The commission came from Jiemian (for reprints, please contact Jiemian); when it was published, the title was changed to “Gene Technology and the Disappearance of Human Gratitude and Awe,” and the content was hardly altered.
It is said that when my mother was pregnant with me, she heard some folk remedy from somewhere, saying that if she wanted my skin to be a bit fairer, she should eat watermelon every day. The result was that this remedy clearly had no effect; after eating dozens of watermelons, she still gave birth to me dark and sturdy…
Wanting one’s child to be smart, beautiful, and healthy is every parent’s wish. In order for children to be born better, parents are also willing to do many things: seek out folk remedies or eat properly, “seal off the mountains and foster the forests,” go for regular prenatal checkups, engage in fetal education, do health exercises, and so on. Some of these things are “scientific,” some are not; some are effective, some ineffective. But all of them are efforts people make in order to “reproduce better.”
Recently, Associate Professor He Jiankui also helped a couple make such an “effort”: he used gene-editing technology to perform an operation on embryos for HIV immunity, and the birth of the two baby girls caused a sensation.
He Jiankui’s actions were of course wrong. Under the current technical conditions and the present international ethical environment, this operation is unquestionably unacceptable; there is not much more to say on that point. But the issue is that He Jiankui has opened a door for humanity—using gene-editing technology to “customize” human babies: He Jiankui may be without precedent, but it is hard to say there will be no successors.
Beyond condemning He Jiankui, we need to prepare for this approaching trend: under what circumstances, and to what extent, can the use of gene-editing technology in human reproduction be accepted?
The first question worth pondering is: what, exactly, is the difference between my mother’s “eat watermelon” plan and He Jiankui’s gene-editing plan? Both are technological aids adopted for the sake of better reproduction; is the difference merely that the latter is more effective and more precise?
Heidegger discussed the difference between modern technology and ancient technology: what is the difference between a riverside waterwheel and a hydroelectric station that blocks an entire river? The key lies in the fact that the hydroelectric station carries out a “double exploitation” of the river. Before the river’s flow is actually used to drive generators, and even before the power station has actually been built, the river has already been “reserved” by the power station; it is grasped in advance as “resource” or “energy.” Before actual development, all of its potential has already been “developed”; what the actual power station has to do is merely seize that energy which has long since been pre-customized. Apart from what has been pre-developed, the river offers no additional gifts; apart from the pre-booked energy, too much or too little is just a nuisance. A waterwheel, by contrast, does not cut off the river entirely—not in reality, nor in thought—and so the river’s mystery and possibility are not stripped away; therefore nature still remains something worthy of gratitude or awe.
I am not advocating any romantic return to ancient society, just as Heidegger also consistently emphasized: modern technology is our destiny, and in any case we have no choice but to bear it. But the point is that, aside from merely drifting with the current, we always hope to understand our own situation, to understand the transformations of this age.
“The gifts of Heaven” is almost an ancient phrase. Modern people have brought nature under total control, hoping only that nature will provide us, according to the requirements pre-set by modern technology, with neither too much nor too little resource; beyond that, we do not want any accidents to cause trouble. So there is no longer any need for feelings such as gratitude for nature’s gifts or awe at nature’s caprice.
The last remaining shelter for the idea of “gifts from Heaven” in the modern world may be the field of reproduction. Even the most “modern” parents are still happy to regard their children as “gifts from Heaven.” The birth and growth of children are always supposed to be under the parents’ “careful nurturing,” not “precise control.” Like ancient people who guarded forests or rivers, parents have hopes for their children and make demands, but they do not expect total, preemptive control. The accidents and unpredictability in a child sometimes make parents anxious, and sometimes bring them surprise.
And the intervention of gene technology marks the fact that even this last “gift” now faces the danger of disappearing.
As for He Jiankui personally, his greatest mistake lay in rashly conducting experiments on human beings when the technology was not yet mature and the risks therefore could not be controlled. But with regard to the disappearance of “gifts,” the real crisis is precisely that one must wait until the technology becomes extremely precise, reaching the point where accidents can be comprehensively controlled.
Compared with “eat watermelon,” the greatest difference with gene editing lies in this extremely precise “pre-control.” When this little dark-skinned me was born, my mother at most would complain a few times about how unreliable the folk remedy was; she would never think that my birth had gone wrong. The desire for a “fairer” child, like the ancients’ hope for “favorable weather and timely rain,” is not a matter of “pre-customization”; it does not point to a clear and definite specific outcome. No matter how I turned out, in my mother’s eyes I was a gift. Ancient technology always left room for a spirit of tolerance toward accidents and gratitude for surprises. But when gene-editing technology can achieve 99.9 percent precision, will parents still feel the same tolerance or gratitude toward their children?
Of course, we need not despair either. In fact, people’s understanding of parent-child relations varies greatly across different eras and environments. The ideas of my generation and my parents’ generation are already very different, and the parents of the next generation will in turn be different from us; that hardly seems worth making a fuss over. But on the other hand, our anxieties and reflections are also necessary. The future will certainly be different from the past, but exactly how it will differ remains to be guided and shaped by our generation. After the disappearance of “gifts,” what attitude should we take toward welcoming new life? That remains unresolved to this day.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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