When Stephen Hsu talks about the future, you think you're in a science fiction movie.
Sex, so predicts the co-founder of a company called "Genomic Prediction", will soon no longer serve the reproduction. To father children instead becomes the task of science. "When the technologies are mature, we can produce a single embryo and make any changes we want."
The worrying: Hsu does not appear in a science fiction movie, but in a documentary. The US-American production "Human Nature", which has been running in German cinemas since Thursday, traces one of the greatest scientific revolutions of this decade: the discovery of the Crispr-Cas gene scissors. With the help of this protein complex researchers can selectively cut through genome sections, and then delete pieces or use desired sequences.
Clever, tall, strong kids on order?
Doctors hope to heal, for example, serious hereditary diseases that are based on a single spelling mistake in DNA. But the technology can potentially also be used to create designer babies: especially bright, tall or strong kids. Human Nature explores just how justified concerns are over a genetically optimized world.
Human Nature - The Crispr Revolution (USA, 2019). Director: Adam Bolt. Duration: 91 minutes.
The filmmakers visited many of the scientists who were directly involved in the discovery of the common secers. They trace their history back to the nineties, when a Spanish microbiologist discovered a strange gene sequence in bacteria and called it "Crispr". It took two decades before a global community of scientists deciphered the mechanism behind the Crispr-Cas protein complex. The film explores the impact of Crispr-Cas in a - for a documentary - unusual depth, but thanks to many illustrations even for amateurs understand.
More about Crispr
On a journey through various laboratories and to US startups, the film authors show that not only reproductive medicine has recognized the potential of the gene scissors. Other researchers are working on pigs, for example, which, thanks to Crispr, will serve as donors for human organs, or even on the resurrection of the mammoth. All at once, almost everything seems possible.
Here is explained, not taught
Even if the documentation sometimes loses itself in the promises of progress, and if a few locations less would have been good for them - one thing makes "Human Nature" right: The film wants to explain, not teach. He dispenses with the alarmist tone that often accompanies the debate on genetic manipulation and lets advocates and doubters speak at length.
More about genetic engineering and Crispr
"Why does not anyone realize we've heard the same objection for 50 years?" Asks bioethicist Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, referring to designer babies. "And the nightmares have not come true until today." On the other hand, the mother of a daughter born with albinism objects: "Where should one draw the line between the decision to have a child without albinism and that of making one's own child a few inches taller? send it as a rower to elite Yale University? "
Answers to these questions can not be provided by "Human Nature" either. Although researchers are still far from being able to model properties such as intelligence or body size, which are influenced simultaneously by tens of genes - and the environment. But scientists like Stephen Hsu leave no doubt that they want to use Crispr-Cas as soon as the function of the corresponding genes has been sufficiently researched. "Human Nature" makes it clear that the debate on new technology must not begin until scientists have broken taboos.
