I just read The Genesis Machine by Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel. I found it one of the most difficult reads that I can recall. I don’t mean that it is poorly written, it is not. I don’t mean that it is hard to understand, it is only mildly difficult to comprehend. What I mean is that I can’t stand the topic and the implications. Reading the book felt a little like watching a horror movie where you know that it is just going to keep getting worse and worse, finally ending in total disaster. Unfortunately, the disaster that seems to be at the end of the story involves the human race.

The book discusses the wonderful things that gene editing (via CRISPR and other tools) is accomplishing with regard to medical and agricultural advances. Truly amazing things are being done in the benefit of mankind (such as Golden Rice that was created by inserting chrysanthemum genes into rice dna to create rice that is high in vitamin A) – but with that amazing power for good comes an equally amazing risks. Not only are these tools being used to create new vaccines, to prevent genetic diseases before birth, “cure” a vast array of genetically related diseases but it is being used to create new organisms that would never come to pass through “normal” breeding processes because genes are being introduced from other species that would never be in the gene pool.

There is an amazing amount of “mix-and-matching” between species being done in laboratories around the world, and many new traits being introduced into species germ lines of species (including humans) that will propagate and mutate into the distant future. Brand new organisms are being created using artificial intelligence techniques putting together entirely new sequences of genetic codes – not cobbling together parts from difference species, but starting from scratch and making new life. Currently, all life seems to come from a common ancestor from billions of years ago. Now scientists are starting all over again, with a new man-made germ line. What could possibly go wrong?

Throughout the book there are comments along the lines of “this is great as long as it isn’t released into the wild”, or “we know the potential risks well enough to understand the cost/benefit assessments”, and “great harm could be done so we have to have regulations to keep people from doing these sorts of things.”

What could go wrong with something that has great power (including devastating bio-weapons)? All that there is between catastrophe and amazing benefits is people’s willingness to “play by the rules” instead of achieving great wealth and/or power, with the understanding that this all has to be error free with people never making any mistakes. The history of humanity isn’t very good with regard to abusing power, understanding all of the implications of a new development, and working error free. Over the past decade, there have already been many abuses, poor decisions, and mistakes with regard to gene editing activities. They will continue – there is zero chance of controlling them.

So now that we have let that particular genie out of the bottle, we can only wait to find out just how bad things can become when “what could go wrong” – does. I see no possible path around multiple catastrophes at an ever-increasing frequency. It is easy to predict some of the “what could go wrong” scenarios (such as release of a new super-covid type pandemic), the accidental destruction of entire species that turn out to have important beneficial roles in the environment, and many others. However, there are also many unknown unknowns that we will discover – with the disclaimer of “who would have thought of that?”, or “nobody would do a thing like that.” We are going to learn a lot of new lessons – I really hope it works out for our descendants, but I think they have yet another earth shattering set of problems to attempt to solve.

These kinds of true stories really leave me in a gloomy state of mind. What idiots people are. The list of mankind’s insanity just keeps getting longer as we get technologically more “advanced”.