I’m a secondary human, or at least that’s what it says on my ID. Right there, below many name, but people usually already know by just looking at me. It is obvious by my facial features. I’m not very pretty. Not ugly either, but there is much that could have been improved.
My parents didn’t. They just didn’t have the money for it. I don’t hold it against them, they tried everything in their power to make it up to me. It wasn’t their fault that a secondary would never be promoted to one of the high paying jobs. But at least I have a job.
At least I wasn’t a tertiary human.
Tertiaries are those who don’t only lack the beautiful outside that is the social standard by now. They also have some genetic disorder which they could potentially pass on to their children. If they’re rich enough, it isn’t much of a problem. If they pay for their child’s genome to be completely cleaned of any defects, they are allowed to procreate.
But most of the tertiaries come from poor families. That’s why they have the disease in the first place. And many of the badly disabled can’t work, so they don’t even have the chance to increase their wealth. To prevent more children from having disabilities, those tertiaries are not allowed to reproduce.
But that had only been the first law they passed. Year after year, the situation got worse. By now, tertiaries were sterilized as soon as they entered puberty if their parents couldn’t prove that they had enough money to treat potential grandchildren.
I heard rumors that this wasn’t everything. Apparently, many tertiaries were taken from their homes, late at night, and brought to some facility. Nobody heard of them again. I can only imagine what happens to them there. You might think death is the worst thing that could happen to you, but since animal testing was outlawed, there is a constant need of voluntary test subjects.
I highly doubt that they are all willing.
But I shouldn’t think things like this. Who knows what comes next? Maybe they’ll learn to read our minds. Maybe some primaries already have those abilities. I don’t really know what possibilities are there when it comes to gene editing.
When they discovered the CRISPR/Cas9 method about 50 years ago, excitement had been the main reaction throughout the biological and medical community. It had enabled them to make precise, targeted changes to living cells. Only a few years later, a genetic heart defect was repaired in a human embryo.
Things had accelerated from there.
More and more defects were proven to be repairable, the pressure to allow the usage of CRISPR on embryos intended for an actual pregnancy rose. At the same time, concerns about the ethical usage became louder and louder.
If there is a way to tamper with the DNA of a child before it’s even considered an embryo, why stop at pathogenic mutations? Why not adjust hair color, eye color, height, intelligence and other features?
The discussions went on and on and on … until one country just said fuck it and allowed it. And it was a success. Healthy, beautiful and intelligent babies were born en masse. The death rates for newborns and young children plummeted. And the other countries? They suddenly felt the need to keep up and allowed the procedures too.
It only took a single generation to transform humanity. Not all of it, of course. But those parts that mattered. Those that had money. Everyone else was left behind, as usual.
For years, I had just accepted this as fact, but no longer.
I am a secondary human, it says so on my ID, right there, below my name. But that doesn’t make me any less valuable.
And today, I join the resistance.
CRISPR/Cas9 and Targeted Genome Editing
Correction of a pathogenic gene mutation in human embryos
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