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The moral issues arising from the work of Dr He Jiankui, who claims to have genetically ‘edited’ two twin baby girls, have been much explored. The use of gene editing techniques to produce designer human beings offends against some very basic moral instincts about the foundations of human life. How was consent established in this case? And what provision can possibly be made for the unknown unknowns of introducing into the human gene pool genetic mutations that may have unwelcome long-term consequences?
These are important questions. But I have another. Does the work of He Jainkui herald the beginning of the end of the “scientific community” – that self-regulating body of collective expertise that supervises the work of global science?
In conversation with the astronomer Sir Martin Rees for my new podcast series, Confessions, the other day, he spoke of his fear that future science will become increasingly deregulated. And that in the global village of future science, there will inevitably be more ‘village idiots’ who do their own thing. In other words, as some scientific techniques get so much cheaper to reproduce, and as massive computing power is available in our own bedrooms, the threat of rogue science becomes ever-greater.
A few days after the work was made public, He gave a presentation to the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong. He received a decidedly chilly reception. The organisers denounced the “unexpected and deeply disturbing” intervention, and called for closer supervision of genetic experimentation. “Even if the modifications are verified, the procedure was irresponsible and failed to conform with international norms,” they said.
The chair of the Hong Kong summit, David Baltimore, called the episode “a failure of self-regulation by the scientific community”. As he managed to conduct his work outside the framework of the scientific community, He may be the first of Rees’s scientific ‘village idiots’.
The very idea of a scientific community was grounded in organisations such as the Royal Society. Founded in 1660, under a Royal Charter from Charles II, members would meet to conduct experiments and share knowledge. From its beginnings, science was an establishment business. Before it was professionalised, the scientific community had its origins in the clubs and societies of a well-heeled intelligentsia. And many members were what we might now call amateur scientists.
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