NLMG Connection - Ethan Pinkes

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One of my favorite podcasts is called Radiolab. Radiolab investigates interesting stories that often have a connection to something in the scientific field and I highly recommend it. They have a really interesting episode about CRISPR and ever since I heard about it I feel that it has been in the news quite often. CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, and it is basically a newly developed way to precisely and inexpensively edit a genome. Scientists have already been able to create mosquitoes that cannot carry malaria, corn that resists drought, extremely muscular beagles, and change the color of a butterfly's wings. In the next few years they believe that they will be able to cure blood diseases like leukemia and lymphoma. Scientists also anticipate that pigs will soon be developed that will be able to host human organs to be used for transplants. CRISPR can even be used at an embryonic stage when parents would be able to choose desirable traits for their child and create so called "designer babies" which would allow those traits to be passed to the next generation and beyond. This means that CRISPR can be used for more then just disease eradication. It could be used to even create a super human race. Ironically CRISPR could solve the problem that Ishiguro raises in his book because we don't need humans like Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy to grow the organs, but on the other hand CRISPR raises a plethora of additional medical ethical issues which are far more complex then the clones in Never Let Me Go. In fact, CRISPR has made the Morningdale scandal in Never Let Me Go a reality. In writing about the Morningdale scandal, Ishiguro says that Morningdale was trying to create children with "superior intelligence, superior athleticism, that sort of thing... He had taken his research... far beyond legal boundaries." (Ishiguro pg. 264) The concern that Ishiguro raises is the same as that is raised by CRISPR: "It's one thing to create students, such as yourselves, for the donation programme. But a generation of created children who'd take their place in society? Children demonstrably superior to the rest of us? Oh no. That frightened people. They recoiled from that." (Ishigruo pg. 264) It seems that in our time we have already passed the medical ethics issue that was illustrated in Never Let Me Go and we still don't have ethical answers. The questions Ishiguro raises in his book, such as how do we handle these advances in medicine and what makes us human, are just as relevant as ever.