She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity (66 page)

Jennifer Doudna's delight now began getting undercut by worry. CRISPR was turning out to be far more powerful than she had expected. Xingxu Huang, a geneticist at the Model Animal Research Center of Nanjing University in China, and his colleagues used CRISPR to alter three genes in monkey embryos. They implanted the embryos in a female monkey, and she
later gave birth to a pair of healthy twins. If the monkeys had offspring of their own, they'd inherit the CRISPR-altered genes, too.

A reporter sent Doudna an advance copy of the monkey paper in January 2014 for her comment. After she read it, she couldn't stop
wondering when the first experiments on human embryos would take place. And it was about then when
the nightmares started.

Sometimes Doudna dreamed she was back in Hawaii, where she had grown up, standing alone on a beach. She saw a low wave in the distance coming toward her, and after a while she realized that it was actually a tsunami. At first she was terrified, but then she found a surfboard and swam straight at the wave.

In another recurrent dream, a fellow scientist asked her to meet with someone very powerful. She went into a room. The powerful person turned out to be Hitler. In Doudna's dream, he had the face of a pig. He kept his back turned to Doudna as he jotted down notes.

“I want to understand the uses and implications of this amazing technology,” the pig-faced Hitler told her.

Doudna woke up with her heart pattering. What, she asked herself, have we done?

Doudna was hardly the only person getting visits from Hitler. In 2015, a reporter asked the inventor Elon Musk if he was considering getting into the business of reprogramming DNA. Musk is the sort of entrepreneur who blithely sets out to replace the world's fleet of gas-powered cars with electric ones while simultaneously building the first recyclable rockets. But gene editing gave him pause.

“How do you avoid
the Hitler Problem?” Musk asked in reply to the reporter's question. “I don't know.”

We must never forget Hitler's genocidal ideology. But we need to remember it for what it was, rather than wrap it around scientific advances that took place seventy years after he died. Hitler wanted Germany's scientists to conquer the future—to build the world's first atomic weapons, to
create the first computers. But when it came to biology, he wanted Nazi scientists to revive a mythical past. He had no need for new genes, because Aryans already had all the genetic superiority they could hope for.

The genetic nostalgia of the Nazis was so powerful that it even extended to other species. Hermann Göring, Hitler's most powerful deputy, became a patron of a project to restore the wild ancestors of cattle. Known as aurochs, these giant animals had become extinct in the Middle Ages. Under Göring's direction, zoologists searched Nazi-held countries for cows that seemed to retain a few
vestigial features of aurochs. They bred the cattle, looking among the calves for the ones that appeared to step even further back in time.

Göring's goal was to release the restored aurochs in Poland, where they would roam one of the last primeval European forests. He pictured himself as a modern Siegfried from Wagner's
Ring of the Nibelung
, hunting the same noble beasts as his Aryan ancestors. To clear the path for his romantic vision, Göring emptied the Polish forests of Jews, Polish resistance fighters, and Soviet partisans.

The Nazi plans for humanity followed the same lines. The Aryan bloodline needed to be protected, revived, and purified. Systematic murder would protect future generations of Aryans from inferior heredity. And planned pregnancies would concentrate more Aryan blood in future generations, just as breeding would turn cows back into their auroch ancestors. The Nazis even forced blond, blue-eyed people to join an association known as Lebensborn, designed to produce children to restore the Aryan race.

After Hitler's defeat, Nazism and other forms of white supremacy did not disappear. As science advanced, latter-day Nazis kept distorting it to feed their genetic nostalgia. They took genetic ancestry tests in the hopes of demonstrating that they were indeed white. “
Pretty pure damn blood,” one member of a computer forum called Stormfront crowed when he got his results. The myth of white purity has endured even after the study of ancient DNA has proven that Europeans have inherited genes from wave after wave of migrants—people with ancestries separated by tens of thousands of years of history, mixing their genes together. A fair number of other Nazis
discovered to their horror that they had some Jewish or African ancestry. They coped with the news either by dismissing the results as statistical noise or by arguing that all you need to do to know your past is look in the mirror—a kind of personal bald eagle test.

It's also a mistake to use Hitler as a label for all of eugenics. World War II and the horror of the Holocaust brought Hitler's particular version of eugenics to a halt. It also forced conservative forms of eugenics in places like the United States and Great Britain into retreat. But ever since Francis Galton coined the term, eugenics has taken on
many different forms, each shaped by the politics and cultures of the people espousing it. And after World War II, a progressive form of eugenics survived. It even rose to prominence. The leading voice for this so-called reform eugenics was a protégé of Thomas Hunt Morgan, the American-born biologist
Hermann Muller.

After Muller learned how to breed
Drosophila
flies in Morgan's lab at Columbia, he went to the University of Texas, where he used X-rays in the 1920s to create new mutations in the insects. He also came under the FBI's surveillance for advising a left-wing student newspaper that espoused suspicious goals such as social security for retired people, equal opportunity for women, and civil rights for African Americans. Muller grew disgusted by the American eugenics movement in the 1920s—its shoddy science, its push to sterilize the weak and ostracize immigrants—and became one of its most outspoken opponents.

In 1932, Muller was invited to speak at the Third International Eugenics Congress at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Charles Davenport and the other organizers of the meeting may have assumed he would limit his talk to his work on mutations in flies. To their horror, Muller planned instead to use his speech to burn the American eugenics movement to the ground. Davenport tried to get Muller to cut his talk, originally slated for an hour, down to fifteen minutes. Then he demanded it be cut to ten. Muller pushed back, accusing Davenport of trying to stifle dissent, and delivered his full address.

On August 23, Muller shocked his audience by condemning the idea
that poverty and crime in the United States were due to heredity. Only in a society where people's needs were met—where children could grow up in the same environments—could eugenicists ever hope to improve humanity. In a country as rife with inequality as the United States, eugenics could do nothing of the sort. Instead, Muller said, it simply fostered “
the naive doctrine that the economically dominant classes, races and individuals are genetically superior.”

Muller grew so disenchanted with conditions in the United States that he accepted an invitation to do research in Germany. But once he got there, he realized he had made a very bad choice. When Hitler became chancellor, Nazis raided the institution where Muller worked, and he worried that his socialist tendencies and Jewish roots could put his life at risk. Another invitation seemed to offer him a new refuge: Muller left for the Soviet Union, where he was asked to establish a genetics lab in Leningrad.

At first, Muller was happy there, working with Soviet students on groundbreaking research. But his timing turned out once again to be disastrous. A plant scientist named Trofim Lysenko rose to prominence by arguing that genetics was a fraud, and that heredity was as malleable as clay. Muller took on Lysenko in a public debate, but the audience of three thousand scientists and farmers shouted him down. When Stalin began arresting and executing scientists, Muller fled the Soviet Union.

He went to Spain to serve as a doctor in the civil war and then traveled to Scotland to teach at the University of Edinburgh. Finally, in 1940, Muller returned to the United States. There he found stability at last, becoming a professor at Indiana University. His work on mutations had proven to be some of the most important research in modern biology, and in 1946, Muller was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on mutations. Not long after, he was elected the first president of the newly created American Society of Human Genetics. Now one of the most prominent scientists in the postwar United States, Muller made the most of his fame by promoting his own vision for social progress.

With the fall of Nazi Germany, Muller believed, the fallacies of its eugenics were exposed. But, he warned his fellow scientists, “
it is by no means
all dead and buried yet, but represents a continuing peril, to be vigilantly guarded against by all serious students of human genetics.” Muller urged a fight against American eugenicists—“racist propagandists,” as Muller called them—who would try to smuggle their old ideology into postwar genetics.

But Muller also used his newfound megaphone to call for a different kind of eugenics. “Eugenics, in the better sense of the term, ‘the social direction of human evolution,' is a most profound and important subject,” he said.

In his research on mutations, Muller had made an important discovery: From one generation to the next, a species can become burdened with a growing load of mutations. Every new offspring may spontaneously gain new mutations, most of which will be fairly harmless. But added together, they could create diseases and lower fertility. In the wild, natural selection eliminated many of these new mutations. In our own species, Muller worried that our mutation load would become dangerously large. Thanks to medicine and other advances, natural selection had grown weak in humans, unable to strip out many harmful mutations from the gene pool.

It was naive to deny the existence of humanity's mutational load, Muller argued, but it was even more naive to try to blame it on some despised race, or on people with some form of intellectual disability. “None of us can cast stones,” Muller said, “
for we are all fellow mutants together.”

Still, something had to be done—something beyond “
making the best of human nature as it is, the while allowing it to slide genetically downhill, at an almost imperceptible pace in terms of our mortal time scale, hoping trustfully for some miracle in the future,” Muller said.

Muller had a plan. He called it “Germinal Choice.”

Traditionally, children could inherit genes only from people who had sex. But in the mid-1900s, sexless reproduction slowly began to emerge. Animal breeders had led the way,
perfecting the art of artificial insemination. A prize bull could father countless calves without ever leaving his stanchion. Once breeders figured out how to safely freeze semen, bulls began fathering calves long after their deaths.

Doctors quietly started imitating veterinarians, using donated sperm to help couples when the husband was infertile. When the practice came to light, it was roundly condemned. The pope declared donor insemination adultery. In a 1954 divorce case, an Illinois judge ruled that a child produced by donated sperm was born out of wedlock. But the practice grew more common, and less controversial. By 1960, about fifty thousand children in the United States had been conceived with donated sperm.

Muller's Germinal Choice plan would turn artificial insemination into a national—perhaps even global—campaign against the mutation load. The sperm from the finest specimens of manhood would be collected and stored away in subterranean freezers, to protect their DNA from radiation and cosmic rays. The sperm from a single man could theoretically produce hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children. In the 1950s, eggs were proving harder for scientists to handle than sperm, but Muller was optimistic that, at some point, the underground germ-cell bunkers could store samples from superior women as well.

The public would then be educated about the coming mutational catastrophe and be invited to use the superior eggs and sperm to build their own families. Forward-minded couples would appreciate the scale of the threat and be the first to step forward. To avoid any awkward encounters with the biological parents, Muller would offer gametes only from people who had been dead for twenty years.

The volunteers would have to be ready to withstand the ignorant mockery of others. But as they raised their obviously glorious children—with the “innate quality of such men as Lenin, Newton, Beethoven, and Marx,” Muller promised—other parents would follow in their path. “
They will form a growing vanguard that will increasingly feel more than repaid by the day-by-day manifestations of their solid achievements, as well as by the profound realization of the value of the service they are rendering,” Muller predicted.

Muller's Germinal Choice plan was met with nods and curiosity. Leading scientific journals asked him to write about it. Conferences invited him to speak. Newspapers and magazines ran interviews with him. Muller's fellow Nobelists considered Germinal Choice a step in the right direction.

For all its science-fiction luster, however, Muller's Germinal Choice was still a fairly traditional form of eugenics. It was what Francis Galton had called for in the nineteenth century, an imitation of what animal and plant breeders had been doing for centuries: combining existing genetic variations into better arrangements that could be inherited by descendants. Germinal Choice didn't require rewriting genes. Apparently, that was too much even for Hermann Muller to imagine.

While Muller's vision of a public Germinal Choice program never came to pass, a private version did. Sperm banks emerged from the shadows, taking on not just married heterosexual couples but single women and lesbian couples as well. By the early 2000s, over a million children had been born with donated sperm in the United States alone. While sperm banks tended to keep their donors anonymous, they allowed customers to pick men based on certain traits—traits, it must be said, that probably don't get transmitted in the chemistry packed inside a sperm cell.