Blinded with Science

A few weeks ago, I took my mother-in-law to get her first COVID vaccine dose. It didn’t go too well. My husband made a mistake with the online registration form and although he corrected the mistake, and called the hospital to explain the mistake and confirm that we could still proceed with the appointment; and although we checked in without incident and a volunteer escorted my mother-in-law to the room where the shots were being administered and she waited there for 40 minutes with her sleeve rolled up, the hospital staff decided that the error on the paperwork was significant enough to force them to send her home without the shot. 

It’s a long story, and there’s no way to make it short so that it still makes sense. But no matter. It was several weeks ago, and she has since gotten the vaccine and has an appointment scheduled for her second dose. All’s well that ends well. 

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I wrote this a few days ago, with the idea that I'd tell you all about the people I saw at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, and how they looked and dressed and behaved. I never tire of people watching, and a hospital is people-watching central. But now I'm in the car, waiting to be called in for my dentist appointment, and I'm thinking about the vaccine itself. I'm listening to NPR's "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, who is interviewing Walter Isaacson, who just wrote a book (The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race) about Jennifer Doudna, who discovered a thing about mRNA that made the COVID vaccine possible. 

Jennifer Doudna won a Nobel Prize for her work in mRNA research and gene editing; and as Isaacson says, she wasn't looking for a vaccine or a gene editing tool or anything else, really. She was doing pure science, trying to figure out what mRNA could do, and what it was for. I'm sure she thought about the possibility that she might discover something useful. But she started out by trying to learn something about how something works, just for the sake of learning it. 

I haven't read the book yet, but I think I need to add it to my list. What I got from the interview is that Doudna's work contributed to the invention of the gene editing technology known as CRISPR (clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). I won’t even try to grasp what this actually means in terms of the nuts and bolts science, though I do know what a palindrome is, and I suppose I could start from there. I’m more interested in the audacity of the very idea of editing genes. 

Editing genes strikes me as a classic example of a thing that we should not necessarily do, just because we can do it. Of course, there’s the miraculous possibility of editing bad genes to treat or even cure disease; and who wouldn't want to do this? But there is a worrisome and slippery-slope downside, too. We can also edit genes to select for what we would consider desirable traits and to eliminate less desirable traits, giving rise to the obvious question of who gets to decide what is desirable, and what is not, in terms of human traits. The possibility of productizing people is very real. Vladimir Putin, who would naturally consider himself an arbiter of desirability in human traits, thinks so too. During the "Fresh Air" interview, Isaacson said that Putin suggested that it might be possible to edit a man's gene sequence to make him a better soldier. Vladimir Putin has almost limitless power in Russia, and it’s easy to imagine him ordering involuntary gene therapy on unwitting subjects so that he can create a master-race army. 

Jennifer Doudna anticipated this misuse of gene editing science, too. She had a nightmare in which a man asked her to tell him more about gene editing. When she looked up, she saw that the man was Adolf Hitler. Because of course he was. 

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My 19-year-old son, who is very political, is also very sure that there is a man-made solution to every problem that plagues humanity; and that all we have to do is find and implement those solutions and we’ll have a world free of poverty, ignorance, illness, and suffering. And I remind him that it’s a fallen world, and that although we are obligated to serve others and to try to alleviate suffering wherever we find it, that we will never eliminate it altogether; and that every single attempt to create a perfect world has ended in disaster, in the gas chamber and the concentration camp. 

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I have great respect and admiration for science and scientists. I’m grateful that there are people who seek knowledge for its own sake and for the sake of its eventual benefit to humanity. I’m glad that a person is smart enough to  figure out that mRNA can be used to develop a vaccine that will confer immunity from a disease that has paralyzed the world for over a year. But I’m more glad that a scientist as brilliant as Jennifer Doudna is also thoughtful enough to know that science can be a tool for evil as well as good. I’m glad that there are scientists who understand that science without humility and without wisdom is a dangerous and potentially violent thing.