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by Rylan Hoffius
In the modern age, we hold the power to change the face of our planet, split an atom in two, and even change our own genome. Genetic modification technology holds great promise for reducing suffering and inheritable disorders, including mental illness. The ethical and medical ramifications are immense and complex to say the least, but one question that seems unanswered is would there be negative effects from removing these genes. Today we will examine at whether there is a correlation between increased creativity and mental illness. First, what is creativity? According to renowned psychologist, Carl Jung creativity is the capacity to produce both novel (original) and adaptable (functional) ideas. Creativity is something fundamental to our species, and something most people have to learn. Some however are believed to be born with an inclination towards being creative. Genetic diversity is widely accepted as an important part of the survival and success of a species, with variations in populations allowing for the species to survive changes in the environment and react to differing conditions. This also applies to phenotypes and neurodiversity. Differences in neurons mean more unique ways of looking at the world, meaning solutions are achieved faster, and people are better at occupying different niches in society. So how does neurodiversity, and mental illness play into traits like creativity? Are things like schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar disorder an evolutionary advantage that occur from natural selection, are they random and negative mutations that are being selected against, or something in between? “In a recent report based on a 40-year study of roughly 1.2 million Swedish people, Simon Kyaga and colleagues found that with the exception of bi-polar disorder, those in scientific and artistic occupations were not more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders. So full-blown mental illness did not increase the probability of entering a creative profession (even the exception, bi-polar disorder, showed only a small effect of 8%). What was striking, however, was that the siblings of patients with autism and the first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and anorexia nervosa were significantly overrepresented in creative professions (Scientific American).” What this suggests is that certain genetic traits related to mental illness act like the heterozygotic advantage of those with sickle cell, meaning that people who are homozygous dominant are unaffected, and people who are homozygous recessive suffer the full fledge harms while those who are heterozygous experience the happy medium which allows for the gene to be preserved and carriers to reproduce. However, more research needs to be done on the subject, and the different mental illnesses seem to have different correlations, as well as differences between creative professions: such as writers having more personality disorders compared to other creative professions. In fact, most disorders on the autism spectrum seem to lower creativity and the ability to understand abstract concepts, part of the reason why those who have autism find difficulty with socialization and comprehension. While we have a lot to learn, the link between creativity and some forms of mental illness is real, with large ramifications for our society. We might find that if we edit our genome to remove these traits, we may find ourselves a whole lot less imaginative, creative, and able to solve the problems the world faces.
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by Kiran Jayasinghe
My twin sister and I are fraternal, and our differences, while slight, have always been rather apparent. My sister had a large gap between her two front teeth for most of her childhood, whereas I had a smile that barely needed the help of braces. I grew five extra inches, while she inherited our mother’s genes and stayed put at five feet. She maintained perfect eyesight, though mine has steadily declined since we were four. As we went through school and partook in sports and developed our own interests, even our smallest differences affected our character and experiences. Without them, we wouldn’t be who we are now. But I would be lying through my (straight) teeth if I said I didn’t want to change a few of my own traits. I believe we’ve all experienced the longing to change ourselves. To turn the color of our eyes into something deemed more ‘striking’, to transform our hair from straight to curly or curly to straight. Perhaps some of us have even wished for things like being genetically intelligent, or to have an affinity for math or art — anything society deems as valuable. The human need to conform to a popular or widely accepted standard is a societal trait that’s existed for ages, so the idea that we could easily change our traits to fit that standard has always been appealing. Naturally, then, the discovery of DNA and genes in the 1860’s by a relatively obscure physician was a beacon of hope for us (“Friedrich Miescher and the discovery of DNA”). If our defining characteristics were formed based off of instructions given by single genes, then by changing those genes, we could change our traits — pick and choose which ones we wanted, delete the ones we didn’t. And after decades of research, some genetically modified mice, food, and bacteria, we have developed the ability to gene-edit. For better or worse, the development of CRISPR technology in 2009 has made it infinitely easier to edit, add, or even erase the the human genome. The benefits of CRISPR and other gene-editing tools are virtually endless. The option to delete, switch, and edit genes means we could cure diseases such as sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer’s, and even many forms of cancer (“Don’t Edit The Human Germline”). CRISPR could — eventually — result in the complete erasure of all hereditary diseases. And we aren’t limited to editing just ourselves, either; we could edit other species and save them from extinction in the process. We could even bring back the already extinct. But with these benefits comes the question of whether CRISPR is entirely ethical. Since the point of CRISPR is to let us wipe out our ‘flaws’, CRISPR also gives us the power to determine what exactly those are. It gives us the ability to decide what we think is inferior and what we believe is desirable — and that is dangerous. If we deem a mental disorder as inferior and delete it from our genomes, we, firstly, are denoting people who have that disorder as lesser,, and also automatically ridding that particular perspective from society. Deleting disorders, diseases, and traits — especially in embryos — could rid crucial biological diversity from our population, which would weaken our society. “Expanding diversity in all its forms, including disability, strengthens the human community ethically and biologically because it opens the public and private sphere to a variety of perspectives, life experiences, ideas, and solutions to live together with mutual flourishing”, says Sandy Sufian and Rosemarie Garland-Thompson. While using gene-editing to treat life-threatening diseases could be revolutionary, we could also overstep and erase what makes us us. With shrinking diversity also comes increasing social inequity. We see this now with all types of modern-day technology — things like computers and phones and new medicines and treatments can only be accessed by those wealthy enough to afford it. With CRISPR, the rich would be at even more of an advantage — parents editing their child’s genes so they could become naturally more athletic, have a more symmetrical face, be a few inches taller. The rich would become genetically predisposed, and the poor would depend on luck only — or rather, natural genetics — to compete with the wealthier. It’s undeniable: gene-editing is the future of humanity, and that future is arriving remarkably fast. But determining how we handle these tools and the usage of CRISPR technology won’t come to us so quickly, and will be, perhaps, even harder than developing the actual tool, because the danger of CRISPR is CRISPR itself. Editing genes could save thousands of lives and ease the suffering of just as many. It could also set us on a path more akin to Hitler’s, leading us to a world filled with blue-eyed, blonde-haired individuals. We’ve already begun to draw some lines — for example, the majority of the scientific community and the NIH oppose the editing of human embryos, which means edited DNA would not pass down through the generations (nih.gov). To use CRISPR in an effective and ethical way, we as a society need to decide which of these lines to cross — because once we do, we can’t cross back. Works Cited Dahm, Ralf. “Friedrich Miescher and the Discovery of DNA.” Developmental Biology, Academic Press, 21 Dec. 2004, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012160604008231?via%3Dihub Lanphier, E., Urnov, F., Haecker, S. et al. Don’t edit the human germ line. Nature 519, 410–411 (2015)]. https://doi.org/10.1038/519410a Sufian, Sandy, and Rosemarie Garland-Thompson. “The Dark Side of CRISPR.” Scientific American, Scientific American, 16 Feb. 2021 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dark-side-of-crispr/ “Statement on NIH Funding of Research Using Gene-Editing Technologies in Human Embryos.”National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 28 Nov. 2018, https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/statement-nih-funding-research-using-gene-editing-technologies-human-embryos |
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