The ethical debate around Crispr
The gene editing technique deserves its Nobel Prize, but we should continue to interrogate how it is used
Folk belief has it that Alfred Nobel founded his prizes out of guilt for having built his fortune on the destructive power of dynamite. It seems more likely that it was a case of image management: Nobel was disturbed to find himself commemorated as a ‘merchant of death’ in 1888 when a French journalist mistook the death of Alfred’s brother for his. Resolving to improve his legacy, he declared that most of his estate should be invested in a fund to support ‘prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.’
It’s not clear that Nobel felt genuinely bad about his explosives business, however. Rather like Fritz Haber (the 1918 chemistry laureate) working on gas warfare, he seemed to believe that the more terrible the weaponry available to generals and leaders, the more they might recoil from armed conflict at all. (It seems we routinely underestimate what Sigmund Freud dubbed our death instinct.)
All the same, Nobel personifies the notorious Janus nature of scientific advance. The phrase ‘dual use’ doesn’t do it justice, though: many important discoveries have complex social implications and applications not readily categorised as merely good or bad. The work awarded this year’s Nobel prize in chemistry illustrates this more emphatically than ever.