IELTS Academic Reading — Practice Test 14

In the space of little more than a decade, a laboratory technique known as CRISPR has moved from obscurity to the centre of both scientific excitement and public anxiety. The tool was not invented so much as borrowed. Bacteria had been using it for millions of years as a primitive immune system, storing fragments of the genetic code of invading viruses and using those fragments to recognise and cut up the same viruses if they returned. In 2012 researchers showed that this bacterial machinery could be redirected to cut a chosen sequence of DNA in almost any organism, and in doing so they handed biologists a pair of molecular scissors of unprecedented ease and precision.

What made the discovery so consequential was not that gene editing had never been possible before, but that it had never been so simple. Earlier methods of altering DNA existed, but they were slow, expensive and technically demanding, within reach of only a few well-funded laboratories. CRISPR changed the economics overnight. A technique that once cost thousands of dollars and took months could now be carried out for a fraction of the price in a matter of days, and by researchers with only modest training. This accessibility is the source of both the technology's promise and much of the unease surrounding it: a tool cheap and easy enough to democratise research is also difficult to confine.

The medical hopes attached to genome editing are not idle speculation. Thousands of human diseases are caused by faults in a single gene, and for the first time it appears possible to correct such faults at their root rather than merely treating their symptoms. Early trials have targeted inherited blood disorders such as sickle-cell disease, editing cells taken from a patient's own body and returning them once corrected, with results that have astonished clinicians. Because these changes are made to ordinary body cells, they affect only the individual treated and cannot be passed to any children. This kind of intervention, known as somatic editing, has attracted little ethical objection; the real controversy lies elsewhere.

That elsewhere is the editing of the germ line — the sperm, eggs or early embryos whose altered DNA would be inherited by every subsequent generation. Here the calculation changes entirely. A change made to the germ line is not a private medical decision but an irreversible alteration to the human inheritance, affecting people who cannot consent because they do not yet exist. Supporters argue that in principle it could eliminate devastating hereditary diseases before birth; opponents counter that the same power could as easily be turned to enhancement — selecting for height, intelligence or other traits — and that our knowledge of how genes interact is far too shallow to justify tampering with consequences we cannot foresee.

The debate ceased to be theoretical in late 2018, when a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, announced that twin girls had been born whose embryos he had edited in an attempt to make them resistant to HIV. The reaction was swift and almost universally hostile. Fellow scientists condemned the experiment as reckless and premature, medically unnecessary and conducted in secrecy without proper oversight; He was later convicted and imprisoned. Yet the episode exposed an uncomfortable truth. The barrier that had prevented germ-line editing was not any law of nature but a fragile consensus among researchers, and that consensus had just been broken by a single determined individual.

How the world should respond remains sharply contested. One camp calls for an outright and permanent ban on germ-line editing, arguing that some lines should never be crossed whatever the potential benefits. A second position, adopted by several scientific bodies, favours not prohibition but a moratorium: a temporary halt, to be lifted only once the technique is proven safe and a broad social agreement has been reached about when, if ever, it should be used. A third view holds that a blanket ban is both unenforceable and unwise, and that the sensible course is careful regulation, permitting narrowly defined therapeutic uses under strict oversight while forbidding enhancement. Underlying these disagreements is a hard practical question: rules made in one country cannot bind another, and a determined researcher can always move to a more permissive jurisdiction.

There is a further worry that is less often voiced. Even if germ-line editing were made perfectly safe, the treatments would almost certainly be costly, at least at first, and available only to the wealthy. Critics fear a future in which the affluent could purchase genetic advantages for their children that the poor could not, hardening existing inequalities into biological ones passed down the generations. Whether such fears prove justified will depend less on the science, which advances relentlessly, than on the choices societies make about how to govern it. The scissors have been handed to us; what we choose to cut is still, for now, undecided.

Every functioning society rests on a foundation that is largely invisible: the willingness of citizens to place their confidence in institutions they will never fully understand. When a person accepts a banknote, boards an aircraft, or takes a prescribed medicine, they are relying not on personal knowledge but on a web of institutions — central banks, safety regulators, medical authorities — whose competence they simply take on faith. This kind of trust differs in an important way from the trust we place in a friend or relative. Interpersonal trust grows out of direct experience; institutional trust, by contrast, must be extended to strangers and to organisations too large and remote to be known personally. It is, in effect, a bet placed on people and systems we cannot see, and a society in which that bet is routinely refused finds even simple forms of cooperation becoming laborious and expensive.

How, then, is such trust established? The most obvious answer is performance: an institution that consistently does what it promises, over long periods, earns a reputation for reliability much as a person does. But research suggests that competence alone is not enough. People appear to judge institutions at least as much on the fairness of their procedures as on the outcomes those procedures produce. A court whose verdict goes against us may still command our respect if we believe the process was impartial and we were genuinely heard; a body that delivers a favourable result through opaque or arbitrary means may nonetheless be distrusted. This finding, sometimes called procedural fairness, suggests that how decisions are reached can matter more to public confidence than what those decisions actually are.

Beneath these observations lies a deeper disagreement about what institutional trust really consists of. One tradition, broadly economic in outlook, treats trust as a species of calculation: to trust an institution is to make a rational estimate that it will behave as expected, based on its past record and its incentives. On this view trust is essentially a prediction, and a well-designed system of rewards and penalties can manufacture it. A rival tradition regards this as far too thin. Trust, its proponents argue, is bound up with shared values and a sense of common identity; we trust institutions we feel are 'ours', that seem to embody our own commitments, and no amount of clever incentive design can substitute for that felt affinity. The distinction is not merely academic, for the two views point towards very different remedies when trust runs short.

Whatever its ultimate nature, trust is notoriously easier to destroy than to create. A reputation built patiently over decades can be undone by a single scandal, and psychologists have long noted an asymmetry in how people process such information: a solitary act of dishonesty weighs more heavily than a long history of honest conduct. One reason is that betrayals are read as revealing an institution's true character, while routine good behaviour is taken for granted. A regulator exposed as having concealed a danger, a bank found to have deceived its customers, an official caught enriching himself — each such episode does damage out of all proportion to its immediate effects, because it invites people to reinterpret everything that came before it in a darker light.

It is often asserted that trust in institutions is in long-term decline across much of the world, but the claim deserves scrutiny. Some scholars question whether the surveys on which it rests are measuring a real change in attitudes or merely a change in what people are willing to say. Others argue, more provocatively, that a fall in trust is not necessarily to be lamented. A degree of scepticism towards the powerful, they contend, is the mark of an alert citizenry rather than a diseased one; blind confidence in authority has, after all, enabled some of history's worst abuses. On this reading, what looks like a corrosion of trust may sometimes be a healthy refusal to grant it unconditionally — a distinction that crude measures of 'trust levels' are poorly equipped to capture.

Yet if distrust can be healthy in moderation, its excess carries real costs, and these tend to compound. Where citizens assume the worst of public bodies, they comply less readily with rules, cooperate less willingly with shared endeavours, and prove more receptive to those who profit from stoking suspicion. Low trust can become self-fulfilling: expecting institutions to fail, people withdraw the support and forbearance those institutions need to succeed, and the resulting failures seem to confirm the original suspicion. Collective challenges that demand coordinated sacrifice — controlling an epidemic, say, or responding to a slow-moving environmental threat — are especially unforgiving of societies whose members no longer believe that others, or the authorities directing them, will play their part.

Can trust, once lost, be deliberately rebuilt? The remedies most often proposed — greater transparency, stricter accountability, more responsive institutions — are sensible enough, yet they come with a paradox that is easily overlooked. Opening an institution to full scrutiny may expose failings that were always present but previously unseen, and so, in the short term, lower the very confidence it was meant to restore. Transparency reveals not only that an institution is behaving well but also every occasion on which it does not. Some conclude from this that trust cannot be engineered directly at all, and can only be earned slowly, as a by-product of doing the job well over time. If that is right, the impatience of those who demand that trust be swiftly restored may itself be part of the problem, for the one thing the rebuilding of trust seems truly to require is the very commodity a distrustful age is least willing to grant: time.