I read somewhere that while both George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World contained dystopian futures, Huxley's world, where humans are made in "hatcheries" and the people were kept compliant, not by the threat of Big Brother, but by the numbing of their senses with the pleasure-inducing drug "soma," was a more plausible scenario.
After reading "In vitro eugenics" by Dr. Robert Sparrow in the Journal of Medical Ethics, I have to agree. Dr. Sparrow explores the possibility of creating embryos in the lab, then using the stem cells from those embryos to create egg and sperm cells, and then using those gametes to create more embryos. Essentially, this would take human reproduction into the laboratory not just for one generation, but for generation after generation. These embryos would be "orphaned at conception." They "would have no genetic parents: there would be no living individual—or indeed individual that had ever lived—who could be described as the genetic progenitor of such embryos." Sparrow calls this "in vitro eugenics."
While I was on my Lenten blogging sabbatical, Britain's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) recommended that the creation of children with three genetic parents be allowed to move forward. Currently, it is illegal to transfer genetically modified embryos to a woman in Britain. The HFEA blessing will likely be used by lawmakers in the UK to change the law.
For those who are not up to speed on the "three-parent" embryo technique, here is a quick primer. This variation of IVF was developed to “prevent” the inheritance of mitochondrial disease. Not all of our DNA that we inherit is in the nuclei of the egg and sperm that join at fertilization. In the cytoplasm of our mother’s egg are mitochondria. Mitochondria have their own DNA called mtDNA. We inherit our mtDNA only from our mother because sperm’s mitochondria are dumped at conception. There are genetic mutations that cause very serious disease found in mtDNA and a woman with a such a mutation cannot help but pass this mutation on to her children.
This technique, called “maternal spindle transfer,” removes the nucleus of an egg from a woman with mitochondrial disease and places it into a donor egg with normal mtDNA. That genetically modified egg is then fertilized with the father’s sperm and a genetically modified embryo is the result. An embryo with the genetic material from two women and one man.
And last week, while many Catholics were rightly focused on the Supreme Court arguements on same-sex marriage and all of the future implications, I was wringing my hands about this turn of events in the world of human genetic engineering.
Why? There are two very important reasons. First, this technique will usher in a world where we are not just content to pick the "best" child out of many that the somewhat still natural process of IVF produces. It signals an acceptance of genetically engineering the next generation. Even though the fight against mitochondrial disease is a laudable endeavor, maternal spindle transfer and other techniques like it mean that medicine is pointed in the wrong direction: engineering children instead of treating the disease.
Second, this is not your average gene therapy where one patient is treated in the cells affected by a faulty gene. This is a germ-line modification that will be passed on to every generation after. So not only does the HFEA approve genetic modifications to one child, but to grandchildren, great grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren. A dangerous precedent indeed, especially to those generations that never gave consent.
Marcy Darnovsky, from the progressive Center For Genetics And Society, said it succinctly, “People have characterized this as sliding down a slippery slope. This one actually throws us off a cliff."
And do not think that this is simply a problem for the Brits. They at least have laws against techniques like maternal spindle transfer. Scientists in Oregon are poised to begin creating three-parent children with maternal spindle transfer. All that is needed in the U.S. is approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
It may seem that the lack of reverence for the gift of human life could not be any greater than it is today. But I fear this signals a new, more devastating, culture of death. One that is not simply content to "choose a better human," but one that now has to "create a better human."
They’re usually thought of as a brutish, primitive species.
So what woman would want to give birth to a Neanderthal baby?
Yet this incredible scenario is the plan of one of the world’s leading geneticists, who is seeking a volunteer to help bring man’s long-extinct close relative back to life.
Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School believes he can reconstruct Neanderthal DNA and resurrect the species which became extinct 33,000 years ago.
His scheme is reminiscent of Jurassic Park but, while in the film dinosaurs were created in a laboratory, Professor Church’s ambitious plan requires a human volunteer.
He said his analysis of Neanderthal genetic code using samples from bones is complete enough to reconstruct their DNA.
He said: ‘Now I need an adventurous female human.
And while the world focused on the creation of a fictional Neanderthal, I was horrified by Church’s “need” for a very real “adventurous female human.”
In October of 2012, scientists in Oregon announced they had created a dozen human embryos with the genetic material from two women and one man. While these embryos never made it to a womb, these researchers are hopeful that they will be given federal approval to, as USA Today reports, "test the procedure in women." This, of course, means transferring these genetically modified embryos to mothers willing to gestate them.
A few weeks later, in December 2012, scientists from New York proclaimed they have improved upon the technique that created these three-parent embryos and are intent on further developing their breakthrough for use in humans.
Another great episode of BioTalk with my friend Chelsea Zimmerman from Reflections of a Paralytic about the new technique that creates embryos with three-genetic parents and how the lack of any federal regulation is going to lead to the Brave New United States.
Scientists from the University of Washington have been able to remove the extra chromosome 21 in cells taken from a person with Down Syndrome. In a gene therapy process that targets only the extra genetic material in the cell, scientist were able to successfully remove the chromosome 21 without damaging the integrity of the rest of the DNA in the nucleus.
Now I know some pro-lifers are immediately suspicious of this announcement thinking that it is meant to create a complete "cure" for Down Syndrome. A syndrome that many of us belief does not need a cure in the traditional sense. But looking closer, this technique was developed to help with some of the health problems of those with Down Syndrome, including an increased risk of leukemia. Dr. David Russell explains...
Over the last year there have been many headlines about the debate in the United Kingdom on whether to create embryos with three genetic parents. Now the debate has come to America where scientists in Oregon have created embryos that have genetic material from two women and one man.
Why would scientists want to engineer an embryo with the genetic material from three people? Because they say it will “prevent” the inheritance of mitochondrial disease. Not all of our DNA that we inherit is in the nuclei of the egg and sperm that join at fertilization. In the cytoplasm of our mother’s egg are mitochondria. Mitochondria have their own DNA called mtDNA. We inherit our mtDNA only from our mother because sperm’s mitochondria are dumped at conception. There are genetic mutations that cause very serious disease found in mtDNA and a woman with a such a mutation cannot help but pass this mutation on to her children.
Oregon scientists created a dozen human embryos using a technique called “maternal spindle transfer” which removes the nucleus of an egg from a woman with mitochondrial disease and places it into a donor egg with normal mtDNA. That genetically modified egg is then fertilized with the father’s sperm and a genetically modified embryo is the result. An embryo with the genetic material from two women and one man.
This modification has implications not only for the embryo but for future generations that cannot help but inherit the modification making this what is called germ-line genetic engineering.
Transhumanists will tell you that the enhancements they propose for the human race will always be "optional." Freedom and choice are their mantra. Freedom to enhance ourselves and our offspring, or not. That is our choice.
In contrast, I have continually argued that transhumanism is by nature coercive. Once we begin to radically change our bodies and our genetics, everyone will have to follow suit or be left behind. Environmentalist Bill McKibben called it a"biological arms race" where no one will win and he points out that once we start upgrading our biology, some of us will naturally become outdated. Those "outdated" somebodies will be our children. McKibben warns parents, "The vision of one's child as a nearly useless copy of Windows 95 should make parents fight like hell to make sure we never get started down this path."
Even Ray Kurzweil, transhumanist extraordinaire, will hint at the fact that enhancements mean that the unenhanced will be left with little or no say in society. He writes, "And to the extent that there will be debate about the desirability of such augmentation, it's easy to predict who will win, since those with enhanced intelligence will be far better debaters."
And yet the pro-enhancement crowd continue to stick to the freedom mantra. Until now. Julian Savulescu, who argues for moral enhancements, enhancements with drugs or genetic engineering that would make us all more socially conscientious, says these kinds of enhancements should not be optional. They are required of all of us otherwise the human race is doomed. Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson, in Philosophy Now, are pushing enhancements not just for those who choose, but as an imperative for all:
Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson argue that artificial moral enhancement is now essential if humanity is to avoid catastrophe....
Modern technology provides us with many means to cause our downfall, and our natural moral psychology does not provide us with the means to prevent it. The moral enhancement of humankind is necessary for there to be a way out of this predicament. If we are to avoid catastrophe by misguided employment of our power, we need to be morally motivated to a higher degree (as well as adequately informed about relevant facts). A stronger focus on moral education could go some way to achieving this, but as already remarked, this method has had only modest success during the last couple of millennia. Our growing knowledge of biology, especially genetics and neurobiology, could deliver additional moral enhancement, such as drugs or genetic modifications, or devices to augment moral education.
The enhancement of mankind is NECESSARY. Education is not enough. We MUST use invasive techniques to mess with our biology to make us better animals. Forget changing the way we think...we must change the hardware with which we think. Once we accept radically changing our biology to solve problems, then making it compulsory isn't so far a leap.
When academics in their ivory towers speak, we lowly masses better listen. As Wesley J. Smith points out what begins as discussions among academics, sometimes becomes policy for the masses. There is no ambiguity here. The academics are saying enhance or perish. Not much of a choice.
As a former California girl, I am aware that my state of origin is full of contradictions like women who are on the Pill eating nothing but organically grown produce.
Back in 2004 Californians overwhelmingly voted with Prop 71 to publicly fund embryonic stem cell research with billions of dollars because they were told that cures would come. Monies from Prop 73 were going to go fund what everyone was calling the best, most promising line of research: therapeutic cloning. Therapeutic cloning would create a cloned embryo through a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) and then destroy that embryo for his or her stem cells. Those stem cells, Californians were told, were going to cure disease. So Californians were cool (whether they realized it or not) with creating genetically-modified human clones (the clones would have mitochondrial DNA from the woman whose egg was used in the cloning process) for medicinal purposes.
Fast forward to 2012 and now California is voting on Prop 37. So while the idea of treating patients with stem cells from cloned embryos was acceptable to CA residents, eating food from genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) is not.
All of the cells in our body have all the same DNA in the nucleus. So what makes a heart cell a heart cell and a muscle cell a muscle cell? The different cell types in our bodies express different genes which give them their unique characteristics. Scientists are discovering that by introducing certain factors , they can reprogram a cell into a different kind of cell.
Researchers in Germany have taken brain cells, called a pericytes, and reprogrammed them into neurons that successfully carried electrical impulses. Neurons are those long funny-shaped cells that are the building blocks of the nervous system. This announcement that scientists are able to take existing cells in the brain and coax them to become neurons is terrific news for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s where neurons are lost at an accelerated rate.
Scientists in New Zealand have used cloning and other genetic engineering techniques to create Daisy, a cow that produces milk low in β-lactoglobulin protein which is the cause of some milk allergies. From Fox News:
People allergic to whey may be able to drink newly engineered milk without the unpleasant digestive consequences, according to research released Monday. A team of New Zealand researchers genetically engineered a cow named Daisy to produce milk free of β-lactoglobulin protein that can cause allergic skin, digestive and respiratory reactions predominantly in infants. "Since the protein is not produced in human milk, it's not surprising that this protein may be recognized as a foreign protein in infants and cause allergies," study author and scientist at AgResearch in New Zealand Stefan Wagner told LiveScience. Studies show that about 1 in 12 infants develops an allergic response to whey, but most infants are able to outgrow their allergy.
But before those with a milk allergy rejoice, a lot of safety testing must be done. And they must ask themselves if they would drink the milk from a genetically-engineered cow, that strangely was born missing a tail:
Daisy was born unable to produce the major allergen in whey, but also born four weeks prematurely, and, to the surprise of researchers, without a tail.
"We do have evidence that suggests that the lacking tail is due to an epigenetic defect (that affects gene expression rather than the genes themselves), and we believe it is not related to the genetic modification of the calf, but this must be backed up by more results," Wagner said.
Dengue Fever afflicts millions of people around the world. It is a virus that is spread by a specific mosquito, the Aedes aegypti. Dengue fever can develop into a more serious disease Dengue hemorrhagic fever which can be fatal. Aedes aegypti is native to Africa, but has spread to other areas including the southern United States.
Oxitec, a company in Oxford, has genetically engineered the Aedes aegypti mosquito so that any males that mate in the wild will produce non-viable offspring. They believe this modification will reduce the population of this particular disease carrying mosquito and unlike pesticide use, will leave other populations of native mosquitoes intact.
Here is a video about Oxitec and what they do:
But when Oxitec tried to introduce their genetically modified mosquito to Key West, the residents were up in arms. They did not want any part of “Robo-Frankenstein mosquitoes" in their backyard. From an opinion piece in the Miami Herald by David Rejeski and Eleonore Pauwels:
Most Europeans see the United States as the land that embraces genetic engineering. So imagine the surprise when a British firm — Oxitec — ran into the buzz saw of public opinion trying to introduce a genetically modified (GM) mosquito in Key West to eradicate the dreaded Dengue virus.
Within a few weeks of a public meeting to discuss the mosquito release, a petition against the initiative had more than 100,000 signatories. [The entire population of Monroe County, which encompasses The Keys, is only about 75,000.] Key West inhabitants have branded Oxitec mosquitoes with names like “Robo-Frankenstein mosquitoes,” “mutant mosquitoes,” and “Super bugs,” using rhetoric lifted from movies like Jurassic Park and The Hunger Games.
Are people overreacting? Maybe. But a closer read of many of the comments posted on the petition website provide a deeper insight into the resistance and some key lessons for future technologies dependent on genetic engineering.
I have always mused on the irony of how many people are fine with genetic engineering techniques like therapeutic cloning or enhancements in humans, but are adamantly opposed to any cloning or genetic modification of plants and animals, even if there is a therapeutic intent, like with Oxitec's mosquito. I have never been able to wrap my head around this bizarre contradiction.
But Rejeski and Pauwels, I think have touched on the heart of it:
Decades of research on risk perceptions have shown that people differentiate between “voluntary” risks, which we willfully undertake, and “non-voluntary” risks, which are imposed upon us. People will smoke themselves to death while fighting against a nearby factory emitting pollutants.
In this case, Key West inhabitants clearly saw the government and the company imposing their will on the population.
In other words, genetically modifying ourselves and our offspring by choice is one thing, but involuntarily sharing the environment with genetically modified organisms is something else entirely.
Interesting psychology there. It does not bode well for human genetic engineering when all of the concerns about safety seem to be reserved for modifying plants and animals and "choice" is the reigning factor in humans.
I love the Olympics, especially the Summer Games. I cannot wait for the ultimate in human sporting events. The test of speed, strength, endurance and most importantly, will. In my fantasies, I have always been an elite athlete instead of what I really am: a hamster on the treadmill at my local gym.
And yet hanging over every Olympic games is the shadow of enhancements. I was reminded of all of the possibilities available to athletes to unfairly enhance themselves to the medal podium by this Nature piece "Performance enhancement: Superhuman athletes". Dedicated to enhancements available now and in the future, this article may make it seem to the reader like human enhancements are inevitable. It even mentions the old, fallacious, "everybody's doing it" argument made by many:
But others argue that enhancers have become so prevalent that the only realistic option is for the sporting authorities to let athletes use what they want, as long as they do it safely.
“If the goal is to protect health, then medically supervised doping is likely to be a better route,” says Andy Miah, a bioethicist at the University of the West of Scotland in Ayr. “Better yet, the world of sport should complement the World Anti-Doping Agency with a World Pro-Doping Agency, the goal of which is to invest in safer forms of enhancement.”
Such enhancements would create a whole new set of sports:
According to [Hugh Herr, a biomechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology], performance-enhancing technologies will advance to a point at which they will not only extend human limits, they will demand an Olympics all of their own. “For each one there will be a new sport — power running, and power swimming, and power climbing,” projects Herr.
And yet lost in the talk of the many possible enhancements that could make athletes stronger and faster is the the whole point of sport. What good is it to go faster or be stronger if these are measures of upgrades instead of dedication and perseverance?
Bill McKibben, in his book Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, thinks that "Sport is the canary in a miner's cage." If athletes engineer themselves to be superhuman, "It's not the personal challenge that will disappear. It's the personal."
Many people are talking about Michael Hanlon's piece in the Daily Mailabout the first genetically modified babies being born. I want to discuss it because everything is not exactly how it seems.
Hanlon's undated piece discusses a technique IVF doctors have used to "rejuvenate" an infertile woman's eggs by injecting the cytoplasm of another woman's healthy egg. Factors inside the cytoplasm help the infertile woman's egg in fertilization. When doctors injected the cytoplasm of the healthy egg, it contained mitochondria from the donor egg. Those mitochondria have DNA from the woman who donated that egg. So the after that hybrid egg is fertilized, the resulting embryo has the DNA from 1 man, and 2 women. A genetic modification that any girl would pass onto her offspring since mitochondria are inherited from the mother only. The Daily Mail article reads:
The world's first genetically modified humans have been created, it was revealed last night.
The disclosure that 30 healthy babies were born after a series of experiments in the United States provoked another furious debate about ethics.
So far, two of the babies have been tested and have been found to contain genes from three 'parents'.
Fifteen of the children were born in the past three years as a result of one experimental programme at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St Barnabas in New Jersey.
The babies were born to women who had problems conceiving. Extra genes from a female donor were inserted into their eggs before they were fertilised in an attempt to enable them to conceive.
Genetic fingerprint tests on two one-year- old children confirm that they have inherited DNA from three adults --two women and one man.
The fact that the children have inherited the extra genes and incorporated them into their 'germline' means that they will, in turn, be able to pass them on to their own offspring.
Altering the human germline - in effect tinkering with the very make-up of our species - is a technique shunned by the vast majority of the world's scientists.
Geneticists fear that one day this method could be used to create new races of humans with extra, desired characteristics such as strength or high intelligence.
Writing in the journal Human Reproduction, the researchers, led by fertility pioneer Professor Jacques Cohen, say that this 'is the first case of human germline genetic modification resulting in normal healthy children'.
A couple of readers have e-mailed this article to me so I went to the journal of Human Reproduction looking for the latest issue and found nothing from Jacques Cohen. I then found that Dr. Cohen is the Laboratory Director at ART Institute of Washington at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Apparently he left Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St Barnabas and works for a U.S. military hospital. (A fact that I find very disturbing.)
I scratched my head for a minute and dug deeper and think I have found the original paper. It was from 2001, not 2012. The technique is called "cytoplasmic transfer." I did not start blogging until 2005, so I had no idea that this genetic engineering of embryos took place. I then found an in depth report in the Washington Monthlyon the issue. Sharon Brownlee explains how the technique raised concerns at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and it seems they put a stop to cytoplasmic transfer in the United States:
In the mid-1990s, embryologist Jacques Cohen pioneered a promising new technique for helping infertile women have children. His technique, known as cytoplasmic transfer, was intended to "rescue" the eggs of infertile women who had undergone repeated, unsuccessful attempts at in vitro fertilization, or IVF. It involved injecting the cytoplasm found inside the eggs of a fertile donor, into the patient's eggs.
When the first baby conceived through cytoplasmic transfer was born in 1997, the press instantly hailed Cohen's technique as yet another technological miracle. But four years later, the real story has proven somewhat more complicated. Last year, Cohen and his colleagues at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St. Barnabas, a New Jersey fertility clinic, set off alarm bells among bioethicists with the publication of a paper detailing the genetic condition of two the 17 cytoplasmic-transfer babies born through the clinic to date. The embryologists reported that they had endowed the children with extra bits of a special type of genetic material, known as mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, which came with the cytoplasm transferred from the donor eggs to the patient's.
Just how normal those children will turn out to be is anybody's guess. At a recent meeting in Europe, the New Jersey researchers reported that one of the children conceived through cytoplasmic transfer has been diagnosed with "pervasive developmental disorder," a catch-all term for symptoms that range from mild delays in speech to autism. Cohen's group maintained that it is extremely unlikely that cytoplasmic transfer and the resulting mishmash of mtDNA is to blame.
But geneticists have only begun to trace the connections between mtDNA and a host of diseases ranging from strange metabolic ailments to diabetes and Lou Gehrig's disease, and some experts argued that the child's disorder may well be caused by a mismatch between the donor and mother's mtDNA. As Jim Cummins, a molecular biologist at Murdoch University in Western Australia, put it: "To deliberately create individuals with multiple mitochondrial genotypes without knowing the consequences is really a step into the dark."
Since 1998, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has argued that genetically manipulated embryos are a "biological product," and therefore subject to regulation, just like medical devices and drugs. But because of a quirk in federal law, the FDA's authority in this sphere is far from certain.
Last summer, FDA sent warning letters to six fertility centers threatening "enforcement action," and asserting its regulatory power over "therapy involving the transfer of genetic material by means other than the union of [sperm and egg.]" Cohen's clinic at St. Barnabas chose to stop performing cytoplasmic transfer. But at least two other recipients scoffed at the agency's threat: Panos Zavos, an embryologist at a Kentucky fertility clinic, and Brigitte Boisselier, the scientific director of Clonaid, the clinic set up by a group known as the Raelians, who believes human beings were genetically engineered by aliens. Both have announced their intentions to clone a human being.
Both also disputed the FDA's authority, and several bioethicists and legal scholars had to agree that the FDA could not prevent them from tinkering with human bioengineering. "It's a stretch for the FDA," says R. Alta Charo, a legal scholar and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, and former member of President Bill Clinton's Bioethics Advisory Committee.
So the children born using cytoplasmic transfer are indeed "genetically modified" but this is not a new development as the Daily Mail report suggests. Since it is not dated, I think the article came out in 2001 but is just making the rounds of the Internet now. So while still unethical, this is not a new technology that will be taking off as the new rage in infertility treatments.
In fact, I could not find any information on who offers this technique or where. When asked, in 2009, where cytoplasmic transfer is legal, Dr. John David Gordon, the Co-Director of Dominion Fertility at The George Washington University and an expert that has been answering questions on high tech IVF for more than ten years, replied, "I honestly have no idea..."
We should still be concerned, since there are questions about the FDA's authority to regulate the fertility industry in this regard. Which means it is even more critical that the United States join a host of other countries that have legally banned any germ-line genetic modifications and cloning in humans.
As the case of cytoplasmic transfer shows, scientists and doctors in the fertility industry will do anything that they are allowed to by law, even genetically modify embryos without real evidence that it is safe.
A British ethics committee has recommended going forward with creating human embryos with 3 genetic parents. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics, an independent body that considers issues in biotechnology and medicine, has found the genetic engineering technique is ethical and should move forward even though the technique is currently against the law in the United Kingdom.
Why would doctors want to engineer an embryo with the genetic material from 3 people? Because, it will “prevent” the inheritance of mitochondrial disease. Not all of our DNA that we inherit is in the nuclei of the egg and sperm that join at fertilization. In the cytoplasm of our mother’s egg are mitochondria. Mitochondria have their own DNA called mtDNA. We inherit our mtDNA only from our mother because sperm’s mitochondria are dumped at conception. There are genetic mutations that cause very serious disease found in mtDNA and a woman with a such a mutation cannot help but pass this mutation on to her children.
This is where the three parent embryos come in.
There are two different ways to approach the making of a embryo with 3 genetic parents. In the first method, called pronuclear transfer, doctors would take the nucleus out of an embryo that had a mutation in his or her mtDNA and put it into an embryo whose mtDNA was normal, after removing the nucleus of that embryo of course. (For an illustration of this method click here.) The alternative method, called maternal spindle transfer, would be to remove the nucleus of an egg from a woman with mitochondrial disease, place it into a donor egg with normal mtDNA (after the nucleus of that egg was removed) and then fertilize the engineered egg with sperm. (The Nuffield Council has a description and current state of research for both pronuclear transfer and maternal spindle transfer.) In either technique, the result is an embryo with the nuclear DNA from its mother and father and the mtDNA from another woman.
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics has determined that either technique would be ethical. The problem is that this kind of genetic engineering would be inherited not just by the child produced, but also by every generation after.
I have to confess that I am a bit disheartened. I find that my fellow Catholics are having trouble really connecting with the Church's teaching regarding genetic engineering. Some very smart, thoughtful and faithful Catholics are having difficulty with the distinction between gene therapy, which is genetic engineering to fix a genetic pathology, and genetic enhancement which is genetic engineering to an otherwise healthy person to make them super-human in strength, intelligence, or infused with non-human traits like night vision or glow-in-the-dark skin.
I am frustrated because I realize I might not be articulating the distinction well enough.
Some argue that to defend the difference between therapy and enhancement, the Church has to define what is considered "normal" which is, of course, difficult to impossible. To decide who qualifies for therapy, they contend that somehow the Church has to decide what is considered "healthy" and what is not.
But the Church doesn't need to do anything of the sort. Here is an analogy I think illustrates the Church teaching on many medical interventions, not just genetic engineering. Take "birth control." A chemical concoction if taken by a healthy woman to thwart her natural fertility (making it no longer function properly) it is unethical. If taken as medicine to treat a significant pathology (a side effect being temporary sterility) then it is morally acceptable. It is all in the intent not the effect.
In no way does the Church need to define what is a normal level of fertility. It simply draws the line between when a chemical is used to pervert a normal human function (fertility) and when the same one used to treat a medical condition.
I think that same applies to genetic engineering. When a manipulation of the human genome is done to treat a genetic pathology, to improve life for or save the life of a patient and bring them back to a more normal human functioning, then it is morally acceptable. When the genetic engineering is done to pervert a system that is already functioning to enhance beyond what is possible by that individual's nature, then it is immoral.
Will there be some seemingly gray areas? Likely. When is a pathology a pathology or just a variation? One person's pathology maybe another's variation. But that is why we have priests and bishops: to guide us in our individual situations.
I think when we focus on the minutia of every little nuance of every possibility we lose sight of the greater picture. Keeping genetic engineering in the realm of therapy (which is exactly where it currently resides), we can prevent some truly horrifying and unnatural modifications of the human genome. We will prevent the mixing of human and animal DNA and the tinkering with otherwise healthy offspring without their consent. Two things that clearly fall in the "immoral" box.
Just remember that science and academia are already toying with enhancements. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded Maxwell Mehlman, director of the Law-Medicine Center at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, $773,000 to develop standards for tests on human subjects in genetic-enhancement research. Research that would take otherwise normal humans and make them smarter, stronger or better-looking. If the existing human-trial standards cannot meet the ethical conditions needed for genetic-enhancement research, Mehlman has been asked to recommend changes.
And a recent paper in the journal Ethics, Policy & Environment, S. Matthew Liao, a professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University, explored ways humanity can change its nature to combat “climate change.” One of the suggestions Liao discusses is to genetically engineer human eyes to be like cat eyes so we can all see in the dark.
The intent of genetic manipulation needs to be therapeutic in nature. That principle alone rejects all manner of crazy and immoral ideas of what we can (but should not do) to ourselves and our offspring while still allowing for the possibility of healing and amelioration of suffering.
My latest piece introducing National Catholic Register readers to Church teaching on human genetic engineering:
Human genetic engineering has always been the stuff of science-fiction novels and blockbuster Hollywood films. Except that it is no longer confined to books and movies.
Scientists and doctors are already attempting to genetically alter human beings and our cells. And whether you realize it or not, you and your children are being bombarded in popular media with mixed messages on the ethics surrounding human genetic engineering.
So what does the Church say about the genetic engineering of humans?
The majority of Catholics would likely say that the Church opposes any genetic modification in humans. But that is not what our Church teaches. Actually, the Church does support human genetic engineering; it just has to be the right kind.
The 3-genetic parent embryo is back in the news. This time it is Australia that wants to attempt to genetically engineer a human embryo to have 3 genetic parents.
Why would scientists want to engineer an embryo with the genetic material from 3 people? To "prevent" the inheritance of mitochondrial disease. Not all of our DNA that we inherit is in the nuclei of the egg and sperm that join at fertilization. In the cytoplasm of our mother's egg are mitochondria. Mitochondria have their own DNA called mtDNA. We inherit our mtDNA only from our mother because sperm's mitochondria are dumped at conception. There are genetic mutations that cause disease in mtDNA and a woman with a such a mutation cannot help but pass this mutation on to her children.
This is where the three parent embryos come in. Here is how it works. Scientists took the nucleus out of an embryo had a mutation in its mtDNA and put it into an embryo whose mtDNA was normal, after removing the nucleus of that embryo of course. The result is one embryo with the nuclear DNA from its mother and father and the mtDNA from another embryo and its mother. Confused? Here is a simplified diagram that I made from the one in the Nature paper. (A zygote is the single celled embryo that results from fertilization.)
So scientists created 2 embryos with IVF, destroyed one human embryo by removing its nuclear DNA and added the DNA from the other human embryo to make a third recombinant embryo with the mtDNA from one woman and the nuclear DNA from another woman and a man.
In Australia it is now illegal to transfer embryos created by techniques other than the fertilization of a human egg with human sperm into a womb. That law is there to prevent scientists from cloning embryos or genetically engineering embryos with extra human or animal DNA and then gestating them to see what happens. And just as in the UK, which has a similar law, Australian scientists are calling for an exception to this law to allow this 3 parent technique to move forward.
And while curing genetic disease with gene therapy is a laudable goal, the Catholic Church teaching is clear that this is not the way to do it. We cannot sacrifice two embryos to make a healthy third. We Catholics could embrace such a genetic therapy to cure mitochondrial disease if life did not need to be created, manipulated and destroyed in a dish. When the day comes that we can fix this without creating and destroying life in a lab, we Catholics can jump on that genetic engineering train.
And with the announcement that with DNA sequencing, mitochondrial diseases can now be easily identified and diagnosed, it is imperative that we object to this approach to "curing" mitochondrial disease. We must insist that researchers look into alternative ways like somatic gene therapy to help those with mitochondrial disease now and not just focus on making sure no one with mitochondrial disease is born.
Chronic pain is a major problem for many and some pain does not respond to traditional pain medications or some people cannot tolerate the side effects. The culture of death has their solution for those suffering from chronic intractable pain: assisted suicide. Researchers at the University of Michigan have another more hopeful approach: gene therapy. They have engineered a herpes virus to deliver the gene that encodes for a natural pain killer. This virus migrates to the nerves and makes the nerve cells produce the pain killer for a month to six weeks. Researchers think they can extend this effect for up to 6 months. From The Guardian:
Doctors in the US have begun a clinical trial of a gene therapy that uses the body's natural painkillers to bring relief to patients who cannot be helped with conventional drugs. They hope that a single injection could provide relief for up to six months in people whose pain is so severe that morphine and other frontline drugs have little effect or cannot be used because of their side-effects.
The trial was launched after a pilot study this year of people with intractable cancer pain showed the therapy was safe. The therapy smuggles a gene into sensitive nerves beneath the skin that makes the cells release natural chemicals that alleviate pain.
Dr David Fink, who is leading the research at the University of Michigan, said that the trial was the first to investigate if the technique was effective in humans.
"We have started with people who are in pain from terminal cancer, but the approach is applicable for intractable pain from inflammatory conditions, such as arthritis of the hip and any number of other situations," he said....
Fink reported a small trial to investigate the safety of the treatment in April this year. Ten patients with intractable pain were given injections. Those who received high doses reported feeling less pain than those who had medium doses. Those who had low-dose injections felt no benefit.
The latest trial will compare tens of patients who have the injections with a control group that receives a placebo jab. Fink, who outlined the trial at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington, expects to have results at the end of the year.
This is fantastic news and another example of ethical genetic engineering. Of course the trial could not possibly progress fast enough for those suffering from chronic pain right now. Until novel treatments such as these are available to all, those with chronic pain can be their own advocate. Dr. Eric Chevlan and Wesley J. Smith have written a book about how to get proper pain control called Power Over Pain: How to Get the Pain Control You Need. From cancer to headaches, it is a valuable resource for anyone who struggles with chronic pain.
Scientists at the Mayo clinic have made a glow-in-the-dark kitty. This is not the first time scientists have made cats glow with the green fluorescent protein (GFP) which was originally isolated from jellyfish. But these kitties are different. They do not just have the GFP gene but also a genetically engineered resistance to the feline version of HIV. The GFP and the resistance were inserted together. The glowing indicates that the kitty was successfully engineered. Scientists hope that these cats will be a model for studying the HIV virus.
I want to go beyond the creation of these glowing cats and their purpose and look at another reason they are special. In the past, transgenic cats and other glow-in-the-dark animals were made by SCNT better known as cloning. The researchers would modify a somatic cell nucleus (somatic is a fancy word for a body cell like skin or muscle cell), insert that nucleus into an empty egg and "Viola!" a transgenic clone was created. But the above cats were made differently. They were made with a tweak on plain old in vitro fertilization or IVF. Researchers modified the egg and then fertilized it with regular sperm. You know, reproduction in the semi-old-fashioned way. This modification was shown not only to be incorporated into the first generation kitty, but for the second generation as well making it a technique that produces germ-line genetic modifications or modifications that can be passed on from generation to generation. This was the first time this technique of modified IVF was successful in carnivores.
Why is this significant? Because it used to be that scientists would talk about the genetic engineering of humans in context of cloning. The idea was to modify the nucleus of a somatic cell like a skin cell and then use that modified nucleus to clone a genetically modified human. In other words, cloning humans would have to be perfected first and then the genetic engineering could proceed after.
But cloning is a very difficult and inefficient process that uses hundreds of eggs which is why the researchers that created these new transgenic kitties did not use it. The modified IVF had a 23% success rate while the cloning was only 3% successful in producing genetically modified cats.
What does this mean? It means that cloning may no longer be considered to be the way in which the genetic engineering of humans will be accomplished. It may only take modifying eggs or sperm before IVF to create a genetically modified human that could pass that modification onto his or her offspring. With IVF being such an accepted and widespread practice, it may not be long before parents are ordering up germ-line genetically modified offspring that will have no choice but to pass their modification on their children and grandchildren.
Well of course such genetic modification of human egg and sperm before IVF to create a germ-line genetic modification is illegal right? It is in many countries like Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, India, Japan and Germany where inheritable genetic modifications are prohibited, but not in the United States. In the U.S. we are hesitant to put any restrictions on the IVF industry in fear of infringing on someone's mythical "reproductive rights." It is time to stop tip toeing around IVF and regulate the fertility industry because it maybe that IVF is where such human germ-line genetic enhancements will occur.
Gene therapy is the kind of genetic engineering Catholics can get behind. Gene therapy would deliver a copy of a normal gene into the cells of a patient with defective genes to cure or slow the progress of disease. The added gene would produce a protein that is missing or defective in the diseased patient. It has proven to be not such an easy thing to do however because the gene has to be targeted to the right spot and our bodies have a lot of ways to prevent foreign DNA from inserting itself into our genome. And even if a new gene is inserted properly, it often does not make it into a daughter cell when the cell divides. Scientists have announced that they have found a way to get a normal blood clotting gene into mice with hemophilia and keep it there. From The Scientist:
Using precision DNA-cleaving enzymes called zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) to replace a dysfunctional gene in vivo, researchers successfully restored nearly normal blood clotting in mice with the human blood disease hemophilia B.
The feat, published online yesterday (June 26) in Nature, represents the first time scientists have been able to use ZFN-enabled “genome editing” to permanently correct the DNA of cells within a living animal, and provides hope that the same technique may one day treat a wide range of human diseases....
To try to achieve a permanent correction of the genome itself, High turned to ZFN technology, which enables researchers to target and precisely cleave specific regions of DNA. The break induces DNA repair enzymes to mend the genetic code, but by offering a template of a desired correction or revision, researchers can effectively trick the cell’s own repair mechanisms into inserting the new code in the place of the defective gene. Getting the cell itself to do the job is optimal, because the replacement gene will come “under the control of the normal regulatory elements” that ensure it will work as it should, High explains....
Furthermore, when the researchers removed part of the 10-week-old mice’s livers, triggering regeneration by cell division, their factor IX levels did not drop, and were still going strong at 30 weeks. By contrast, in mice that had received the corrective gene without the ZFN, factor IX levels went up at first, but crashed to near zero after cell division, confirming that the addition of the ZFN had resulted in actual correction of the genome.
Although human trials are at least some time off, the hemophilia treatment is now being tested in dogs, and the study bodes well for “a series of diseases where a small change in the level of protein present will make a big difference,” said Capecchi. While treated mice showed no ill effects, the hurdle in humans will be safety. Cutting DNA, Capecchi cautioned, “is a very reactive set of events that can lead to bad things happening, so it’s very important that they get the break where they want it and nowhere else.”
Controlling Human Genetic Engineering Before it Controls Us Part 1 was all about the distinction between gene therapy and genetic enhancement. I want to delve deeper into the world of human genetic engineering in Part 2 and discuss somatic and germ-line genetic modifications. I know that for some of you the words "somatic" and "germ-line" have made your eyes glass over and I am about to lose you (if I haven't already). Stick with me! This will not be as painful as it sounds and you might actually enjoy knowing more about human genetic engineering than 99.9% of the general populace
The distinction between somatic and germ-line modifications is just as important as the distinction between gene therapy and genetic enhancement. Somatic is a fancy scientific term meaning any cell that is not a reproductive cell like an egg or sperm. Somatic cells are heart, lung, muscle, brain cells and the like. Germ cells are the reproductive cells, namely egg and sperm. A somatic genetic modification is a genetic modification that is in the somatic cells only. So a somatic genetic modification is one that does not extend to the germ cells and so will not be inherited by any future offspring. A germ-line genetic modification is one that is made so that it is included in the germ cells. Germ-line modifications will be inherited which means that the genetic engineering will be passed on to future generations.
As of now the way to make a germ-line genetic modification is to modify a sperm or egg before IVF so the resulting embryo has the modification or to modify an existing IVF embryo before implantation. The idea is to modify the human organism early enough that the modification is in all the cells including the germ cells. That way when that embryo becomes and adult, its sperm or egg contain the modification and so that adult will pass that change on to his or her offspring.
So what does the Catholic Church say about somatic and germ-line genetic modifications? Somatic modifications for gene therapy is morally permissible. In plain English that means genetically modifying one person to cure disease is great. As discussed before, a somatic genetic enhancement, taking one person and enhancing them beyond what is human, is never moral and should never be attempted.
But what about germ-line modifications? In theory the Church embraces germ-line gene therapy. If curing genetic disease in one patient is good, then curing the disease for the whole family for every generation after is even better. The problem is that as current technology stands, to make the germ-line modification means that a human life has to be created and manipulated in a lab dish. The Catholic Church rejects the creation of human life in a lab. Once technology is developed that will allow the germ-line gene therapy to be accomplished without IVF or cloning and can be shown to be safe without major side effects, then the Catholic Church can embrace it. So while germ-line gene therapy is not now moral, it could be in the future.
As for germ-line genetic enhancement, if genetic enhancement is immoral for one individual, it is certainly immoral if it is done to every generation that follows. A germ-line genetic enhancement means that children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and so on will also be enhanced. This is the granddaddy of all unethical human genetic engineering. It is one thing to enhance yourself, it is quite another to force it onto generations that never asked for it.
Libertarians are some of the greatest advocates for the germ-line genetic enhancement. They believe it is their right to enhance their offspring in any way they see fit and anyone telling them otherwise is forcing their ideals on others. The argument can be summarized by Ronald Bailey in his piece for Reason magazine:
Liberals accept as true that there is a protected sphere of private activity and belief into which even well-meaning democratic majorities may not intrude. Biotechnology is one of a suite of new intimate technologies which are well on the way to empowering people to enhance themselves and their progeny by giving them stronger bodies, longer and healthier lives, and smarter brains. Certainly technologies dealing with birth, death, and the meaning and purpose of life need protection from meddling by others who, however democratically, would force their visions of the good on the rest of us.
Bailey's argument seems compelling but, like most people these days, he is only thinking about the rights of the PARENTS and not of the resulting children and grandchildren. He argues that telling parents they cannot genetically enhance their offspring is forcing our "visions of good" on them. I argue it is the parents who would genetically enhance their progeny that are forcing "their visions of the good" on their children. Children who are genetically enhanced to be intelligent or athletic would be forced to fit their parents' idea of genetic perfection. And not just while the children are minors, but for the rest of their lives. Enhancement is not like piano lessons or sport that a child can quit once out of the house, it is for life. And if it is a germ-line enhancement, these children will be unable to help passing this parental "vision" on to their children and their children's children. Talk about forcing one's ideals on other people. In reality, germ-line genetic enhancement is the exact opposite of a liberal ideal.
So what is the current state of genetic engineering in humans? Right now most genetic engineering is being attempted only at the somatic level for gene therapy. The attempt is to cure disease and only in the somatic tissues that are affected in a specific patient. This means that the genetic modification is only for the person who needs it and will not be passed on if that patient has children. Unfortunately, somatic gene therapy has had some pretty terrible side effects including cancer and death. The gene therapy was only undertaken because the risk of the genetic engineering was outweighed by the devastation of the genetic disease. With the risks inherent in genetic engineering, genetic enhancement of an otherwise health individual is downright dangerous, and germ-line genetic enhancement of future otherwise healthy individuals is morally unthinkable.
Congratulations, you are now more educated about human genetic engineering than 99.9% of the general populace. Pat yourself on the back.
Now it is up to you to educate your friends and family. To control human genetic engineering BEFORE it controls us we need to listen to the wisdom of the Church and make the distinction between gene therapy and genetic enhancement and be mindful of the differences between somatic and germ-line modifications. Widespread human genetic engineering is not yet a reality, but someday it will be. And it falls on us to make sure that it doesn't destroy our humanity. Luckily we have the teachings of the Church to guide us.
I have not had much time lately to write so here is a repost for my readers of a guest piece at Creative Minority.
www.chrismadden.co.uk
More and more movies depicting a dystopian future are playing on big screens everywhere. They are usually cautionary tales of how technology ends up dominating human existence, our choices, our families, our relationships, our lives. These tales are not new. From GATTACA to The Island, from Surrogates to Limitless, what begins as man wielding his superior intellect to mold his world and harness nature ends up as individuals losing their humanity and becoming slaves to technology.
As in Surrogates, often the technology is developed as a way to cure disease or help the disabled, but applied to the common man it changes who we are and how we interact with each other. The message is clear. Technology starts out treating disease or disability. But when used to "fix" was isn't broken it means a loss of humanity.
Surprisingly, this science fiction theme is critical in understanding human genetic engineering and what the Catholic Church says on the issue. Not all human genetic engineering is morally wrong. There are two distinctions to be made when discussing the Church's teaching on the ethics human genetic engineering. I will address one in this part and the other in Part 2.
First, under the umbrella of "genetic engineering" there is a difference between gene therapy and genetic enhancement. These concepts are often confused and lumped together, but there are important moral differences.
For many years scientists have envisioned using gene therapy to cure devastating disease. Gene therapy would deliver a copy of a normal gene into the cells of a patient with defective genes to cure or slow the progress of disease. The added gene would produce a protein that is missing or defective in the diseased patient. A good example would be Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy or DMD. DMD is an inherited disorder where a patient cannot make the protein dystrophin which supports muscle tissue. DMD strikes in early childhood and slowly degrades all muscle tissue, including heart muscle. Average life expectancy is only 30 years.
Researchers have recently been able to introduce the normal gene for dystrophin in mice with DMD. They achieved this by inserting the dystrophin gene into the DNA of the mice. The genetically modified mice were then able to produce eight times more dystrophin than DMD-mice without the modification.
More dystrophin means more muscle which, in this case of a devastating muscle-wasting disease, is good. But apply this technology to a normal man who wants more muscle to improve his athletic ability, and you have entered the world of genetic enhancement. Genetic enhancement would take a otherwise normal individual and genetically modify them to be more than human in intelligence, strength or beauty. Genetic enhancement is also called gene doping and the DMD researchers have already been inundated with calls from athletes who want to be genetically enhanced.
So while both therapy and enhancement are technically genetic engineering, they have different intent and very different outcomes. Gene therapy seeks to cure disease. Genetic enhancement seeks to change the very nature of man: to make him "super-human."
The Church is clear that gene therapy is laudable while genetic enhancement is morally wrong. From the Charter for Health Care Workers:
In moral evaluation a distinction must be made between strictly <therapeutic> manipulation, which aims to cure illnesses caused by genetic or chromosome anomalies (genetic therapy), from manipulation <altering> the human genetic patrimony. A curative intervention, which is also called "genetic surgery," "will be considered desirable in principle. provided its purpose is the real promotion of the personal well-being of the individual, without damaging his integrity or worsening his condition of life.
On the other hand, interventions which are not directly curative, the purpose of which is 'the production of human beings selected according to sex or other predetermined qualities,' which change the genotype of the individual and of the human species, 'are contrary to the personal dignity of the human being, to his integrity and to his identity. Therefore they can be in no way justified on the pretext that they will produce some beneficial results for humanity in the future,' 'no social or scientific usefulness and no ideological purpose could ever justify an intervention on the human genome unless it be therapeutic, that is its finality must be the natural development of the human being.
There is a multitude of misinformation surrounding the Catholic Church teaching on human genetic engineering. A perfect example is this excerpt from David Frum's piece in the New York Times. Frum insists that the Church and John Paul II support genetic enhancement. He performs a slight of hand, whether intentional or not. See if you can spot it:
The anti-abortion instincts of many conservatives naturally incline them to look at such [genetic engineering] techniques with suspicion — and indeed it is certainly easy to imagine how they might be abused. Yet in an important address delivered as long ago as 1983, Pope John Paul II argued that genetic enhancement was permissible — indeed, laudable — even from a Catholic point of view, as long as it met certain basic moral rules. Among those rules: that these therapies be available to all. [My emphasis]
Like many, Frum confuses gene therapy with genetic enhancement. Some argue there is only a hair's difference between the two so lumping them together is acceptable. This is not the case. Any genetic engineering will no doubt have unintended consequences and unforeseen side effects. It should only be under taken in cases where the benefits will outweigh the risks, as in the treatment of life-threatening illness. Genetic engineering should never be used on an otherwise healthy person because the risk is not worth the so-called "reward."
In movies like Surrogates and GATTACA, it appears inevitable that technology that was designed to help humanity eventually destroys our humanity. To some extent, I believe we have bought into that idea that no matter what we do, technology will eventually be our master. But the real world does not have to mirror science fiction, if we make the distinction that the Catholic Church has made. There is a difference between using genetic engineering and technology to help the sick or disabled and using the same technology to take an otherwise healthy person and enhance them beyond normal human abilities. While therapy seeks to improve the human condition, enhancement seeks to fundamentally alter it. Most are unaware of the distinction. It is our job to enlighten. We do have the ability to control human genetic engineering without it controlling us. To do that we must draw a line in the sand between morally laudable therapy and human altering enhancement.
Part 2: Somatic and germ-line genetic engineering. (Sounds like fun doesn't it?)
Yes. Thats right a three genetic parent baby maybe on the way in the UK within the next year. Why would scientists want to engineer an embryo with the genetic material from 3 people? To "prevent" the inheritance of mitochondrial disease. Not all of our DNA that we inherit is in the nuclei of the egg and sperm that join at fertilization. In the cytoplasm of our mother's egg are mitochondria. Mitochondria have their own DNA called mtDNA. We inherit our mtDNA only from our mother because sperm's mitochondria are dumped at conception. There are genetic mutations that cause disease in mtDNA and a woman with a such a mutation cannot help but pass this mutation on to her children.
This is where the three parent embryos come in. Here is how it works. Scientists took the nucleus out of an embryo had a mutation in its mtDNA and put it into an embryo whose mtDNA was normal, after removing the nucleus of that embryo of course. The result is one embryo with the nuclear DNA from its mother and father and the mtDNA from another embryo and its mother. Confused? Here is a simplified diagram that I made from the one in the Nature paper. (A zygote is the single celled embryo that results from fertilization.)
So scientists created 2 embryos with IVF, destroyed one human embryo by removing its nuclear DNA and added the DNA from the other human embryo to make a third recombinant embryo with the mtDNA from one woman and the nuclear DNA from another woman and a man.
Currently it is against the law in the UK to implant genetically engineered embryos such as these but as I predicted authorities are ready to chuck the law in order to start on this right away. From Fox News:
Babies with three biological parents could be conceived in the UK as early as next year, after the British Health Secretary invited scientists to advise whether he should approve a new IVF technique for preventing severe inherited diseases, The (London) Times reported Friday.
Andrew Lansley asked the fertility watchdog to convene an expert panel to consider the safety and effectiveness of the procedure, the first step towards possible approval.
The therapy, developed by a team led by Professor Doug Turnbull at Newcastle University, is designed to replace faulty versions of structures called mitochondria inherited from mothers.
Mitochondrial failure can cause fatal liver, neurological and heart conditions.
The treatment involves merging DNA from two fertilized eggs, so that malfunctioning mitochondria are replaced by healthy ones. As mitochondria contain small amounts of DNA, a child conceived that way would inherit genetic material from three parents, though 99.8 percent would be from the mother and father.
It is illegal to place embryos created that way into the womb, but the 2008 Human Fertilization and Embryology Act gave the Health Secretary the power to rescind the ban without primary legislation.
If Lansley approves clinical use of the therapy, his decision is likely to be put to a vote in both Houses of Parliament. If the ban is lifted, Turnbull could apply for a license to treat patients.
Notice they don't really mention that two embryos are destroyed to make a third. Who needs details anyway?
The ban on implanting genetically modified embryo was in place to prevent the implantation of embryos that were cloned with rabbit, mouse or cow eggs but it looks like the UK is willing to toss that out like yesterday's lunch.
And while curing genetic disease with gene therapy is a laudable goal, the Catholic Church teaching is clear that this is not the way to do it. We cannot sacrifice two embryos to make a healthy third. We Catholics could embrace such a genetic therapy to cure mitochondrial disease if life did not need to be created, manipulated and destroyed in a dish. When the day comes that we can fix this without creating and destroying life in a lab, we Catholics can jump on that genetic engineering train.
This movie looks phenomenal. I am hoping it delivers. Jim is a movie about genetic enhancement, taking otherwise normal humans and genetically engineering them to be more than human. After crushing life experiences, Jim decides to order up a child who is enhanced to handle all of the troubles that he could not. There is another story line of a distant future where a genetically enhanced super race controls a race of clones. Here is the trailer:
There is even a website for Lorigen Engineering the company that offers Jim a genetically enhanced child. Here is their commercial:
After all we want the best for our children. Or do we?
the Church's teaching regarding genetic engineering. Some very smart, thoughtful and faithful Catholics are having difficulty with the distinction between gene therapy, which is genetic engineering to fix a genetic pathology, and genetic enhancement which is genetic engineering to an otherwise healthy person to make them super-human in strength, intelligence, or infused with non-human traits like night vision or glow-in-the-dark skin.
Scientists at the Mayo clinic have made a glow-in-the-dark kitty. This is not the first time scientists have made cats glow with the green fluorescent protein (GFP) which was originally isolated from jellyfish. But these kitties are different. They do not just have the GFP gene but also a genetically engineered resistance to the feline version of HIV. The GFP and the resistance were inserted together. The glowing indicates that the kitty was successfully engineered. Scientists hope that these cats will be a model for studying the HIV virus.
