Sea Change

Years ago, long before I was attuned to the threats of cli­mate change and for rea­sons I can’t entire­ly fath­om, I began col­lect­ing sto­ries about flood­ed cities. Old leg­ends of drowned Welsh vil­lages. Atlantis. True accounts of small towns and set­tle­ments inun­dat­ed when dams were built to pro­vide elec­tric­i­ty. News sto­ries about ancient cities swal­lowed up by the sea and new­ly dis­cov­ered by mod­ern explor­ers. Over time, I piled up pages and pages of notes.

To be hon­est, I did have an agen­da. about dreams, a his­tor­i­cal tid­bit about a bear, a mem­oir about a girl grow­ing up in a harem — and I fol­low it onto the web, into book­stores, into libraries, and into con­ver­sa­tions with experts, with friends, with acquain­tances. For me, that’s how a new book begins.

But in this case, it turned out that I need­ed some­thing else, some oth­er ele­ment, in order to ani­mate this old fas­ci­na­tion into a novel.

Time passed. My daugh­ter, who was in pri­ma­ry school when I began col­lect­ing these sto­ries, grew up and earned a PhD in engi­neer­ing and micro­bi­ol­o­gy. She told me that excit­ing things were hap­pen­ing in the field of genet­ics and encour­aged me to explore.

I began to read. Sid­dhartha Mukherjee’s book, The Gene, was a joy and a rev­e­la­tion, and I rec­om­mend it to every­one. I read oth­er books, searched the inter­net, read every­thing on genet­ics that cropped up on my news feed, and haunt­ed sci­ence pod­casts. I can’t remem­ber exact­ly when I first hap­pened upon the gene-edit­ing tech­nique called CRISPR, but I know that not long there­after, my old “flood­ed cities” fas­ci­na­tion resur­faced and flowed into the genet­ics idea. I decid­ed to do a loose retelling of Hans Chris­t­ian Andersen’s “The Lit­tle Mer­maid.” A YA love sto­ry, set in the future, with a gene-hack­ing twist.

CRISPR is a tech­nol­o­gy that makes it rel­a­tive­ly easy for sci­en­tists to edit DNA in ways that can fun­da­men­tal­ly change plants and ani­mals, includ­ing the human race. It will lead to breath­tak­ing med­ical mir­a­cles and to knot­ty eth­i­cal quan­daries. Over the years when I was writ­ing Sea Change, sci­en­tists Jen­nifer Doud­na and Emmanuelle Char­p­en­tier were award­ed the Nobel Prize for their work on CRISPR; sev­er­al excel­lent non­fic­tion books for gen­er­al audi­ences came out on the sub­ject; and CRISPR became a hot top­ic in the dai­ly news. Mean­while, spurred by the glob­al pan­dem­ic, sci­en­tists raced to devel­op treat­ments, and CRISPR research made pos­si­ble a new kind of vac­cine, now run­ning in my veins.

As I write, CRISPR is being used in humans to treat sick­le-cell dis­ease, cer­tain can­cers, and blind­ness. Com­ing soon, per­haps: resis­tance to Alzheimer’s dis­ease, to dia­betes, to ele­vat­ed LDL cho­les­terol, to HIV, to acute myeloid leukemia and to infec­tion in the next pan­dem­ic, no mat­ter what that may be. And after that… Increased mus­cle mass? Alter­ations to skin col­or? Resis­tance to age­ing? The abil­i­ty to smell as well as a blood­hound? See as well as a hawk? The abil­i­ty to trav­el through space for decades, immune to the harm of gam­ma rays?

What should be off lim­its? Should we con­fine our­selves to pre­vent­ing and cur­ing dis­ease, or try to evolve beyond human lim­i­ta­tions? If the lat­ter, how far should we go? Should we draw the line at gene-edits for one per­son at a time, or open the door to gene-edits that can be inher­it­ed, passed down for­ev­er? More impor­tant­ly, who should decide? Giv­en the rel­a­tive ease of using CRISPR, how will laws against rogue hack­ers be enforced? Will we pri­or­i­tize safe­ty, or, spurred by the excite­ment of dis­cov­ery and impa­tience for new mir­a­cles, rush into a night­mare of unin­tend­ed consequences?

Sea Change is a work of spec­u­la­tive fic­tion. It doesn’t pre­dict the future, but asks what if? While Turtle’s acci­den­tal­ly-hacked gills and “reset” are fan­ta­sy, the poten­tial ben­e­fits and risks of human gene edit­ing are immi­nent and real. Turtle’s dilem­ma pos­es ques­tions about what is “nor­mal,” about inclu­sion and exclu­sion, about the ties of fam­i­ly — genet­ic and acquired. On anoth­er lev­el, it rais­es ques­tions about the rapid advance in CRISPR and oth­er gene-edit­ing tech­nolo­gies, with which, dur­ing the life­times of today’s young read­ers, humans will be trans­formed in ways we can hard­ly imag­ine now.