vote would not have passed. Here, instead, we have played with inequality and evolution to show how a minority can overrule the rest: by deploying wealth, the minority of individuals can gain an edge and then leverage it to grow at the expense of others.
# Conclusions
Our toy thought experiment does not deal with a lot of the variables that would play a role in the real world (for instance, would the wealthy have enough resources to sustain population growth over a long period?). It exaggerates the divide that gene editing might create, the advantages that it might deliver, and even the effects of wealth on the outcomes.
But outside the hyperbole, I think that this thought experiment shows how inequality does play a role in shaping the choice we collectively make. It is not always as manifest as I have depicted it here, but it is there, sometimes through proxies. Access to good education, to credit, even to a social network. Without a feedback loop regulating things, a few might really decide for the whole, especially if the distribution of “power” (wealth, in this case) is more concentrated than the distribution of votes (where one would correspond to one individual).
Preventing inequality to arise to the extreme is a job for governments and regulation. How to do balance that effectively against the free market and how to achieve it in a decentralized environment, such as the one of global decision, is instead an argument for another post.
Thanks for bearing with me through my ramblings. I would love hearing your thoughts about all this! ‘til next time! 👋