The period
The embryo is fourteen days old. No nervous system, no heartbeat. A cluster of cells smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. And it is a human being.
That conviction is not a feeling....
The price tag
Vertex priced Casgevy at $2.2 million per patient. The disease: sickle cell. The patients: Nigeria, DRC, India, Tanzania. The Nobel: Stockholm. The patent: Boston. The patients are in Kano.
We have seen this....
The scream
Three hundred thousand children born with sickle cell every year. Most in sub-Saharan Africa. First pain crisis before second birthday. Bones on fire, organs swelling. Pediatric nurses identify it across a ward by the pitch of the scream....
The prefix
The Nuffield Council — Britain’s independent body for bioethics — took five years on its report. We argued about "permissible" versus "not impermissible" for longer than anyone should argue about a prefix. Published July 2018....
The video
November 2018. He Jiankui uploaded a YouTube video announcing he had edited the genomes of two human embryos using CRISPR-Cas9. Twin girls, Lulu and Nana. HIV resistance, he claimed....
A hundred and twenty years
In Genesis 6:3, after the patriarchs lived to improbable ages and the world filled with violence, God says: "My Spirit shall not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years." The shortening is not...
Being-toward-death
Heidegger used a phrase that resists translation: Sein-zum-Tode — being-toward-death. You are not a being who happens to die. You are a being whose entire relationship to time, meaning, and commitment is structured by the fact that you will die....
The mice got younger
In 2023, Altos Labs — $3 billion, four Nobel laureates, a parking lot larger than most university biology departments — published a paper demonstrating partial cellular reprogramming in live mice. The mice did not merely live longer....