Quarantine Watching: Ken Burns’ "The Gene"

These are the days of COVID-19, quarantine, and… lots of TV watching. I’m guessing there will be records set for Netflix hours logged. I’ve contributed to that because of the absence of live sports. My wife and I both enjoy watching sports. In a normal year, we would have just come out of March Madness and the Masters, and would now be into new seasons of Boston Red Sox baseball and Formula 1 (don’t judge that latter one until you’ve watched the Netflix series, Drive to Survive). None of that has happened this year, and I’ve had my fill of watching reruns of the cliff diving championships.

I started in on Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary, having seen chunks of it, but never the whole thing start-to-finish. And then I discovered he has a brand new documentary out that let me justify watching TV while I work: The Gene. Part 1 is called “Dawn of the Modern Age of Genetics” and has already aired on PBS. It is available to watch online until May 5.

The documentary is based on the book by Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History. It begins with the announcement by Dr. He Jiankui that he had successfully edited the genes of twin baby girls—an event we have covered here a couple of times. Then there is this claim:

“This moment heralded the arrival of a new era—an era in which humans are no longer at the mercy of their genes, but can control and even change them. It is a scientific revolution of almost unlimited promise… and peril.”

Most of this episode focuses on the promise. They follow some families who have children with rare genetic disorders, and recount the story of the discovery of the gene that triggers Huntington’s Disease—including filming a dramatic moment when someone finds out the test results for whether she has disease. There are now some tremendous possibilities for treating these kinds of genetic diseases. They didn’t include the recent story about treating (and it looks like curing!) Sickle Cell disease through gene editing. You can see that here on 60 Minutes, including conversations with BioLogos founder, Francis Collins (Collins makes a couple of short appearances in this documentary too).

Besides the contemporary cases the documentary follows, it intersperses the history of genetics, beginning with Darwin—who knew nothing of genes, but figured there must be a mechanism for passing on traits from parents to offspring. And this is where there is some treatment of the peril that has been associated with genetics in the past (I assume the next episode will treat the future perils that come with being able to edit our genes).

Francis Galton (1822-1911) is called the Father of Eugenics because he opined that if farmers could breed better cattle, why couldn’t an enlightened society breed a better human being? “What nature does blindly and slowly, man may do providently and quickly.” This led to some very dark moments in human history, like Nazi Germany death camps and forced sterilizations in America.

Opponents of evolution like to link the science of evolution to eugenics, as though the latter follows inevitably from the former. And to be sure, there is plenty of blame to be given to scientists of the day for atrocities committed. But it must be recognized that there was more than science driving those atrocities. Science may have figured out what “nature does blindly and slowly,” but it does not give us the answer as to whether we ought to do the same “providently and quickly.” It is a philosophical add-on—not the science itself—that advocates for such policies. But sometimes it can be tricky for people to sort out the difference between the “science itself” and add-ons or interpretations of the science, particularly when science has enormous prestige in society.

Even people who reject the scientific consensus of things like vaccines, climate change, and evolution rarely do so by claiming to be anti-science. They just invoke their own version of science to support the conclusions they have come to by other means. In the documentary, Eric Lander, of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, acknowledges the danger of this tendency:

“Science lets itself be used if you don’t stand up every time and say “No, that’s not OK! That conclusion is not OK!” and eugenics from the beginning of the 20th century to the Nazis is a perfect example of what we have to watch out for every time we go off with a little bit of scientific knowledge and prescribe what we think is right for the world.”