The Eugenics Diet Can Make You and Your Kids Thinner

Eat for your health and the next generation. (Cred: Me)

“This is a story of another time, of a plausible future 30 years from now, give or take, in which the human experience of life and health (and perhaps even of who we are) will unfold unlike anything known before. The citizens of this future will learn early in life — through some combination of next-next-next-generation genetic testing and intelligence gleaned from their smart accessories — whether they are heading toward disease: depression, dimension, diabetes, what have you. More importantly, they will be offered an exit strategy.”

This is the opening of a January 2020 article for UCSF Magazine. It discusses the potentials of several in-progress genomic research initiatives intended to further various disease treatments and preventative measures. It is also mentions different ethical viewpoints on the potential dangers of therapies, like germline engineering, capable of manufacturing intergenerational genetic changes.

Designer babies and designer grand-babies and designer great-grand-babies — whole designer family tree-branches, if you will.

I returned to this story after seeing a recent article in Science Translational Medicine about a potential CRISPR-Cas9 therapy for “obesity” from an international team affiliated with Harvard Medical School.

You’ve probably heard of CRISPR, which is a biotechnology adapted from bacteria that interacts with an enzyme (Cas9) to let researchers alter genes. There are now a few different variations serving, generally, this same purpose.

The Harvard team used CRISPR-Cas9 technology to alter the characteristics of different kinds of adipose tissue in fattened mice. In general, there are two types of adipose tissue: brown and white. Brown adipose tissue specializes in heat production and is generally considered to be “good fat”, since it burns calories while creating heat. When it’s under the skin, white adipose tissue is the subcutaneous fat that we grab and pinch in our hands when we feel particularly bad about our bodies.

These scientists and many others are working towards a future where the fat we hate can function as the fat we love. The bad fat will hold itself hostage, light a match, and burn itself away. Forget about liposuction — 30 years from now, it’ll be passé to let surgeons pipe out or hack off your jiggly bits.

These scientists will save us, all of us, even the ones who are too senseless to want to be saved. We will praise them for setting us free from our corpulent prisons, for making us so thin and lithe and beautiful. We will always be shrinking. We will always be burning. We will all wear straight sizes and sacrifice something precious to these genius lab-haunting deities.

I’m kidding, but only because we don’t need to wax snark about what horrors will occur in the next few decades or century. We don’t need to make jokes about our children and our children’s children burning up at the altar of brown adipose tissue. And, in fact, we shouldn’t.

All it does is obscure the very real, very current presence of eugenic thought in our search for healthfulness.

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Credit: SMBC by Zach Weinersmith

In March 2015, a group of colleagues — including Jennifer Doudna, the inventor of CRISPR-Cas9 — wrote “A prudent path forward for genomic engineering and germline gene modification”, a Science perspective piece. They discussed the benefits of CRISPR-Cas9 as an “unparalleled” genomic tool, as well as implored the research community to consider its wide range of uses, simplicity, and wide availability.

“A key point of discussion,” they wrote, “is whether the treatment or cure of diseases in humans would be a responsible use of genome engineering, and if so, under what circumstances. For example, would it be appropriate to change a disease-causing genetic mutation to a sequence more typical among healthy people?”

Their recommendations to the scientific community were foremost buttressed by a call for “open discussion of the merits and risks of human genome modification by a broad cohort of scientists, clinicians, social scientists, the general public, and relevant public entities.”

As Robert Pollack wrote in a response letter for Science: “rational eugenics is still eugenics.”

And eugenics is not led by a desire to make a better human race.

If it were, it’d be concerned with inequity. It would tackle white supremacy, poverty, fatphobia, imperialism, capitalism, and the destruction of the earth. It would not spend this much time on a cold lab bench or on a missionary trip to the African continent or in the pages of a grant proposal for a “culturally sensitive” diet intervention. It would put ramps in front of every building. It would bulldoze every prison. It would give reparations to everyone touched by anti-blackness. It would breed accountability and reflexivity and love and safety.

But it doesnt.

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A pro-eugenics chart titled, “The Triangle of Life,” from the Kansas Free Fair, c. 1920. (American Philosophical Society)

Convening a cohort of people to “openly discuss” eugenics is not going to make CRISPR and the research it spawns any less unethical.

Research projects are cultural products. They are shaped by the society they are created in, the beliefs of their respective researchers, as well as the people and places they are eventually applied to. Research projects are a reflection of what we hope for, aspire to, fear, and hate.

Genomic research to eradicate “obesity” is only desirable in a culture where fatness is bad. Genomic research to eradicate “obesity” is only necessary in a culture that hates fat people.

Fat people have to live in that culture every day. We must abstain and starve and stow ourselves away with the knowledge that our absence will not keep the vitriol at bay, will not make us hated any less. We do not have the luxury of planning for an ethical crisis in 30 years. We live in pain now. Our presence is a threat to a “better” world, an abomination. Science is never objective or neutral, but it is callously transparent. “Fat people do not belong in our future,” it says. And so the lights stay on in the lab.

When scientists and geneticists ascribe good or bad moral weight to genes, when their work revolves around a socially-constructed dichotomy of healthy or diseased, they are making a choice about who is worthy to live.

Fat people are never worthy. We are never winners. We lose. And when we have nothing left, they will tell us that we can always stand to lose more.

First published on Medium. Curated by Medium Editors in Biotech, Beauty, and Science.