Francis Fukuyama: The Great Danger of Engineering Human Genes Is That It Costs Us Our Humanity

In the end, what people fear is that biotechnology will strip human beings of their humanity — the one bedrock quality that does not change however the world turns, that makes us what we are and sets where we are going. Worse, biotechnology will change human nature and we will never notice how valuable the thing we lost was.

Editor's note: In 1989, Fukuyama advanced the now-famous "end of history" thesis, declaring that in political terms human history had already ended in liberal democracy. Thirteen years later, in 2002, he overturned his own view in Our Posthuman Future, arguing that "history cannot end unless science ends." The "end of history," he now held, was not secure: liberal democracy faced many challenges ahead, and the gravest of them came from the biotechnology revolution in modern science.

"Biotechnology will strip human beings of their humanity… and we will never notice how valuable the thing we lost was. Perhaps we will find ourselves standing on the far side of the great divide between human and posthuman history without realizing that the divide is already there, because we can no longer see the most fundamental part of human nature," Fukuyama writes in the book.

This piece is excerpted from Our Posthuman Future by the Japanese-American scholar Francis Fukuyama, published with permission from Imaginist (WeChat ID: lixiangguo2013).

The Road to the Designer Baby

The greatest hope held out for modern genetic engineering is the designer baby.

In detail: scientists will be able to identify the genes that decide a person's traits — intelligence, height, hair color, aggression, self-esteem — and use that knowledge to shape a better-endowed child. And the gene they are hunting for may not even come from a human body.

Transgenic experiments on human beings still look a long way off. Two routes to genetic engineering are possible: somatic-cell gene therapy, or germ-line genetic engineering. Somatic-cell gene therapy uses bacteria or other vectors to carry new, already-modified genes into the body, changing the DNA of the target cells. The difficulty is that the human body holds hundreds of billions of somatic cells, and for the therapy to work, millions of them must be changed. Barring surprises, those altered cells die with the person; nothing is passed down the generations.

Germ-line genetic engineering is different. It is already routine in agriculture and has been carried out successfully in many animals. In theory, altering germ-line genes means changing a single set of DNA molecules in a fertilized egg, which then divides and differentiates into a whole human being. Somatic-cell therapy changes only the DNA of body cells and can therefore affect only the person treated; a germ-line change is inherited. That makes it especially attractive for treating inherited diseases such as diabetes.

But before humans use either method to alter genes, a pile of hard problems stands in the way. The first is the sheer complexity of the thing, which in some measure makes genetic engineering of higher human behavior all but impossible.

The second obstacle is the ethical worry about experimenting on people. The National Bioethics Advisory Commission sought a short-term ban on "human cloning" on the grounds that "experimenting on human beings is extremely dangerous." Before Dolly the sheep was cloned successfully, 270 experiments had failed. Many of the failures came at the implantation stage, and nearly 30 percent of cloned animals showed severe abnormalities of one kind or another. If there is little assurance that the baby will come out well, or if the defects the cloning process creates take time to appear, people will be in far less of a hurry to make designer babies.

Given the tangled causal path between a gene and the final expression of a trait, the harm cloning does is very likely to be magnified. The law of unintended consequences will be proved without mercy: a gene that leaves someone prone to one disease may have second- or even third-order effects that go unnoticed when it is altered, and those effects may take years, or a whole generation, to show.

With so many limits on genetic engineering, does it follow that whatever meaningful changes it may one day make to human nature, we need not discuss them? That conclusion comes too early. Before drawing it, we should weigh several things carefully.

First, the life sciences are moving forward at a pace that is striking and faster than people expect. In the late 1980s geneticists agreed that a mammal could not be cloned from the somatic cells of an adult; the birth of Dolly in 1997 ended that consensus. In the mid-1990s geneticists predicted that the Human Genome Project might be finished sometime between 2010 and 2020; new, highly automated sequencing machines finished it in July 2000. We cannot say now what new shortcuts will turn up to cut the research time on complex tasks.

That genes do many jobs at once, and interact in extremely complicated ways, does not mean human genetic engineering is stuck until those patterns are fully understood. Very often a new drug is invented, tested and approved for sale without the manufacturer being entirely sure how it works. In pharmacology it usually takes years for side effects to surface, and a drug sometimes interacts with other drugs or with the environment in ways nobody foresaw when it was introduced. Genetic engineers can solve the easy problems first and then climb, step by step, toward the complicated ones.

Experimenting on human beings is a major obstacle to fast progress in genetic engineering, but not an insurmountable one. In drug trials, animals bear most of the risk first. How much risk is acceptable in human experiments depends on the good the project can do. Take Huntington's disease, which carries a 50 percent chance of leaving a person demented or dead and passes the faulty allele to the next generation. A disease like that can be treated as a case apart; it is nothing like adding muscle tone or chest measurement. The mere possibility of unforeseen or long-term side effects will not stop people from seeking gene therapy, as long as it works in the early going.

Whether eugenic or non-eugenic genetic engineering will spread widely enough to change human nature is an entirely open question. Plainly, for any genetic technique to make a real difference to a whole population, it must be very useful, quite safe and cheap. Designer babies will be expensive at first, an option only for the rich. Whether they get steadily cheaper and therefore popular depends on how fast the technology moves — compare, for instance, the falling price curve of preimplantation genetic diagnosis.

Nobody knows whether genetic engineering will one day be as cheap and as commonplace as ultrasound and abortion. That depends largely on how much good it does. The worry most common among bioethicists today is that the technology will be within reach only of the rich. Suppose future biotechnology found a reasonably safe and effective genetic method of producing more intelligent children — then the danger would rise sharply. In that case the developed democratic welfare states would enter the eugenics game again, this time not to prevent the birth of low-intelligence babies but to use genetic methods to raise the intelligence of those born disadvantaged, and of their descendants. At that point the state would insist that the technology stay cheap and available to all. Only then would an effect on the whole of humanity become genuinely possible.

Even if genetic engineering never arrives, the first three stages of biotechnology's development — a closer grasp of genetic causal chains, advances in neuropharmacology, and longer lifespans — will still weigh heavily on the politics of the twenty-first century. These developments will be fiercely contested, because they challenge the equality people cherish and the capacity to make moral choices; because they hand society new means of controlling how citizens behave; because they will change our traditional understanding of human character and identity; because they will upend existing social structures, deeply altering the distribution of intelligence and wealth and the workings of politics; and because they will remake the nature of global politics.

Second, even if genetic engineering that touches the whole species takes twenty-five years, fifty, or a hundred, it remains by far the most consequential advance biotechnology has to offer. That is because human nature is the ground on which justice, morality and the good life rest, and all of them would be overturned by the wide use of this technology.

Why We Should Worry

Facing the roads humanity may take, we need to ask ourselves: why do we worry about biotechnology?

Eugenics is the ghost hanging over the whole of genetics — the idea of breeding only humans with preferred hereditary traits. The word was coined by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's nephew. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, state-backed eugenics programs enjoyed broad support, and not only from right-wing radicals and social Darwinists. Among the supporters were the Fabian socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, the communists J. B. S. Haldane and J. D. Bernal, and even the feminist and birth-control campaigner Margaret Sanger.

The United States and several other Western countries went on to pass eugenics laws, letting the state sterilize the feeble-minded by force while urging people of good stock to have as many children as they could. In the words of Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes: "We need people who are healthy, of good character, emotionally stable, compassionate and intelligent; we have no need of fools, dullards, paupers and criminals."

Once Hitler's eugenic policies came to light — the extermination of whole peoples, medical experiments on those deemed inferior — the eugenics movement was outlawed in the United States. Continental Europe has been inoculated ever since against any revival of it, and genetic research of every kind fell out of favor. The opposition was not universal: in the progressive, social-democratic countries of Scandinavia, eugenics statutes stayed on the books until the 1960s. In Asia, apart from Japan's forced medical experiments on civilians during the Pacific War — the infamous Unit 731 — other countries raised no strong objection to the idea of eugenics.

The second flaw in the old eugenics was that the state ran it and used force. The Nazi Party took the policy to a terrifying extreme, killing the innocent and experimenting on the "inferior." Even in the United States, people judged feeble-minded or moronic (the technical term then used for the mentally deficient) could well be hauled before a court and ordered sterilized against their will.

Genetic engineering has put eugenics back on the table exactly as it was. What is clear is that whatever methods a future eugenics adopts will look very different from the historical ones, at least in the developed West. Neither of the two errors above will apply again; the coming eugenics will be kinder and gentler, shedding the terror the word has carried.

The first obstacle — that eugenics was not technically feasible — existed only under the scientific conditions of the early twentieth century, when forced sterilization was the tool at hand. Advances in biological testing already let doctors detect recessive genes a mother carries before a couple has a child, and may extend to screening embryos that have inherited recessive genes from both parents and carry a high risk of deformity. For some populations this is already possible: Ashkenazi Jews, for instance, are more likely than others to carry the Tay-Sachs gene, so two carriers may decide not to marry or not to have children. In the future, germ-line engineering will offer the chance to strip such recessive genes out, sparing the descendants of particular carriers. If those treatments become easy to get and cheap, then clearing a given gene out of humanity at large becomes conceivable.

The second obstacle — that the state drove it — will count for little in the future, because almost no modern society wants to go back to the age of the eugenics race. Since the Second World War, in fact, every Western country has moved a long way toward protecting individual rights, and the right of individuals to decide their own reproductive questions ranks high among them. The view that the state has a legitimate interest in collective matters such as the health of its citizens' gene pool no longer commands social acceptance; it is treated instead as dated racism and arrogant elitism.

The kinder, gentler eugenics now taking shape will be a private choice made by the two people having the child, not something the state forces on its citizens. As one commentator put it: "The old eugenics required the constant selection of fit genes for reproduction and the weeding out of unfit ones. The new eugenics will in principle allow all the unfit to be converted to the highest genetic level."

Parents can already make choices of this kind: when amniocentesis shows a high risk of Down syndrome, they can decide to end the pregnancy. In the future the new eugenics will lead to more induced abortions and more discarded embryos, which is why opponents of abortion object to biotechnology so fiercely. But it will not coerce parents or limit their reproductive rights. On the contrary, their choices will widen greatly, because a range of other problems — infertility, congenital deformity — will no longer be worth worrying about. More likely still, reproductive technology will become safe and effective enough that no embryo is discarded or damaged.

When it comes to the genetic engineering ahead, I would personally rather drop the badly overloaded word "eugenics" and use "breeding" instead. In all likelihood we will breed human beings much as we breed animals, only by more scientific and more effective means, deciding through genetic selection what we hand on to the next generation. "Breeding" carries no implication of state backing; better still, it captures the steadily "dehumanizing" potential of genetic engineering.

So no case against human genetic engineering need lose its focus by getting tangled up with state programs or the prospect of government coercion. Even so, those who object to breeding a new kind of human still have to spell out exactly what harm follows when individual parents freely choose to rebuild their children's genes.

We may further assume that while parents will not set out to hurt their children, they will try to maximize their own happiness. The libertarian writer Virginia Postrel puts it this way: "People want to push genetic technology forward because they want to use it for their own ends; they hope it will help them and their descendants preserve their humanity… In a dynamic system where individual choice and responsibility are decentralized, people need trust no authority but themselves."

By economic theory, social harm adds up to a collective effect only when individual choices produce "negative externalities" — that is, when the cost of the harm falls on third parties who took no part in the transaction. A company may profit by dumping toxic waste into the local river, but at the expense of the community nearby. Bt corn shows the same effect: the plant makes a toxin that kills the European corn borer, a local pest, but it kills monarch butterflies too. The question is whether individual choices in biotechnology could produce negative externalities of that kind, leaving society as a whole to pay.

In genetic modification the child — never asked for consent, yet the party most directly involved — is obviously the third party who may be harmed. Family law as it stands assumes that parents and children share an interest, and so gives parents wide latitude in raising and educating them. Libertarians stress that since most parents want only the best for their children, this amounts to a kind of tacit consent: the child is the direct beneficiary of higher intelligence, better looks, more desirable traits. Yet there is ample room for choices about reproductive technology that serve the parents and hurt the child.

What Is in the Child's Best Interest?

Parents can go badly wrong here, because they consult scientists and doctors, and lean on their advice, according to agendas of their own. The urge to master human nature out of plain ambition, or to prescribe what human beings may become on nothing but ideological assumption, is all too common.

In his book As Nature Made Him, the journalist John Colapinto tells a heartbreaking story. Its subject, David Reimer, suffered a double misfortune: a terrible accident burned off his penis, and he then came under the care of John Money, the celebrated gender expert at Johns Hopkins University. Money stood at the far end of the nature-versus-nurture argument. On the strength of a career's work, he insisted that gender identity is not given by nature but built after birth. David Reimer offered him a chance to prove the theory. David was one of a pair of identical twins, so he could be compared against a brother with the same genes. After the accident, Money had David castrated and raised as a girl, under the name Brenda.

Brenda's life was a private hell, because she knew — whatever her parents and Money told her — that she was a boy and not a girl. Early on she insisted on urinating standing up rather than sitting down. Later:

Joining the Girl Scouts made Brenda's life miserable. "I remember making daisy chains and thinking like a girl. If that's the most exciting thing in the Girl Scouts, count me out," David recalls. "I kept thinking about all the fun things my brother was doing in the Cub Scouts." At Christmas and on birthdays Brenda was given dolls, and refused to play with them. "What can you do with a doll?" David asks today, his voice full of frustration. "Look at it? Dress it? Then undress it? Comb its hair? It's so boring! With a little car you can drive it somewhere, get something done. I wanted cars."

The attempt to manufacture a new gender identity caused such emotional torment that as soon as she reached puberty, Brenda broke off Money's supervision and completed the change back with reconstructive surgery. David Reimer is said to be married now and living happily.

The differences between the sexes are by now well understood to begin before birth, when the brain of a human male — as in other animals — is bathed in testosterone in the womb and goes through a process of masculinization. But the most striking part of the story is that for nearly fifteen years Money asserted in his papers that he had successfully turned Brenda's gender identity into a girl's, when the truth was the reverse. The research made his name. His false findings were echoed in the feminist Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, noticed by Time, saluted by The New York Times and written into countless textbooks, one of which cited it as proof that "children can easily be raised as the opposite sex" and that whether innate sex differences exist in humans at all "remains unclear, and can be controlled through cultural learning."

David Reimer's case is a useful warning about how biotechnology may be used. His parents chose out of love; in despair over their son's injury they agreed to a treatment that appalled them, and blamed themselves for years afterward. John Money was driven by scientific vanity, academic ambition and the wish to manufacture an ideological showpiece, and all of it led him to ignore the evidence against him and to act flatly against his patient's interests.

Cultural norms can also push parents into choices that damage their children. One example was touched on earlier: in Asia, people use sonograms to learn the sex of the child and decide whether to abort. In the culture of many Asian countries, a son brings clear advantages in standing and in care for old age. But this plainly harms the girls who die before they are born. A skewed sex ratio also makes it harder for men as a group to find partners and weakens their bargaining position against women in the marriage market. And if badly raised men bring more violence and terror to society, then society as a whole pays for it.

With a single trait such as intelligence, the negative externalities may be sharper still — and raising intelligence is thought to be the most conspicuous target of future genetic improvement. Where reproduction and IQ are closely correlated, a society with a higher average IQ may be richer. But the boost in intelligence many parents chase will in many respects prove an illusion, because the advantage of being brighter is relative, not absolute.

People want smarter children so they can squeeze into Harvard, for instance — but the competition for a Harvard place is zero-sum. If my child is made cleverer by gene therapy and gets in, he or she may have taken your child's place. My decision to have a designer baby leaves you to bear the cost, or rather your child does, and it is not clear that anyone is better off overall. A genetic arms race of this kind puts a particular burden on people who, for religious or other reasons, do not want their children modified. When everyone around them is doing it, holding out becomes harder and harder, for fear of standing in the child's way.

For all the worry about unintended outcomes and unforeseen costs, the deeper anxiety people carry about biotechnology is not utilitarian at all. In the end, what people fear is that biotechnology will strip human beings of their humanity — the one bedrock quality that does not change however the world turns, that makes us what we are and sets where we are going. Worse, biotechnology will change human nature and we will never notice how valuable the thing we lost was. Perhaps we will find ourselves standing on the far side of the great divide between human and posthuman history without realizing that the divide is already there, because we can no longer see the most fundamental part of human nature.

Cover image: a still from the film Blade Runner 2049, from Douban