An illustration of a robust human.
A panel of leading experts gathered this week at a sold-out event in downtown Manhattan to talk about the science and the ethics of enhancing human beings -- making people "better than well" through biomedical interventions. Here are the ten most memorable quotes from their lively discussion, which was organized by the New York Academy of Sciences, the Aspen Brain Institute, and the Hastings Center.
1) "It's okay for us to be enhanced relative to our ancestors; we are with the smallpox vaccine." —Dr. George Church, iconic genetics pioneer; professor at Harvard University and MIT
Church was more concerned with equitable access to enhancements than the morality of intervening in the first place. "We missed the last person with polio and now it's spread around the world again," he lamented.
Discussing how enhancements might become part of our species in the near-future, he mentioned the possibility of doctors slightly "overshooting" an intervention to reverse cognitive decline, for example; or younger people using such an intervention off-label. Another way might be through organ transplants, using organs that are engineered to not get cancer, or to be resistant to pain, pathogens, or senescence.
2) "All the technology we will need to fundamentally transform our species already exists. Humans are made of code, and that code is writable, readable and hackable." —Dr. Jamie Metzl, a technology futurist and geopolitical expert; Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank
The speed of change is on an exponential curve, and the world where we're going is changing at a much faster rate than we're used to, Metzl said. For example, a baby born 1000 years ago compared to one born today would be basically the same. But a baby born 1000 years in the future would seem like superman to us now, thanks to new capabilities that will become embedded in future people's genes over time. So how will we get from here to there?
"We will line up for small incremental benefits. By the time people are that changed, we will have adapted to a whole new set of social norms."
But, he asked, will well-meaning changes dangerously limit the diversity of our species?
3) "We are locked in a competitive arms race on both an individual and communal level, which will make it very difficult to put the brakes on. Everybody needs to be part of this conversation because it's a conversation about the future of our species." —Jamie Metzl
China, for one, plans to genetically sequence half of all newborns by 2020. In the U.S., it is standard to screen for 34 health conditions in newborns (though the exact number varies by state). There are no national guidelines for newborn genomic screening, though the National Institutes of Health is currently funding several research studies to explore the ethical concerns, potential benefits, and limitations of doing so on a large scale.
4) "I find freedom in not directing exactly how my child will be." —Josephine Johnston, Director of Research at the Hastings Center, the world's oldest bioethics research institute
Johnston cautioned against a full-throttled embrace of biomedical enhancements. Parents seeking to remake nature to serve their own purpose would be "like helicopter parenting on steroids," she said. "It could be a kind of felt obligation, something parents don't want to do but feel they must in order to compete." She warned this would be "one way to totally ruin the parenting experience altogether. I would hate to be the kind of parent who selects and controls her child's traits and talents."
Among other concerns, she worried about parents aiming to comply with social norms through technological intervention. Would a black mom, for example, feel pressure to make her child's skin paler to alleviate racial bias?
5) "We need to seriously consider the risks of a future if a handful of private companies own and monetize a map of our thoughts at any given moment." – Meredith Whittaker, Research Scientist, Open Research Lead at Google, and Co-Director of New York University's AI Now Institute, examining the social implications of artificial intelligence
The recent boom in AI research is the result of the consolidation of the tech industry's resources; only seven companies have the means to create artificial intelligence at scale, and one of the innovations on the horizon is brain-computer interfaces.
Facebook, for example, has a team of 60 engineers working on BCIs to let you type with your mind. Elon Musk's company Neuralink is working on technology that is aiming for "direct lag-free interactions between our brains and our devices."
But who will own this data? In the future, could the National Security Agency ask Neuralink, et al. for your thought log?
6) "The economic, political, and social contexts are as important as the tech itself. We need to look at power, who gets to define normal, and who falls outside of this category?" – Meredith Whittaker
Raising concerns about AI bias, Whittaker discussed how data is often coded by affluent white men from the Bay Area, potentially perpetuating discrimination against women and racial minorities.
Facial recognition, she said, is 30 percent less accurate for black women than for white men. And voice recognition systems don't hear women's voices as well as men's, among many other examples. The big question is: "Who gets to decide what's normal? And how do we ensure that different versions of normal can exist between cultures and communities? It is impossible not see the high stakes here, and how oppressive classifications of normal can marginalize people."
From left: George Church, Jamie Metzl, Josephine Johnston, Meredith Whittaker
7) "We might draw a red line at cloning or germline enhancements, but when you define those or think of specific cases, you realize you threw the baby out with the bathwater." —George Church, answering a question about whether society should agree on any red lines to prohibit certain interventions
"We should be focusing on outcomes," he suggested. "Could enhancement be a consequence of curing a disease like cognitive decline? That would concern me about drawing red lines."
8) "We have the technology to create Black Mirror. We could create a social credit score and it's terrifying." —Meredith Whittaker
In China, she said, the government is calculating scores to rank citizens based on aggregates of data like their educational history, their friend graphs, their employment and credit history, and their record of being critical of the government. These scores have already been used to bar 12 million people from travel.
"If we don't have the ability to make a choice," she said, "it could be a very frightening future."
9) "These tools will make all kinds of wonderful realities possible. Nobody looks at someone dying of cancer and says that's natural." —Jamie Metzl
Using biomedical interventions to restore health is an unequivocal moral good. But other experts questioned whether there should be a limit in how far these technologies are taken to achieve normalcy and beyond.
10) "Cancer's the easy one; what about deafness?" —Josephine Johnston, in retort
Could one person's disability be another person's desired state? "We should be so suspicious" of using technology to eradicate different ways of being in the world, she warned. Hubris has led us down the wrong path in the past, such as when homosexuality was considered a mental disorder.
"If we sometimes make mistakes about disease or dysfunction," she said, "we might make mistakes about what is a valid experience of the human condition."
Recent immigration restrictions have left many foreign researchers' projects and careers in limbo—and some in jeopardy.
"I spent about $4,000 on lawyer fees and another $1,200 to pay for the motions I filed," she recalls. "I had to borrow money from my parents and my cousin because without my salary I just didn't have the $7,000 at hand." But the already narrow window of opportunity slammed completely shut when the Trump administration suspended issuing new visas for foreign researchers in June. All Mohan's attempts were denied. In August, she had to leave the country. "Given the recent work visa ban by the administration, all my options in the U.S. are closed," she wrote a bitter note on Twitter. "I have to uproot my entire life in NY for the past 6 years and leave." She eventually found a temporary position in Calcutta, where she can continue research.
Mohan is hardly alone in her visa saga. Many foreign scholars on H- and J-type visas and other permits that let them remain employed in America had been struggling to keep their rights to continue research, which in certain cases is crucial to battling the pandemic. Some had to leave the country, some filed every possible extension to buy time, and others are stuck in their home countries, unable to return. The already cumbersome process of applying for visas and extensions became crippled during the lockdowns. But in June, when President Trump extended and expanded immigration restrictions to cut the number of immigrant workers entering the U.S., the new limits left researchers' projects and careers in limbo—and some in jeopardy.
"We have been a beneficiary of this flow of human capacity and resource investment for many generations—and this is now threatened."
Rakesh Ramachandran, whose computational biology work contributed to one of the first coronavirus studies to map out its protein structures—is stranded in India. In early March, he had travelled there to attend a conference and visit the American consulate to stamp his H1 visa for a renewal, already granted. The pandemic shut down both the conference and the consulates, and Ramachandran hasn't been able to come back since. The consulates finally opened in September, but so far the online portal has no available appointment slots. "I'm told to keep trying," Ramachandran says.
The visa restrictions affected researchers worldwide, regardless of disciplines or countries. A Ph.D. student in neuroscience, Morgane Leroux had to do her experiments with mice at Gladstone Institutes in America and analyze the data back home at Sorbonne University in France. She had finished her first round of experiments when the lockdowns forced her to return to Paris, and she hasn't been able to come back to resume her work since. "I can't continue the experiments, which is really frustrating," she says, especially because she doesn't know what it means for her Ph.D. "I may have to entirely change my subject," she says, which she doesn't want to do—it would be a waste of time and money.
But besides wreaking havoc in scholars' personal lives and careers, the visa restrictions had—and will continue to have—tremendous deleterious effects on America's research and its global scientific competitiveness. "It's incredibly short-sighted and self-destructing to restrict the immigration of scientists into the U.S.," says Benjamin G. Neel, who directs the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center at New York University. "If they can't come here, they will go elsewhere," he says, causing a brain drain.
Neel in his lab with postdocs
(Courtesy of Neel)
Neel felt the outcomes of the shortsighted policies firsthand. In the past few months, his lab lost two postdoctoral researchers who had made major strides in understanding the biology of several particularly stubborn, treatment-resistant malignancies. One postdoc studied the underlying mechanisms responsible for 90 percent of pancreatic cancers and half of the colon ones. The other one devised a new system of modeling ovarian cancer in mice to test new therapeutic drug combinations for the deadliest tumor types—but had to return home to China.
"By working around the clock, she was able to get her paper accepted, but she hasn't been able to train us to use this new system, which can set us back six months," Neel says.
Her discoveries also helped the lab secure about $900,000 in grants for new research. Losing people like this is "literally killing the goose that lays the golden eggs," Neel adds. "If you want to make America poor again, this is the way to do it."
Cassidy R. Sugimoto at Indiana University Bloomington, who studies how scientific knowledge is produced and disseminated, says that scientists are the most productive when they are free to move, exchange ideas, and work at labs with the best equipment. Restricting that freedom reduces their achievement.
"Several empirical studied demonstrated the benefits to the U.S. by attracting and retaining foreign scientists. The disproportional number of our Nobel Prize winners were not only foreign-born but also foreign-educated," she says. Scientific advancement bolsters the country's economic prowess, too, so turning scholars away is bad for the economy long-term. "We have been a beneficiary of this flow of human capacity and resource investment for many generations—and this is now threatened," Sugimoto adds—because scientists will look elsewhere. "We are seeing them shifting to other countries that are more hospitable, both ideologically and in terms of health security. Many visiting scholars, postdocs, and graduate students who would otherwise come to the United States are now moving to Canada."
It's not only the Ph.D. students and postdocs who are affected. In some cases, even well-established professors who have already made their marks in the field and direct their own labs at prestigious research institutions may have to pack up and leave the country in the next few months. One scientist who directs a prominent neuroscience lab is betting on his visa renewal and a green card application, but if that's denied, the entire lab may be in jeopardy, as many grants hinge on his ability to stay employed in America.
"It's devastating to even think that it can happen," he says—after years of efforts invested. "I can't even comprehend how it would feel. It would be terrifying and really sad." (He asked to withhold his name for fear that it may adversely affect his applications.) Another scientist who originally shared her story for this article, later changed her mind and withdrew, worrying that speaking out may hurt the entire project, a high-profile COVID-19 effort. It's not how things should work in a democratic country, scientists admit, but that's the reality.
Still, some foreign scholars are speaking up. Mehmet Doğan, a physicist at University of California Berkeley who has been fighting a visa extension battle all year, says it's important to push back in an organized fashion with petitions and engage legislators. "This administration was very creative in finding subtle and not so subtle ways to make our lives more difficult," Doğan says. He adds that the newest rules, proposed by the Department of Homeland Security on September 24, could further limit the time scholars can stay, forcing them into continuous extension battles. That's why the upcoming election might be a turning point for foreign academics. "This election will decide if many of us will see the U.S. as the place to stay and work or whether we look at other countries," Doğan says, echoing the worries of Neel, Sugimoto, and others in academia.
Dogan on Zoom talking to his fellow union members of the Academic Researchers United, a union of almost 5,000 Academic Researchers.
(Credit: Ceyda Durmaz Dogan)
If this year has shown us anything, it is that viruses and pandemics know no borders as they sweep across the globe. Likewise, science can't be restrained by borders either. "Science is an international endeavor," says Neel—and right now humankind now needs unified scientific research more than ever, unhindered by immigration hurdles and visa wars. Humanity's wellbeing in America and beyond depends on it.
[Editor's Note: To read other articles in this special magazine issue, visit the beautifully designed e-reader version.]