This season on Brave New Us, we’re exploring the field of genetics, its human applications, and the ethical question that arise when we think about using this knowledge to alter the building blocks of who we are.
In this episode, we explore the research on genetic editing. Where are we now? Does what we might able to do with genetic editing justify what we need to do to get there? If not, where does that leave us?
Guests appearing in the episode:
Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, O.P., is a Dominican priest and a professor at Providence College, RI. His areas of expertise are the biology of cancer, aging, and programmed cell death, health care ethics and bioethics in the Catholic tradition, and philosophical and theological implications of modern evolutionary theory.
Transcript
In September of 1999, High school student Jesse Gelsinger took a flight from Arizona to Philadelphia that would change the course of genetic research. Jesse had a metabolic disorder called OTC D. A disorder that causes ammonia to build up in the blood. It's a disorder that is often lethal in infants. Jesse had a milder version that was discovered when he was 2, and although he had to follow a strict diet and took nearly 50 pills a day, 17 year old Jesse was able to live life as a regular teenager. He lived motorcycles and professional wrestling. He did not love the restrictions of living with his illness. At one point in his teens, he stopped taking his medications for a time, the choice that resulted in uncontrollable vomiting as his ammonia levels built up the treatment and induced coma until his levels returned to normal. With a history like this, it's not surprising that Jesse wanted out. He wanted help to find a better solution for kids born like him, so Jesse volunteered for a clinical research trial for a type of gene therapy that helped promised for kids with Jesse's condition. This type of gene therapy used the adenovirus rendered harmless to take the new gene into its host in hopes that it would repair. Deficiency. Four days after receiving the experimental treatment, Jesse was dead. This news stopped research on gene therapy in its tracks for nearly a decade. Even now, the phrase gene therapy carries with it a kind of stigma much more popular to use. Now is the term genetic editing, one that more accurately describes the current processes used to address genetic conditions by altering the genes themselves. The newest technology is called CRISPR. It's fast, it's cheap, it's proven effective in altering at least two types of genetic conditions. I wanted to talk with someone from the field of science who could give us the rundown on what crisper is and. How it works? Because it's a relatively new and exciting technology, I expected that everyone and anyone would want to talk about it. Instead, my request for interviews LED. To a whole pile of dead ends. Even researchers who had been college friends, former professors, refused to talk to me. Maybe it's that they didn't see the value. Of a podcast. Or they really were that busy. But as the rejections kept coming, I had to wonder if there was something else at play. Given the history between science and religion, I began to think that maybe the doors weren't closing on me, but rather on the church. Then I heard an interview on another podcast, one that's put out by a prominent university. The interviewee made a comment that struck a chord. He confirmed there are tensions surrounding genetic editing. What surprised me was that they weren't related to the church so much as the whole history of genetic therapies. They were worried about the backlash over Jessie Gelsinger coming back to haunt them now, setting aside the issue of a young man's life being reduced to backlash. I think that this highlights something that we really need to pay attention to, the scientist on the podcast was worried that science would be Hell's back and that progress would stall if the ethicist got involved. And I suppose that's true. If you wanted to find progress merely as the ability to do more stuff. I once asked my doctor a question and knowing my background in bioethics, she began by saying I don't know much about the ethics of this, but. And I mean, I can't help thinking if we're going to do something, shouldn't we know the ethics of it? If we as human beings are going to move forward and execute a choice, a particular course of action does not presuppose some sort of moral judgment as to the goodness or baldness of our actions. What could possibly let us off the hook? Should we really be able to proceed with research and experimentation by saying I don't know the ethics of this? Sure. If you plunge ahead without ethical discourse, you will be able to do more stuff faster. But is that really progress? What if those achievements come at the expense of our fellow human beings? As a Catholic, as a mother, as someone who studied bioethics for half a second, I have to believe that progress, real progress requires placing values over achievements, and that our real goal is not simply to increase the number of things we are capable of doing, but to work towards a society that is more hospitable and more human. On this episode of Brave new US, we explore the research on genetic editing. Where are we now? Does what we might be able to do with genetic editing justify what we need to do to get there? If not, where does that leave us?
Yes.
I'm Samantha Stephenson and this is brave new US.
The message that we might be communicating is that we wouldn't want them around if we could have prevented them, we would. Have.
We don't talk about a pencil and say, well, it's inherently good. It's inherently evil. We all.
Are giving this gift of suffering. This moment where God is asking us to walk closer with him, to cling to the cross.
It's pain and it's suffering. And none of us stood out of. It.
We're at a point where we're trying.
To get to a perfect generation. That.
Puts an insane amount.
Of pressure on people to earn or deserve their.
Grace.
We're dealing with not simply shaping a life, but actually shaping the person.
We have the power to change our genetics.
But should we?
And how might using this power change? Who we really are. This is bioethics in the light of ethics. Welcome to Season 1 with Brave new US.
If you ask my scientist friends about Christians what they're going to think about is they're going to think about, quote, the Bible thumping fundamentalist preacher from Alabama who appears to be anti reason and who claims that. Faith and reason are at odds, especially when it comes to scientific questions like.
This is Father Nick Nord, reflecting on the difficulty I had in finding a scientist to come on the podcast.
The Catholic approach is incredibly different from that the Catholic approach is that reason and faith are both gifts from God our father, and so both of them, when exercised properly, when exercised with the power of grace and after profound prayer and struggle. Can both attain to true. And that this truth, which is not easy to come by because of the brokenness of of the that that resulted from the fall, is such that there will be times when there could be apparent contradictions between what reason discovers and what faith proclaims. And that apparent tension is only apparent, and it is not a. It is not a test of faith in that we are supposed to reject reason, the name of faith. The human being is called to trust that God, who has given his faith given him faith and given him reason in time, will help us to resolve the two.
So faith and reason not as opposed as we might think. Science and the church not at odds with one another. You'll recall that we met Father Nikanor in episode 1. What you maybe didn't realize is that Father Nikanor himself is a scientist. The Santa Filipino immigrants Nikanor was born in the US and raised in Thailand, where as a young boy of 10, he pledged to find a cure for cancer and he was well on his way when the call to the priesthood caps. Him after getting a PhD in molecular biology, he found Jesus.
Science was my God and I had in so many ways reached the heights of scientific achievement in my early 20s, and yet I discovered what they say. You know, a forever empty in your heart. And I think that encountered with the Catholic fellowship at MIT, which is a group of undergrads and graduate students who were on fire. Christ. You know, they had something I didn't have, and that was joy. And I wanted to understand the source of that joy, the cause of that joy. And of course, they would tell me that they'd encountered Christ. And even though I I had been Catholic, I have been Catholic my whole life. I had never encountered the savior. And so I did. On the 7th of May. In 1996, at 5:30 in the afternoon, actually and.
When I remarked that, I'm surprised that he remembers the exact day and time he challenged me.
How could you not when you encounter love? And and you know when you read, when you read the, when you read Sacred Scripture, there will be moments where the apostles say it was 4:00 in the afternoon. And I remember growing up thinking how the heck do they remember? Oh, you remember.
After graduating with his PhD, he had a prestigious fellowship with the University College London. But he couldn't shake this encounter with Jesus. Instead of staying for five years, he left to join the priesthood after only 10 months. He is a Dominican priest and their order focuses on preaching and it shows. As we were talking, I couldn't help but think his students are lucky to have someone who can so clearly distill these complex topics. For example, listen to the metaphor he uses to explain the CRISPR and gene editing technology.
We have a genome and genome is collection of all the genes and that you and I have and. We have 46 chromosomes and a chromosome is a stretch of DNA that contains these genes. So you can imagine that our we have 46 chromosomes, 23 from Mom, 23 from that you could imagine this this genome as an encyclopedia made-up of 46 volumes and the volume is full of text and the text is the information of our genes. And prior to CRISPR, we could change some of that text, but we'd have to RIP out pages and take pages back. CRISPR allows you to go to volume 41, page 522, column three. Paragraph four, line 6. And you can change that G into an E so CRISPR promises to be a tool that gives us the capacity, the power, which we could use for good or for evil to genetically edit the genome of any living thing with that.
Precision. When I told him I wanted to know more about how CRISPR is being used, he had more metaphors at the ready.
You wanted to study COVID-19. It turns out that mice don't really get COVID-19 because COVID-19 has a key that fits into a human lock. So in order for the virus to infect your cells, it has to enter those cells, and so your your cells actually have a door. And the door in this particular case is called ACE 2, and the virus has a key that can open up the human ACE 2 quite well. It can bind to the human Ace 2 and it can unlock the door. It can enter your cells and then you get sick. Mice also have ACE 2, but their lock. Doesn't fit the the the virus key, so one of the things that people are doing now is we can genetically edit the. Ice lock so it actually fits the the the COVID-19 virus key. And So what you are able to do is you're able to transform mice in such a way that they're now vulnerable to COVID-19. And you think, well, why would you do this? Well, you would do this because you can't do experiments with COVID-19. Patients, you certainly don't want to be testing drugs on them. And So what are new drugs? So what you would do is you would make these mice that are susceptible to COVID-19 using CRISPR. And then with these mice that can get sick with COVID-19, you can try to. New drugs to try to prevent them from getting sick. And then you, you know, once you develop them and in mice, you would then be able to translate them and use them with people and with human patients. Now the only reason we can do this with mice is because of a of a precision editing machine like CRISPR.
But CRISPR is not just being used in research involving animals. There's more at stake here than accidentally creating a Superman. It's being used in humans and sentiments surrounding the research are mixed. On the one hand, clinical trials for patients with a type of inherited blindness are promising, with tiny CRISPR changes allowing them to distinguish between light and dark. And then the other, we have studies like the one in China in which a researcher genetically altered twin embryos with HIV positive parents to be HIV resistant. HIV chosen not so much out of fear of the disease itself, but because the social stick. Against HIV in China negatively affects marriage pros. Studies like these. Are not favored so highly even in China. The researcher was given three years in prison.
These experiments have been routinely condemned around the world for ethical violations, one of which is that the technology that he used was not safe and is not safe for for that kind of human deployment. We're not even sure he was able to correct the HIV resistance gene that he said he was going to. Create and we don't know the long term effects of the technology that he deployed on these on these girls. Now hopefully we will never really know who and where they are. Are we know their names? Lulu and Nana. But we we don't know where they are and I hope we never find out who who they are, because otherwise we're going to be. They're going to be getting pigs. Ham. Human hamsters for the rest of their lives. And and that that's not something that we should do with them. We should allow them to live their lives. But I think the concern with those experiments is that we increase their propensity for their vulnerability. Other diseases, especially cancer, and that's a huge concern.
And that's the real problem for Father Nick. Nor really, that all of us should have with this research. It's all of the unknowns. In particular, he takes exception to the kind of cells that were altered in this study. Germ line cells. You see, if you want to use CRISPR to make changes, you can either change only the somatic cells. The cells that affect only the patient in front of you or you can change germ line cells. The cells involved in reproduction. Changes at this level affect not only the patient in front of you, but every person who might come from this genetic line. You change what can be inherited and in that way your experiment is not only on this subject in front of you, but on every generation to come good or bad. We have no way of knowing what the ramifications of something like that might be.
We are incapable of doing the risk benefit analysis for gene editing of future generations. It is a core principle in in ethics and bioethics especially. That you can't do something unless you know the risks and the benefits of what it is that you're going to do, especially medicine. So you you can see this, right? They're going to. If you before you give consent for a medical procedure, they'll tell you why they're doing it. They're going to tell you why what the risks are. And you are asked to decide. And give informed consent the nature of germline editing and germline editing is the editing of future generations. Future persons is that we've never been able to do that. We've never we don't know what the risks are. Because we have not done that done that yet. And so I think that to endorse germ line editing is like endorsing a new drug that you have never done a clinical trial on. And we know that would be deeply unethical. I mean we're we're we're we're facing that question with the vaccine technology that we have in hand, no one is going to give you know, no one is going to take a vaccine. Unless they know the risks, and yet we're saying that we can expose future generations, our children and our grandchildren to those risks, even though we don't know what those those risks are.
We don't know. Risks and. We won't know the risks unless we choose to decide for a future generation. So in the end, where does that leave us? Father Nikanor does not seem to be as down on the research as I might have expected of the Catholic priest. Actually, he seems pretty optimistic.
I think you know somatic cell gene editing, which is the editing of adult bodies, adult adults, as long as it's safe, as long as the benefits outweigh the risks, we should be able. To use them.
Think of all the heritable conditions out there. Patients and their families who courageously jump over hurdles, endure interminable uncertainty and prey through the trials of genetic illnesses. If we could really lift their burdens and treat these conditions by sniffing out the bad genes and replacing them with healthy ones, what might that mean?
No.
Could we do that without sacrificing some greater good? When we literally can change the structure, that makes us up, can we keep hold of those things that make us?
Well.
That's next time on brave new. Us.
Well, we will. We will be will.
And what is so striking, too, is that our politics has gotten so polarized that the other person is not simply wrong. The other person is evil. And so that and you know, that's the difficulty when you perceive that the other person is not a human being, a a son or daughter of our Heavenly Father, who is also struggling with the truth. What ends up happening is the other one is perceived to be an agent of evil, whose main purpose in life is to destroy everything that you value and and are living for.
This clip is from our full interview with Father Nick Noor. To listen to this and all the other full interviews from brave new US, visit our Patreon. Special thanks today to Mackenzie Kim, Lauren Klingman, and Jessica Gearhart. Is our recording artist and listen to her music on Spotify. As always, this episode is written and produced by me, Samantha Stephenson. Please don't forget to rate and review this podcast. Share it with someone who will love it as much as you did. God bless and thank you for listening.
Will be. Well, will be. Well, well, and I will be well and I will be well, will be well, we will be well. All will be well and all will be well and all will be well. Will be. Well, will be well and I will be well and I will be well. Will be well and I will be well and all will be well.