Evolution NewsJuly 23, 2019
Genetic engineering is among the most powerful human technologies
ever invented. It holds great hope for everything from medical uses to
cleaning up the environment. But it could also unleash a deadly pandemic
or lead to a “new eugenics” with very sharp teeth.
The last time we witnessed something like this was the splitting of
the atom. At that time, we had a sufficiently cohesive and responsible
world community to enact meaningful legal and regulatory restrictions to
govern the technology’s development, which have been generally
successful — with some obvious exceptions. Imagine where we would be if
atomic energy had developed under an “anything goes” paradigm.
Anything Goes?
We are apparently no longer sufficiently cohesive or responsible to similarly come to grips with the vast power of biotechnology.
As a consequence, experiments are going forward that are both unwise
and potentially unsafe. For example, even though the biotech world was
in a supposed uproar about the birth of the first germ-line genetically engineered babies (meaning the changes will flow down the generations), nothing has been done to stifle supposedly rogue scientists from continuing to pursue such unethical human experimentation.
No Principled Opposition
Indeed, the Brave New Worlders candidly reveal that within the
biotech/bioethics community, there is essentially no moral or principled
opposition to engaging in germ-line human engineering:
The battle lines over heritable genome editing currently
pit those who choose to ask “whether” to proceed against those who ask
“how” to press on.
The latter hold that the collective ethical good is best served by a
“responsible path” toward the prevention of crippling monogenic
disorders; they are willing to trust that regulatory agencies such as
the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will hold applications for
heritable genome editing to rigorous demonstrations of safety and
efficacy before they garner agency approval.
The “latter” approach is rank subterfuge. Without an
enforceable,
international legal ban
on these experiments in humans to allow the regulations to catch up
with the technology — which these authors and many other heavy hitters
in the sector oppose — experimenters will simply do what they want. If
U.S. agencies won’t give the green light, some will simply resort to
“outsourcing ethics” (a term coined by my friend, the Stanford
bioethicist, William Hurlbut) and conduct research in other countries,
particularly China or Africa. I suspect that is already going on.
