The New Millenium

We can already inject foreign genes into most living things: firefly genes into tobacco plants; tobacco genes into pigs; pig genes into mice; mice genes into sheep; sheep genes into cows; and human genes into cows, mice, sheep, pigs, tobacco plants---and the reverse. The ability to do this has consequences---enormous consequences.

Today, blood is in short supply. Few people donate it and what they do give has to be filtered and tested, making it expensive. Despite the testing, of the 3.5 million Americans who get blood transfusions each year, over a thousand contract hepatitis. Who wouldn't pay to get cheap, untainted, human blood from pigs or sheep or cows if it meant the difference between life and death? Well, we can do it---not tomorrow, not next year---today.

Organ donors are also in short supply. People don't sign their donor cards, accidents happen far from hospitals, relatives are too busy grieving, and medical teams are reluctant to ask. Few of the donated organs can be used anyway: they may be the wrong size; the blood type may be wrong; there may be complications. Consequently, even in advanced countries, fewer than one in a hundred people who will die without donated organs get them. And one in five of those who do may still die, because of tissue rejection. Who wouldn't pay for a personal transgenic pig to carry copies of all important organs so that if one fails---a heart, a lung, a kidney---it can be replaced? Such a replacement couldn't be the wrong size, nor would it be rejected, because it's as identical to your own organ as if it grew in your body.

In 1990s America alone, health care costs consume nine hundred thousand million dollars annually---that's almost a seventh of the entire economy. It is estimated that Americans spend another four thousand million dollars a year on antiaging cosmetics. Further, every year, roughly a million Americans spend large sums on cosmetic surgery---not to mention the enormous amounts spent on dieting and exercise.

Our body is at its peak at about twelve years old. It remains supple and efficient for six long years, then, at about eighteen, begins to die. Beyond eighteen, our brain cells die in ever-increasing numbers, our teeth fall out, our immune systems lose flexibility, our muscles and bones thin and weaken, and our skins thicken and roughen. By twenty-one, the hand of death is already heavy upon us, and its weight rises with the passing years. By thirty, all our bodies have to look forward to is disability, disease, and dependence.

Evolution has shaped us to fit that cycle because, from the point of view of our genes, we're only useful until we pass them on---which can be as early as twelve or thirteen. Once we can reproduce, we're only useful to our species for as long as it takes to raise a few children to reproductive age---maybe another fifteen years. Beyond, say, thirty, evolution hasn't worked out the remaining kinks in our design. It would have been a waste of effort. So it didn't.

To us, that seems like a terrible waste, but look at it from our genes' point of view. Each of us alive today is descended from a unbroken chain of people, each of whom were once young but few of whom were ever old. Over millions of years, evolution has had a chance to weed out most of the genes that lead to early death; so these genes were rarely passed on. In all that time, however, it has had little chance to weed out genes that kill us later in life. But that doesn't mean we can't do something about it.

For example, there's a rare disease called progeria that hastens aging. Twelve-year-olds with progeria look like tiny seventy-year-olds, and they soon die from all the ailments seventy-year-olds die from. The disease results from one change in a single gene. So it may be that many of our old age ailments can be traced to similarly flawed genes. If we can find them and fix them, the ailments should vanish.

Now try to imagine a world, perhaps fifty years hence, where we can get baby-soft skin from body paint, new teeth from chewing gum, strong and flexible bones from milk, superhuman muscles from an injection, greater intelligence from an inhaler, higher sex drive from a pill, better memory from hair spray. That kind of technology could force major changes in how we think about the world and ourselves. For example, what might Muslims and Jews do if we insert pig genes into tomatoes to make them riper or tastier or longer lasting? Does their religion let them eat such a hybrid? Can Roman Catholics eat a fish during Lent if half the fish's genes come from cows? Can Buddhists eat corn rebuilt with human genes? When these religions began such questions were meaningless.

What will we do if we find genes that retard or reverse aging? Or genes that retard or reverse cancers? Or genes to make childbirth painless and danger-free? Or ways to permanently change our height, weight, sex, race, intelligence, memory, patience, skill? Who will let themselves be engineered to carry those genes? Will we let our governments determine the genetic structure of our children? The questions go on and on, one leading to another. For instance, is it okay for the government to check an airline pilot's genes for propensity to heart attack? If so, is it also okay for an employer to check your genes for propensity to Alzheimer's disease?

Biotechnology isn't something we can safely leave to our next generation to think about; we're already using it. So the question isn't when we'll start, but when do we stop? To ask the question is to answer it: We won't stop. Just as we aren't stopping today with computers. We've always left the consequences to our descendants. Why should we change now?

Of course, there will be slowdowns and setbacks here and there as this country or that religion decides that one change or another is too dangerous, too immoral, or just plain too strange. But the incentives to change are simply too high to turn back now. Since its beginnings 3,500 million years ago, life has always been make do or die. Here today, lunch tomorrow.

Where the Wild Things Are