Human germline gene editing is bioart: an open letter to Lulu and Nana

In the form of an open letter published in the DIY-biologist and fablab-focused Makery, bioartist and Adam Zaretsky provides an artistic critique of not only the rationale driving the editing and implantation of human embryos, but also the rationale driving bioethics and the proposition of research moratoria. Eschewing the common tendency to ascribe the provenance of Lulu and Nana as the whims of an ambitious rogue scientist, Zaretsky conceives of their parentage well beyond strict genetic heritage. The “parents” of “CRISPR babies” Lulu and Nana to whom the letter is addressed include He Jiankui as well as a broad range of individual collaborators and interlocutors alongside laboratories, universities, and entire national governments. By attributing parentage to this large and varied group, Zaretsky places collective responsibility on the global apparatus of genomic science. Notably, this apparatus includes—and in so doing, condemns—bioethics and ELSI committees, which Zaretsky goes so far as to call “shills for hire.” The complicity he attributes to these institutions is captured by his image of the “Yellow Light of Bioethics.” To challenge such institutionally embedded reason, Zaretsky advances the role of the arts and what he calls their honed lack of reasoning. In place of reason, he substitutes aesthetics and in so doing, challenges the role of technical experts as the leading voices in the governance of human germline editing. Indeed in his proposal of the Bioarts Ethical Advisory Komission (BEAK), Zaretsky subsumes the values that often guide these experts—take health, for example, the rational explanation for Lulu and Nana’s “knocked-in” gene for HIV resistance—interpreting them as aesthetics themselves. On these grounds, Zaretsky finds the aesthetics uninspiring, culturally banal, and generally short of artistic standards.