Posted on 06/04/2019 2:14:58 PM PDT by robowombat
Gene editing should be banned, bioethicists say by Tom Strode, posted Tuesday, June 04, 2019
WASHINGTON (BP) -- Evangelical bioethicists are calling for a ban -- not just a moratorium -- on gene editing even as it is being reported that fertility clinics desire to use the controversial technology.
Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced in November the births of the first genetically edited children, twin girls named Lulu and Nana. He led an effort in which the girls' DNA was altered through the use of a tool known as CRISPR to guard them from the HIV virus their father has, He said. Though news of the gene-edited babies drew widespread criticism, fertility clinics contacted He to ask him to teach their staffs gene editing for application in their services, according to a May 28 report by the news site STAT, which is produced by Boston Globe Media to report on health, medicine and scientific discovery. A fertility clinic in Dubai emailed He in early December with such a request, and other centers made similar appeals to He, said William Hurlbut, an ethicist and senior research scholar at Stanford University Medical School. Hurlbut has advised He regarding the ethics of his work, STAT reported.
While some scientists have proposed an international moratorium on gene editing, evangelical bioethicists contacted by Baptist Press said a temporary hold is inadequate.
Southern Baptist bioethicist C. Ben Mitchell told BP the "only way to prevent future harm to human beings is to ban the procedure and attach stiff penalties for violation of the law."
He's announcement "was a siren that signaled an urgent need for global policy to ban human germline gene editing," said Mitchell, professor of moral philosophy at Union University, in emailed comments. "There is no way germline gene editing in humans can pass ethical muster."
Mitchell told BP he has submitted a resolution on gene editing to the Southern Baptist Convention's Resolutions Committee for consideration at the SBC annual meeting June 11-12 in Birmingham, Ala.
Joy Riley, executive director of the Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture, questioned why some people -- "no matter how well trained" -- would be permitted to make changes to the human genome that threaten to cause harm when inherited.
"Some have called for a moratorium," she told BP by email. "That is insufficient. It should be a ban."
Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said, "The move to design babies is indeed a significant move from seeing children as gifts to seeing children as tech.
"Technology is about tools, and we need tools," Moore told BP in emailed remarks. "But technology is only good if it is subservient to something greater, to the mystery of humanity, to human beings who know that our tools may be means to an end but that people never are."
Mitchell, editor of the international journal Ethics & Medicine, offered three reasons gene editing is unethical:
-- "First, He's experiments sacrificed dozens of human embryos. This was the first level of unethical practice.
-- "Second, He altered the germ cells or reproductive cells of the human subjects in his research. We should not alter the reproductive cells (sperm or egg) because those alterations will be passed from one generation to the next. If we create a genetic condition that either causes a disability or death, we are responsible for those results. And those alterations will be passed from generation to generation. There is no ethical way to run clinical trials of germline gene editing in humans.
-- "Finally, the whole enterprise is fraught with eugenic implications. Children -- abled or disabled -- are a gift, not a do-it-yourself project. We should not be designing our descendants."
It now appears He's success may prove more harmful than helpful. Two researchers reported Monday (June 3) that people with the rare genetic variants He sought to edit into the twin embryos to protect them from HIV actually have a 21 percent higher mortality rate than those with the more prevalent gene, STAT reported. The report appeared in the journal Nature Medicine.
In a January email to Hurlbut, He said he recognizes he "pushed too quickly into a first-of-kind clinical study without the necessary open dialog with regulators, the scientific community, and the public," according to STAT. He was dismissed by Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen after he announced the births of the genetically edited twins.
Congress, however, is considering eliminating a ban on gene editing for the purpose of creating a baby. The House of Representatives Appropriations Committee was expected to vote today (June 4) on a spending bill that would drop a ban established in late 2015, STAT reported. On May 23, a subcommittee approved a bill that funds the Food and Drug Administration without the provision.
Riley, a physician, described human gene editing as "a grave error. We have a responsibility to succeeding generations to receive them as gifts -- not experiment upon them as projects."
"Would any of us sign up to be someone else's science project? For governments to allow such experimentation upon embryos is unconscionable," she told BP.
"C.S. Lewis was correct when he wrote in The Abolition of Man, 'For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means ... the power of some men to make other men what they please.'"
Tom Strode is the Washington bureau chief for Baptist Press.
Unfortunately, the kind of ethics we would need --- the kind that entails treating human life per se as something sacred --- is something almost no society is willing to adopt.
This could be the end of us, but most of "us" will not realize it until the dehumanization process is too advanced to be stopped.
Headline is misleading.
Docs also want ‘subhuman’ test cells that they can experiment on and since it “isn’t human” it must be okay
I think I now know why we have not discovered intelligent life in the universe.
Life grows until it becomes so intelligent that it destroys itself!
Humans have gone from the invention of radio to manipulating genes in just 100 years!
If it can be done, it will be done.
In what way?
Meliorare society, here we come...
From “Jurrasic Park,” but apropos for this topic:
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Don’t you see the danger, John, inherent in what you’re doing here? Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet’s ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that’s found his dad’s gun.
Donald Gennaro: It’s hardly appropriate to start hurling generalizations...
Dr. Ian Malcolm: If I may... Um, I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here, it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now
[bangs on the table]
Dr. Ian Malcolm: you’re selling it, you wanna sell it. Well...
John Hammond: I don’t think you’re giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody’s ever done before...
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.
It should say evangelical bioethicists,
not generic bioethicists, which
narrows the number way down.
“Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced in November the births of the first genetically edited children”
I don’t believe it.
He provided zero documentation.
There’s been a lot of fake claims along these lines from East Asia.
Unfortunately, the objections of religious bioethicists count for little due to the anathema shown by government officials for objections based (or even appearing to be based) on religious belief.
Academic ethicists are the reference group that government looks to for guidance in these areas. And academic ethicists rarely, if ever, stand in the way of research that government or business wants.
Production of gene-edited humans, specifically, designer clones, is eventually going to occur. Bioethic considerations will, at best, play out on the margins. There are second, third, and fourth order downstream effects from this that will make what we have done to domesticated animals over the millennia seem like child’s play.
Remember that every dog breed today, no matter how unusual in size, appearance, or temperament, is really just a variation on the wolf.
If it can be done, it will be done. Exactly! And the Atheist Chinese will lead the way. The Chinese want to be the best. The Chinese want to win. 80 more years till the 22nd Century. Can you dig it?! The Flu was going around about 100 years ago. Let’s hope we don’t have another one of those.
I think that’s because it was published in Baptist Press. All the interviewed ethicists were Baptists.
Never going to happen.
Eventually we were destined to have widespread health problems from things like antibiotic resistance, and genes that nature intended should kill you before you could reproduce (like blue baby syndrome) but medical science saved you, and your defective genes along with you.
Gene editing saves us from ourselves.
“You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.”
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