Q&A: Bill McKibben on Staying Human

Center for Genetics and Society. Posted May 29, 2003.

In his latest book, Bill McKibben writes about two up-and-coming technologies, human genetic engineering (also called "germline engineering") and nanotechnology. "Enough" questions the necessity of enacting these technologies, and pursues the question of what it means to be human, and whether using genetic engineering to "perfect" humans will cause us to become something else entirely.

In "Enough," you warn against the dangers -- many of them imminent and grave -- of new technologies that will allow us to "redesign" human beings. Realistically, what kind of redesigning are we talking about?

Genetics researchers are continually discovering new traits linked, in part or in whole, to our DNA: IQ, muscle mass, height, sociability, even our inclination to optimism or happiness. Just as they've already done with many other animals, some scientists want to tweak human embryos at an early stage of development to "enhance" these characteristics.

These sound like pretty far-out ideas. Do you believe anyone -- science -- would actually do that? And if they would, isn't that light years away?

Some researchers with real scientific credibility, and real access to large amounts of venture capital, hope to do just this kind of work. Consider, for instance, James Watson, the co-discoverer of the double helix, who this spring celebrates the 50th anniversary of his Nobel-winning paper. Watson -- who was also the first head of the national genome project -- has called for aggressive pursuit of so-called "germline engineering." He urges society to "go for perfection," using our new understanding of genetics to eliminate shyness and to rule out "cold fish." "Who wants an ugly baby?" he asks, adding, "If we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we do it?"

And Watson is far from alone -- top researchers at places like MIT and UCLA have deemed such work not only a good idea, but "inevitable," predicting that within a very few years the children of most people who can afford the technology will be 'enhanced' before birth. "Why not seize this power?" asks Princeton geneticist Lee Silver in his book Remaking Eden. "We control all other aspects of our children's lives and identities through powerful social and environmental influences... On what basis can we reject positive genetic influences on a person's essence when we accept the rights of parents to benefit their children in every other way."

That's an interesting question. What would be wrong with 'improved' children?

This is at the crux of "Enough." Other writers have at least begun to focus on the practical problems: all the things that could go wrong with these technologies, and the fact that they would enshrine the divisions between rich and poor into our very biology. But I've tried also to raise a deeper set of issues: the meaning of a human life will disappear if we make these changes. To understand what I mean, imagine yourself an 'improved' child. Is your intelligence your own? Is your mood your own, or the result of some protein pumped out by your cells in response to a particular stretch of commercial DNA added by your parents before your birth? Would your accomplishments, your hopes, your dreams mean anything in the way we reckon it now in such a world? Or would you be more akin to a robot?

We already try to influence our children in innumerable ways. But part of growing up is dealing with that influence: rebelling against it, finding the parts you want and rejecting the rest. You'd never be able to reject this kind of influence, though; it would be part of every cell in your body. This is the single most radical technology anyone's ever thought of -- and the greatest breach with all that came before.

Can we avoid this world of designer babies without sacrificing necessary medical progress?

Yes, happily. The insights that genetics have provided already have yielded all sorts of useful treatments for real people with real illnesses. So-called "somatic" gene therapy, involving the insertion of better-functioning genes into living individuals to, say, keep their lungs from malfunctioning due to cystic fibrosis, does not raise the kind of existential problems that come from designing people before they're born. Other researchers are hard at work designing drugs that take into account the genetic peculiarities of certain cancers. All this is good and necessary work, part of the world as we know it.

Even controversial ideas like cloning embryos to get stem cells need not be abandoned. But scientists and government regulators need to work out careful protocols before they proceed in order to insure that cloning embryos for spare cells doesn't turn into reproductive cloning, which would be the basis for making designer children.

Is it just genetics that worries you, or are there other methods of engineering humans on the horizon?

The DNA revolution is on top of us -- people are already claiming to have cloned children. But if you look a few years further out, other technologies are rapidly converging. Roboticists insist, with some credibility, that their creations will be smarter and more able than humans in a few decades; at best, they say, we will need to make ourselves part silicon to survive. "Those of us alive today, over the course of our lifetimes, will morph ourselves into machines," says MIT's Rodney Brooks. "Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior species," adds Carnegie Mellon's Hans Moravec.

Others have begun to forecast how nanotechnology -- the manipulation of matter at the atomic level -- may well allow for eternal repair of human organs and arteries, granting us a kind of physical immortality. All of this work is being pursued aggressively, and with very little in the way of public debate. One reason for writing this book is to try and spark some of that discussion.

But is debate even possible? Won't we inevitably develop these technologies?

The researchers would like us to think so. "Asking whether such changes are 'wise' or 'desirable' misses the essential point," says UCLA's Gregory stock. "They are largely not a matter of choice; they are the unavoidable product of technological advance."

In fact, though, this genie is still in the bottle, if barely. And there is reason to hope we can keep her there. For one thing, we've learned a lot in the last century about controlling technology -- our record with chemical and biological weapons, for instance, while far from perfect nonetheless gives us some hope. And it's worth bearing in mind that one or two enhanced children won't make much difference. For it to become widely commercialized, you'd need an industry with lots of capital, and with some protection from liability and regulation. In other words, you'd need to persuade the public to back it, or at least not to interfere.

A political debate is coming, therefore -- a political debate on what it means to be a human being.

Won't such a debate just pit right wing fundamentalists and pro-life activists against everyone else?

No. These technologies are so new and different that they're already creating a new politics. Last year's congressional debate on cloning was instructive. Some libertarian Republicans backed the right to clone; some pro-choice liberals called for tight restrictions or bans on the technology. Feminist and environmentalist leaders have been outspoken in opposition to these technologies. Speaking about these forms of genetic engineering, Sierra Club president Carl Pope told the convention of the National Abortion Rights Action League, "We must be as vigilant for the whirlpools of extreme instrumentalism as we are for Operation Rescue."

The real division is between those who think every decision can be left to the market, and those who think some decisions must be made by the society as a whole. If there was ever such a choice to be made, this is it.

Your work is mostly as an environmentalist. Do you see these, in part, as environmental issues?

Indeed they are. My best-known book, "The End of Nature," was the first account for a general audience of global warming. It's now in 20 languages and on every continent -- mainly because it described a threshold moment in our history, a change so big that unless we ward it off everything that follows will be different.

The technologies described in "Enough" are the next such threshold change. They take one of the last reserves of the natural -- our individual lives -- and turn them into something very different. The caution of environmentalists, and even more their love of the world that already exists, are necessary to thinking clearly about these choices. Without them we will fall easy prey to the siren song of the human "enhancers," just as we've seen so much of the rest of the natural world disappear in the name of "improvement."

How does this book differ from other books recently published on genetic engineering?

Most of the critical writing about genetic engineering, and these other emerging technologies, concentrates on either the practical problems (it won't work right, babies will be born deformed, etc.) or on the social effects (it will create a breed of elites and thus undermine democracy). Both of these criticisms make sense, and I discuss them briefly -- but I'm more interested in a deeper question: What will it mean to be a human being once we start making such changes? What, ultimately, will it feel like? I think that the greatest dangers are to the very meaning of being human.

Why did you call your book "Enough?"

In the end, these questions run to the very core of what it means to be human. Are we good enough as a species, or are we in need of wholesale improvement? Do we have -- in the West -- enough intelligence, longevity, convenience, comfort, or do we need to remake the world in search of More? I think that the fast advance of technology has taken us to a very important crossroad, and we need to face issues we've always postponed before. If we don't, the technology will take care of them for us.

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