Book Review – As Gods: A Moral History Of The Genetic Age By Matthew Cobb
As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age is precisely what its title claims it to be. Biologist Matthew Cobb (The Idea of the Brain) has examined both the potential and dangers of genetic engineering and has created a history of the world’s inept attempts to appropriately regulate the new science.
As Gods functions as a warning, but not a hysterical one. As Cobb points out, humans have been changing nature since the dawn of agriculture. Since the 1953 discovery by James Watson and Francis Crick of the double helix structure of DNA (the stuff of genes), matters have gotten both more promising and more dicey than they were for thousands of years before. In 1972 at Stanford University, scientists successfully added a mammalian virus to DNA taken from the E. coli bacterium. “Recombinant DNA technology” has since taken off, altering medicine impressively, all the while conjuring up hellish images from Frankenstein and Jurassic Park.
The fears of biology used as engineering are not ridiculous warns Cobb. As Gods is a meticulous history of the astonishing medical benefits that genetic engineering has enabled and of the cultural and political reactions to those benefits. Fearing monsters (or monster-like germs), geneticists have called four times for a halt to further work so that appropriate containment facilities and protocols can be developed. Four times those calls have met with paltry responses from the National Institutes of Health and other regulatory agencies. Even today, there are no worldwide, enforceable guidelines for scientists about how to work or what projects are ethically appropriate to pursue. In 2018, a Chinese scientist surprised the world by announcing that he’d secretly ignored guidelines prohibiting experiments with humans and manipulated the DNA of human embryos, producing two baby girls “designed” not to inherit their father’s HIV. (There are safer ways medically to lessen the danger of inheriting HIV.) No one knows what that particular scientist’s tampering will prove to have done to the girls’ health long-term — or to their fertility or their children’s health.
As Matthew Cobbs points out in As Gods, with that Chinese scientist’s flouting of rules, the genie of recombinant DNA technology escaped the magic lamp in which a laattice of milquetoast regulations and agreements were supposed to contain it. What’s needed now are sensible and enforceable rules about how to harvest the potential of genetic engineering while staving off disaster. As Gods is an excellent and occasionally harrowing guide to the past and future of that science. The book is not a scare story. It is masterfully told history of awe-inspiring success — and too lax regulations. As such, it offers a clear-eyed, well-researched view of the pitfalls and promise of a necessary new technology.
Historian and biologist Matthew Cobb is a professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester. He is the author of six books: The Idea of the Brain, Life’s Greatest Secret, Generation, The Resistance, Eleven Days in August, and Smell: A Very Short Introduction.
As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age
By Matthew Cobb
Basic Books
ISBN 978-1541602854
November 2022
