The writer is in New Zealand

THE founder of ChatGPT, Sam Altman, has joined a clutch of tech billionaires contributing to the $30million funding of a biotechnology business called Preventive which aims to ‘correct devastating genetic conditions for future children’. The US company has plans to edit the DNA of babies before they are born, a process known as human germline genetic engineering, which is banned in 70 countries. Preventive is seeking a country which will give it permission to carry out its experiments. No doubt the New Zealand Gene Technology Bill, currently awaiting its Second Reading, which will liberalise decisions about gene technology experiments and place them in the hands of a single regulator, will have brought NZ to the attention of Preventive.

If such research projects were given the green light here, it would not be the first time that NZ has hosted germline genetic engineering. For the last two decades NZ scientists have carried out genetic experiments on animals with disastrous results. Reports of adverse outcomes of GE germline experiments on animals at AgResearch’s Ruakura facility document spontaneous abortions, cancers, deformities and sterility, requiring animals to be euthanised. Currently there are no surviving GE animals at Ruakura. The experiments have been terminated after repeated failures. You can understand why such experiments on humans have been banned so far: the prospect of euthanising ‘human mistakes’ echoes the worst extremes of Nazi medical experimentation.

The alliance of tech billionaires pushing to allow risky experiments on humans is just one example of the huge pressure building to allow the wholesale editing of human DNA. The three largest countries in the world, India, China and the US, are graduating more than half a million students each year in the biological sciences, all of whom have been trained to edit DNA and sold on the naive idea that they will be improving the health, happiness and intelligence of the human race.

The rapid spread of the likely engineered covid virus around the world, the vaccination of 5.5billion people with experimental covid gene shots and the 30million excess deaths which resulted, provides a salutary example of what will happen to the world when the biotechnology regulatory dam finally breaks, as is being proposed in NZ.

After reading the above you may imagine the motivations of some in the biotechnology industry are overly ambitious, possibly reckless but at least altruistic. Think again: aside from attractive financial incentives and career prestige, the motivations behind some biotechnology research projects are only just being exposed to the light of day. Senator Rand Paul has published emails showing that Dr Ralph Baric — a North Carolina virologist who worked closely with the Wuhan lab that is the likely source of the covid virus — held extensive discussions with the CIA as long ago as 2013 about the possibility of ‘human adaptation’ of coronaviruses.

History tells us there are certain situations which are so extreme that an extraordinary effort and depth of understanding is necessary to grasp the enormity of what has begun to happen and is about to engulf everyone.

There are hard truths and stark limitations to our knowledge about biological systems which are being kept well away from public view lest they halt the relentless advance of the biotech juggernaut. Among these is the popular but false idea that DNA is the source of life. In fact, the life of all living systems begins not with DNA on its own but with a whole cell of which DNA is but one part, albeit a very important part. This should be well known to everyone who has gone to school and studied basic science, but its implications are being conveniently forgotten in the biotech gene editing frenzy.

Read More – Gene editing of the unborn – a terrifying new biotech frontier