Human nature has designed and provided us with a biological structure that is complex, multifunctional and perfectly adaptable to enormous amounts of changes in the external environment. Our physical vehicle functions, in almost all cases, with a precision unmatched in all systems known or designed by man, and we possess a multitude of mechanisms that facilitate every component of the body we use that allows us to literally be alive in this “earthly” experience.
Exploring our genomic programming
This, however, may be changing. Since we learned how to decode the genomic sequence in 2016 and have been understanding how our DNA works, we have been able to make changes to it on a small scale. This was made possible by the Human Genome Project, an international scientific research project with the fundamental goal of determining the sequence of chemical base pairs that make up DNA and identifying and mapping the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in the human genome from a physical and functional point of view.
On this basis, CRISPR technology has been developed, which allows us to alter or modify a specific gene for small mutations or programmed changes that can eliminate some type of genetic problem, change or alter some characteristic in our double helixes and, in general, help us to understand much better how our organism works and the programs and codes that are at the basis of its management.
As we learn more and more, and as we can fully and deeply understand which gene controls which part of the body, or if by changing any part of our DNA we can alter a part of the organism, we will be closer to being able to modify our entire physiological vehicle to levels not known to human science in all the years of its existence.
Biohacking and genetic manipulation
Biohacking, the processes, techniques and protocols by which one tests oneself in the organism to alter one’s own DNA for experimental purposes, is beginning to boom, and the manipulation of embryos so that they develop in a certain way has already been in the news, especially due to experiments with babies in some laboratories. The most notorious of these cases was that of the Chinese scientist He Jiankui, who was later arrested for violating the Chinese law on genetic experimentation, but there may be other similar cases of which we are not aware. This type of experiments are produced to avoid genetic problems inherited from parents, or so that they could choose a certain feature of the body of their future children, and began to be tested to try to obtain changes in the genetic sequence that will lead us to have the body with a configuration more in line with the desired by oneself, and not so much at the whim of the genes inherited from our previous generations.
Although this field of knowledge is a novelty and something far from the reach of most people on the planet, it is a social movement that is gaining more and more strength especially in the United States, where it began years ago by providing a simple DNA analysis through websites that could give you a description of the same based on a test that they did with a sample that you sent them. The DNA decoding techniques and programs that were developed in the preceding decades and that led us to the achievement of being able to decipher the programmatic and tremendously complex pattern of the proteins and chemicals that form us have made companies like 23andMe, MyHeritage DNA or 24Genetics, more and more popular.
Will we set limits to this scientific progress?
How far are we going to be able to take this? In other words, are we going to be able to literally manipulate our DNA with techniques that will be increasingly understandable and easy to apply and will be within the reach of a growing number of people? Everything points to this being the case. In other words, everything points to the fact that scientific progress and advances in genetics and bioengineering are leading us irremediably towards a society that, within a few decades, will be able to choose a large number of physical parameters of the body to “use”, and, therefore, there will be “fashions” with respect to how we want our organic vehicle to be.
This is something that escapes us right now. The understanding of what this means is beyond the implications we can imagine. The human body a la carte? No, we are not there yet, still far away if you will, but on the way to achieving it, because we only need to learn how to change the color of our eyes at will, something we already more or less know how to do, although it is not publicized with too much enthusiasm by the social movement that is against it, or that we know how to eliminate a gene that brings some genetically inherited defect, or that we can inhibit some unwanted characteristic or find a way to activate another one, etc.
All this is already in the hands of the techniques produced and developed by the world’s most advanced bioengineering laboratories and companies, and, as such, it is only a matter of time before their methods and products come onto the market with greater or lesser speed depending on the resistance and the time it takes to find a suitable business niche for them.
A new and untapped market niche
This market, as things stand at the moment, exists, but it is semi-occult. There are parents who do not want their future children to have a certain gene that they do have in a certain way, who want them to have a certain hair or eye color, who want to inhibit some physiological trait so that it disappears from the following generations, etc. There are many reasons, some of them ethical and with a “moral” basis behind or health or concern or simply aesthetics.
In other cases, the experiments to get this right can also sow much concern in society if they were made public, because touching the human genome leads many people’s minds to situations that so far we have only seen in the movies and in scary movies and series. But we only have to take a look at the series West World of the HBO production company and we will understand what we are, as a society, going to build in the future. On the one hand, the modification of the human genome itself to change something in the organism we have or want in our children. On the other hand, the ability to manufacture ourselves biological and human bodies with a certain characteristic directly by programming the genome and working with its sequencing and alteration to create the perfect physical vehicle, or, at least, perfect for what we want to do with it.
A new generation of “Captain America”
Will we be able to create perfect soldiers – a “Captain America” style based on a standard genomic configuration? Or how about an army of clones all with the same strength, speed, endurance and skill? Again, it’s a movie thing, because humanity is not yet at that level of development, or maybe it is, but only those in the elite of knowledge in genetics and bioengineering, but there is no doubt that when the technology exists, humans always use it, and there is no other way for genetic manipulation than testing to change everything that can be changed. Now we limit ourselves to hair color, to cure a disease or to change the shade of the iris, but who is going to stop here when you know you can change anything else and you know how?
What we want to say is that never until now has the human being stopped for moral or conscience reasons in the face of technological progress. If we have atomic technology, we create a bomb as well as power plants to give us energy, if we have genetic technology, we save lives by curing diseases but we can create bodies completely at our whim and desire, or combine all this and create human beings programmed from birth for a certain function. None of this is bad or good per se, in the sense that knowledge is still knowledge, it’s just that not everyone is going to be aware of how it will be applied to both ends of the equation.
Social movements against, and technology for it
There are already social movements against the genetic manipulation of human beings, although we are all aware that we have manipulated and continue to manipulate plants, so no one worries about transgenic corn or seedless tomatoes anymore. The same with animals, so we can clone sheep or manipulate mice to change their entire genetic structure. No moral conviction or law can end up prohibiting everything learned from being tested on humans, as is done on a small scale in very specific cases as we mentioned at the beginning.
And the fact is that, in this type of business, there is a lot of money at stake. There is a lot of money invested in the research, and in the expensive laboratory apparatus and equipment, and, therefore, the big companies will want to recoup it somehow at some point, offering “low negative impact” products to the public, such as curing some disease or altering some minor characteristic in the organism, so that we get used to the fact that the human body can be changed and manipulated as much as a tomato or corn in a few decades. It is only a matter of a few thousand more genes to study and a little more complex to carry out, but it is still possible.
Improved” humans
This, then, brings us to another issue. Let’s imagine 30 years from now that what we now put as “starting” is the norm and something completely accepted by society. Will we still consider ourselves “human” as we do now if we can choose the type of body we want and the shape and characteristics of it, and if many of those bodies are born in laboratories to do some functions that the rest of us no longer want to do? That era of posthumanity by genetic manipulation is another sci-fi nightmare, but I think fiction has shown us that everything in the common psyche that ends up being reflected in a movie somewhere in our world is being researched, being carried out, or being implemented. It doesn’t have to reflect exactly what the series or movie shows us, what we mean is that if it is in the collective imagination, humanity always finds or forces a way for that to become a reality, even if it is many decades away in our linear view of progress.
Genetic modifications to go into space?
Once we normalize the manipulation of the physical body, another barrier will have fallen in our civilization, and there are companies and governments that are looking for a way to make us drop this barrier because there are very ambitious plans that may require these techniques and genetic manipulations. Imagine the human being wanting to conquer other planets, or at least, to be somewhat more modest, to explore them. What if we could genetically alter our astronauts to make a much easier journey to Mars or any other point in the solar system? What if we could change some characteristics for those who are going to spend months in orbit to make them more easily accustomed to weightlessness or to the conditions of our satellite, our space stations, our rockets or our manned missions to other planets, when we are in a position to do them?
Then it will make sense, many groups opposed to it now will say, because there will be a reason to create people with certain characteristics, because they are going to spend many months in space, maybe years, and live in conditions different from those on Earth. And when those genetically enhanced people reproduce and have genetically superior children, will that be accepted as well? Then we will already have a tiny part of the genetically improved population and their descendants as well, while the rest of us will continue to suffer from our diseases and aging and “expiration” processes that this “improved” part may have managed to solve.
What will the rest of humanity do? It will surely ask itself why it cannot possess the same characteristics and potentials as those who were designed to go to the stars, and, in this way, the demand for treatments for genetic alteration will begin, and, if it develops enough, biohacking so that it can be self-applied and put into practice by oneself. In short, a spiral leading to an “enhanced” posthumanity, which again, sounds like fiction to us now, but will not be in a few decades given the genetic development and dynamics that are developing in this area of scientific research.
A paradigm shift in our species
Again, we cannot judge now whether that will be good or bad. We will simply be different. And being different is not negative either, it is just that, change. A radical change in our civilization that can allow enormous advances in many aspects and that a part of the scientific community sees with good eyes, others see with rejection and others still do not understand what they are being asked.
Public opinion is still “green” in this sense. The majority rejects the alteration of the genome only for aesthetic or whimsical reasons of parents with money, on the other hand, they approve of this same alteration for “humanitarian” and health reasons, so it is more a moral question than a scientific one that will determine the rate at which we will have genetic self-altering kits at home or that the new generations will be “improved” as a matter of course, for lack of a better term.
We will need to grow as a society in awareness and responsibility as well as in scientific and genetic knowledge to be able to deal with this fundamental change at the root of our species, which is to be able to alter the DNA codes and information that make us who we are. When we have understood the implications of this, and if we manage to make the debate global and public, perhaps we will be able to control the race to achieve the “post-human” before companies embark on massive modification for the high economic impact it brings them, but do so outside public scrutiny, and without the supervision of international bodies or regulators to control what is manipulated, created or modified.
Nobody wants to see an army of clones invading the neighboring country by one country to obtain its natural resources, nor a generation of long-lived, healthy human beings without any “defect” next to billions who die of degeneration, disease or physical problems that can be corrected only by turning on or off a gene in our DNA.
It will be a long debate, and we will have to expand awareness and information about it much sooner than we expect. Let’s see how far society can control or manage it without it becoming a problem for our entire species and the humanity we represent.
