CRISPR

As a voracious reader, I would check out a stack of books from the local library and finish them before renewal limits. Getting close to the end of the year, I get even more suggestion from the best books of the year. Not surprisingly, those selected books have an unparalled level of popularity. So much so that I won't be allowed to renew the books, which have already been reserved by dozens of readers.

That means I have to finish The Code Breaker within two weeks of borrowing this Walter Isaacson must-read. That is a gripping account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna discovered the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR. A tool even more thrilling than the Apple product of Steve Jobs.

When we open the box of an iPhone, we have the tactile experience to set the tone for how we perceive the product. When Doudna broke the code of CRISPR, she opened a Pandora's box. It's not just a matter of switching off the defective gene causing Huntington's disease. In addition to offer the prospect of curing an inherited neurodegenerative condition, it might be used to edit out a defective gene which would otherwise severely reduce body height. That seems ethical and reasonable, as most of us would think. But what about a genetic edit that could add eight inches to a kid's height? Should we allow CRISPR to be used on a boy who would otherwise be under five feet tall to turn him into someone of average height? Well, as if the slope is not slippery enough, let's take another step to ponder the use on a boy who would otherwise be average height to make him six-foot-five?

To make this thought experiment even more interesting, Walter Isaacson raised the key difference between an absolute improvement and a positional improvement. Increased height, when we think about it carefully, is a positional one. Walter Isaacson dubbed it the standing-on-tiptoes problem. Imagine yourself standing in the middle of a crowded room. To see what's going on in the front, you stand on your tiptoes. This trick works. But then everyone else around you do the same. They all get two inches higher. Then nobody in the room, including you, sees any better than the people in the front row.

Uh-oh.