Recruiting the ‘Selfish Gene’: the Threat to the Sacred and the Self-Suspicion

The experiment of Chinese scientist He Jiankui in editing the genome of twin girls has generated a new wave of suspicions about biotechnology. In fact, staff biotech labs and influential international figures were under suspicion, because they considered to use our desire to become healthier, stronger, and more efficient for the sake of transforming the world’s population. In their social significance, these concerns go far beyond the wish to reduce the uncertainties associated with the development of new technologies. The image of the threat posed by genome editing has paved the way for the “liquid fear” of displacement and substitution described by the sociologist Zigmunt Bauman. It also overlapped with the immunopolitical anxiety associated with the fear of being infected and losing one’s identity.

At the same time, the suspicion of genome-editing technology clearly mirrors the motives of the violated sacred described by Emile Durkheim, Mary Douglas and contemporary cultural sociologists. However, in the case under consideration, these motifs take on a very special meaning. The human genome, which determines how we should live, and therefore has sacred characteristics, is under threat of violation. At the same time, our life, too, turns out to be only part of the evolutionary competition of “selfish genes” striving to spread in space and time. Usually, the danger associated with the sacred lies either in its desecration or in desire to gain its support. We can interpret the suspicion of genome editing as an attempt to form a prescription for the sacred game of “selfish genes,” to recode its internal principles. And since the sacred in this case is contained in every cell of the human body, the object of suspicion is the suspect himself.