But we want to leave you with one takeaway in language the biotech community can best understand, in the words of Dr. Coles:
We talked about the origins of this, dating back to 1619, when the first enslaved people were brought to this country and the dehumanization that was involved to consider someone else as less than a person. And we even codified that in law, it was the Three-Fifths Compromise…
But think about what that dehumanization actually does to the psyche of the person who is dehumanizing the other. It actually mutated our social DNA as a human race. And that mutation—let’s just say it was 1619—that mutation we’ve been trying to treat with all sorts of chemotherapy, or non-specific therapies. I’m just putting it in language that we understand as a community…
We actually thought we had targeted therapies to treat this social DNA—this mutation in the mind—called the Voting Rights Act, or the Civil Rights Act, or the anti-lynching laws, all the laws that dismantled the Jim Crow South. When, in fact, what we really needed to do was CRISPR that mutation out of our social DNA.
So, we don’t need to be embarrassed. We need to be embarrassed if we don’t do anything now, now that we understand that we were wired—and white people in particular were wired—deep in the sub-conscious in the social recess, in the social DNA that has made up America in the society that we know. You can’t help it. You didn’t even know it. We don’t walk around thinking about our genes.
But what we should do, now that we understand this distinction—we should be embarrassed if we don’t fix it. – Dr. Tony Coles
As Dr. Michelle said, we need to heal our social genome.