Where will evolution take us in the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
1. In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, new gene editing tools are likely to overtake biological evolution
In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, “satisfactory” may no longer be the status quo. We are now witnessing the most revolutionary stage of evolution, when we give up evolving by biology alone. With new life sciences tools such as CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, we are now able to reshape genomes and alter biological form and function.
The quest for human perfection through gene editing has already begun. In November 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui claimed to have created the world’s first gene-edited babies. In June 2019, Russian scientist Denis Rebikov announced similar plans to edit the DNA of human embryos to confer immunity to HIV. These developments present new ethical challenges and have triggered calls for a global moratorium on heritable gene editing.
The potential to accelerate and direct the course of biological evolution raises further questions, the most urgent of which is how to manage collateral changes to the environment. Such concerns have led the European Union’s highest court, the Court of Justice, to rule in July 2018 that gene-edited crops should be subject to the same stringent regulations as conventional genetically modified organisms.
Plant breeders and scientists have called the EU ruling overly rigid, as it requires all CRISPR-Cas9 food to go through a lengthy approval process, essentially grinding agricultural gene editing research to a halt.
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