Category: Nation & World

For thousands of years, we have been trying to craft our ideal canine companions. We have honed their abilities to perform an array of specific tasks, from fetching waterfowl to staring down wayward sheep. We have reshaped and refined their bodies, producing sausage-shaped dachshunds, polka-dotted Dalmatians, bushy-browed schnauzers, and deeply wrinkled Shar-Peis.

And we have done it using nothing more sophisticated than good old-fashioned selective breeding.

Now our canine engineering efforts are entering a new era. Earlier this month, Kindred Companion Sciences, a biotech startup based in New York, revealed that it had used the technique known as CRISPR to create the first gene-edited, hypoallergenic dogs. Thanks to a single genetic tweak, the dogs — two undeniably adorable beagles — appear unable to produce a protein that can leave some people red-eyed and wheezing.

Still, it’s a long way from the lab to the laps of pet owners across America. (It has been 2½ years since scientists announced a gene-edited, hypoallergenic cat, but such felines are not yet available to the public.) More time and data are needed to determine whether Kindred has truly delivered on its promise of hypoallergenic dogs, experts said. Can a single gene edit reliably stave off the sniffles in humans?

An even more critical question: What does it mean for dogs? Will our efforts to create pets that are more convenient for us have unintended health consequences for them?

History is not encouraging. Since the Victorian era, when dog fanciers began to create and codify modern dog breeds, our quest for the perfect pooch has yielded dogs that are inbred, disease-prone, and saddled with extreme physical traits — super flat faces and ultralong backs — that compromise their welfare.

“We’ve created an enormous amount of inherited diseases in dogs, often unintentionally, because of our pursuit of certain traits that appeal to us,” said Rowena Packer, an expert on companion animal welfare at the Royal Veterinary College in London. “I just think we have a lot more responsibility to think more critically about the dogs that we create.”

Dog design

For all the canine diversity we’ve managed to create through selective breeding, a truly hypoallergenic dog remains something of a holy grail. Breeders have created all manner of low-shedding dogs and purportedly hypoallergenic dogs (behold the labradoodle and all of its doodle-y descendants). But these dogs still produce proteins that, secreted through their skin, saliva, and urine, can trigger human allergies.

Gene editing provides a “simple, elegant” way to solve the problem at the source, said Matt Walker, cofounder and CEO of Kindred, who has suffered from dog allergies his whole life.

Kindred began with canine cells, using CRISPR to disable a gene known as Can f 1, which codes for one of the main canine allergens. Then, the scientists used a basic cloning technique to transfer the edited genomes from these cells into dog embryos. They implanted the embryos in a surrogate beagle mother, who gave birth to two puppies: Alfie and Bailey, who are now almost 2 years old.

The company has detected no trace of the allergen in either dog, and Walker, who adopted Bailey, has experienced no allergic reactions. (Alfie was adopted by one of Walker’s colleagues.) The dogs appear to be developing normally.

“No red flags, no yellow flags — so far, the animals seem completely healthy,” Walker said. “That said,” he added, “this is the starting point of our work.”

Indeed, for all its purported precision, gene editing can have unpredictable consequences. Medical issues might appear later in the dogs’ lives, or when the company starts producing enough dogs to spot rare side effects.

Or, of course, they could turn out to be perfectly healthy. But it’s too soon to say, and we’re likely to see more efforts to create gene-edited dogs in the future. Where do we want to draw our ethical lines?

Thirty years ago, when genetic engineering was still in its infancy, philosopher Bernard Rollin proposed an ethical principle he called the “conservation of welfare,” which held that we should not modify animal genomes in ways that left the animals “worse off, in terms of suffering” than their unmodified forebears.

That’s a sensible starting point. But it’s a low bar. And it doesn’t address all the ethical implications of making gene-edited dogs, which may require using additional animals to serve as test subjects, egg donors, and surrogate mothers.

“I think we get sometimes so excited about the idea of what technology can fix, particularly biotechnology — we’ve got to remember that, generally, we use a lot of animals to get to that end ‘product,’” said Lisa Moses, a veterinarian and bioethicist at Harvard University.

Ethicists have also questioned whether we should bring gene-edited dogs into a world that already has more dogs than it can care for, especially when the goal is not to create a healthier animal, but one that better meets our human needs.

“Should we use sophisticated biotechnology to create the animals we want, rather than changing how we relate to the animals who already exist?” said Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “That’s a question of priorities, and perhaps misplaced priorities.”

Walker sees it differently. His allergies would prevent him from ever adopting a shelter dog, he said; gene editing is the only thing that has made it possible for him to have a relationship with dogs. “I’m also really invested in applying this work to service dogs for people who are allergic,” he said.

“People’s ethical barometers are set differently,” he added. “For me, this feels justified by the potential benefits, as long as animal health is protected.”

Good breeding

Dog lovers can, in good faith, come down on different sides of the Kindred question. But if we’re going to discuss the ethics of dog creation, experts agreed, we need to ask ourselves some hard questions not just about our new gene-editing tools, but also about our long-standing breeding practices.

“At the end of the day, they’re both producing animals for companion purposes,” said Alison Van Eenennaam, an expert on animal genomics and biotechnology at the University of California, Davis. “It’s not the technology that’s creating the ethical issues.”

We’ve done plenty of harm without modern biotechnology. And there are ways to use gene editing to improve canine lives — even, in some cases, to undo some of the damage done through selective breeding. In a 2022 study, scientists showed that it was technically possible to use gene editing to “correct” a genetic mutation associated with hip problems in Labrador retrievers.

But these hip problems stem from a variety of risk factors — both genetic and environmental — and most canine health conditions probably cannot be cured by editing just one gene, experts said.

Improving dog welfare is likely to require an array of complementary approaches. These include revising breed standards, opening up closed breeding pools, performing widespread genetic screening, and educating the public about the welfare costs of breeding dogs with certain physical traits.

Experts have been calling for these reforms for years, with limited success. But they are necessary if we want to bring our behavior in line with the values we claim to hold. We are, after all, a society that is so besotted with dogs that we have startups trying to develop canine longevity drugs — and editing genes so that people can live alongside creatures that would otherwise give them hives.

Life with Bailey has been “amazing,” Walker said. “I didn’t really appreciate, when people say pets are part of your family, what that really means. But she really is a part of our family.”

His wife had grown up with dogs, he added, and had long bemoaned his allergies. “She always said that this was the one thing she wished she could change about me,” he said.

Indeed, as news of Kindred’s hypoallergenic dogs spread across the internet this month, one Facebook commenter raised precisely that possibility: “Why doesn’t he alter himself instead of the beagles?”

Alas, we can’t yet edit dog allergies out of our own genomes. But that doesn’t mean we can’t evolve.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

In early 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia died of a heart attack on a Texas ranch, sending his Supreme Court colleagues into a period of grief and uncertainty. Behind closed doors, they had to contend with another piece of unsettling news.

Scalia, the leading light of the conservative legal movement, had left no plans for his working papers, according to five people aware of the situation. For a Supreme Court justice, this was the equivalent of dying without a will. With no instructions for creating an archive or opening it to the public, the definitive inside account of his work — and the court’s — could be lost or emerge with uncomfortable speed.

So following his death, his colleagues entered into private negotiations to try to head off any such situation in the future.

In a series of memos and conference meetings, Chief Justice John Roberts led the surviving justices in discussions about imposing a more uniform seal for their own papers, according to several people with knowledge of the process.

The absence of instructions from Scalia and ensuing confidential conversations, which have not previously been reported, help explain why the nation’s highest court can be so difficult to understand. The ultimate record of the court’s work is considered the personal property of each justice, to dispose of or share as he or she chooses. And many of the justices have valued confidentiality over transparency and chosen to postpone scrutiny of their work for years to come.

In contrast with the executive branch, which is required to preserve and ultimately make public a record of its inner workings, there are no laws to determine what the justices save, shred, burn, or reveal, or when. The court does not share any information about policies or plans for records; a spokesperson for the court did not respond to written questions.

People familiar with the episode after Scalia’s death, who spoke to the New York Times on the condition of anonymity because of the court’s sensitivity over disclosure of internal workings, recalled that a consensus was reached but had differing memories of its terms and how solid or lasting it was.

Still, the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, just a few years later, provides a clue: Her Supreme Court papers went, at her direction, to the Library of Congress on the condition that no case file would be opened until every justice involved in the matter had died, a restriction that could lock away many documents for decades.

Although some justices in previous eras arranged for their papers to be released not long after their own deaths, the trend on the Roberts court has been to impose much tighter restrictions, serving to further obscure a branch of government that has resisted calls for more transparency.

Each year, the justices carefully compose and edit about 60 opinions in argued cases to share with the world. The fuller, richer narratives of each case, showing the behind-the-scenes stories of how members of the court pressured, persuaded, and prevailed over one another to arrive at those opinions, are hidden away in the justices’ working papers — their confidential internal memos and opinion drafts.

The justices have said they want to keep those internal exchanges out of view, contending that secrecy protects the authority and finality of their decisions.

Because of the court’s lack of transparency, it is impossible to say what will become of the inner history of its current work — which scholars say is more crucial, and more endangered, than ever.

And people familiar with the court’s operations say they worry some of the most authoritative and revealing records are not being saved at all. That is because some work is now conducted digitally, via emails and texts. Those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters, said they were unaware of any consistent procedures for saving electronic records.

The revelations found in past justices’ working papers have been so potent, they have caused bruised feelings among the justices and blowups among government institutions.

And because no law governs the preservation of the justices’ work, each justice, assisted by staff, builds his or her own archival trove, deciding which memos, drafts, voting sheets, and meeting notes to preserve — or not.

One spring morning in 1993, the justices opened their morning copies of the Washington Post to find detailed accounts of their internal debates. Earlier that year, Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black member of the court, had died, and his papers had been donated to the Library of Congress. With no announcement, the library had opened his papers for public review, and Post reporters had been digging through the newly released archive.

The surprise release led to a brawl over how to interpret the justice’s written instructions. In a furious public letter, Chief Justice William Rehnquist took a swing at the Library of Congress, accusing it of “bad judgment” and of opening the records, some only two years old, prematurely. Marshall’s family sided with the chief justice, asking a senator to request that the papers be resealed. The library defended its reading of Marshall’s instructions. The papers stayed open.

In the wake of that controversy, the justices considered establishing common timelines for releasing their papers but could not come to a consensus, according to the papers of Justice Harry Blackmun, who chose to make his papers public five years after his death.

“‘This is the people’s court; it’s not our court,’” Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale University law professor and former Blackmun clerk, recalled his boss saying. “‘Who cares if we’re embarrassed. The main purpose here is to educate the public.’”

The 2004 release of Blackmun’s papers again caused shock at the court, because of the unvarnished portrait they revealed. His 24-year chronicle of his time on the court exposed tensions among the justices, his own heavy reliance on clerks, and a bombshell: In 1992, the court had come close to overturning Roe v. Wade, but a centrist coalition of justices had secretly worked together to save the federal right to abortion. The precedent had been far more vulnerable than outsiders realized.

A year after that release, Roberts joined the court as chief justice. The court’s new leader was reserved and disciplined. He rarely gave interviews or delivered speeches.

The fullest record of the Roberts court is hidden away in its basement.

In the bowels of the Supreme Court, below the red-velvet grandeur of the courtroom and the shuffle of tourists, the justices are assigned storage rooms in which they store case files, said people familiar with the court’s practices.

Access to the records in the basement is highly restricted. But every year, about three dozen new people are allowed to read some of them: the justices’ incoming law clerks, who arrive for yearlong apprenticeships.

Reading those files clears away the mystery that surrounds the court, say those who have seen them. Clerks often ask to read the insider accounts of the most game-changing decisions. But the deeper education is in learning about the dynamics among the justices.

In public remarks, the justices have argued that their judicial independence requires keeping these kinds of exchanges private so they can bat around ideas and change positions.

But some scholars question why papers should be sealed long after a justice has retired.

The Trump era has transformed and heightened the importance of the current justices’ working papers: They will one day provide the public’s first opportunity to understand why the court ruled as it did in some emergency matters.

“The more cases get decided without full opinions, the more important it is to get access to the papers,” Stuart Banner, a legal historian at UCLA, said in an interview.

But it is virtually impossible to estimate when — if ever — the public might see those records.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.