This recent news story (link below) about Chinese scientists doing some DNA insertion experiments with embryos raised a lot of fuss. Over the years there seems to be a sorta-kinda consensus that cloning animals is OK but cloning or gene modifying a human being is absolutely taboo because … well… it just is.
What specifically is the moral issue with doing this? If I am a gazillionaire and I want to clone some geniuses and raise them as my own children what’s wrong with that assuming the genetic donators and surrogates carrying the children are all fully informed, well paid, and onboard with the plan?
My objections tend more towards the “we really don’t know what the fuck we are doing” part of it.
At this point IMO we are like drunk monkeys making wormholes and warp drives when it comes to our understanding of the nitty gritty details of genetics.
I always thought the real problem was the tremendous failure rate. For every healthy one, you might have dozens that die at some stage of development, and a handful more that die shortly after birth.
Experimenting on humans always requires serious ethical consideration. History is absolutely littered with examples of terrible things done to people in the name of science and progress.
Some people believe very strongly that human embryos are morally equivalent to full-grown humans, so experimenting on them without their consent is really problematic. Even if you don’t believe that they’re morally equivalent, allowing an experimented-on embryo to survive and grow into a child and adult may be morally equivalent to experimenting on an adult without their permission.
The parallels to cloning animals aren’t very convincing. We do lots of things to animals that we would consider morally beyond the pale if we did them to humans. Different moral systems differ on how much consideration they give to animals, but I can’t think of any that consider humans and other animals to be completely equivalent.
Re real world embryo “personhood” we abort embryos all the time for practical lifestyle reasons. I’m pro choice about a woman’s right to choose, but you’re making it sound like the defacto moral posture of scientists should be (or is) pro-life WRT the sanctity of embryos.
Speaking as a scientist who uses the technology in question in mice:
Holy shit, I just finished a project where we used 300 embryos, 30 of them survived to birth and 15 survived to adulthood. One had the genetic mutation we were actually looking for. There are generally multiple mutations in unrelated genes that we were not looking for. This was considered a success!
Think about that in human terms: in order to have one healthy child born without your genetic defect, you’d be going through many, many rounds of fertility drugs/embryo harvest to collect that many embryos. You’d need to recruit surrogates for embryo implantation. The vast majority of those pregnancies would miscarry. You’d have a dozen sick or damaged children to take care of, a dozen in which the gene had not been altered (which you would also hopefully take care of), and ONE shining genetically-repaired child with an unknown number of accidentally-caused mutations.
When and if the technology gets much better, I don’t really have a problem with trying to fix clear genetic defects, but the bar is still pretty high…
…because someone is going to have to live their entire lives with the outcome of your experiments.
I think supporting the right to choose abortions is completely different from allowing badly damaging experiments to be done on humans that you expect to survive.
I’ll note that the embryos used in the OP’s study were already known to be fatally defective and there was no chance of their survival even if implanted.
It seems to me that the correct standard for genetic modification of embryos is implied consent. If you’re unconscious at the scene of an accident, the paramedics who come to the scene can treat you, even if you haven’t signed a paper giving consent, because any reasonable person would consent to the treatment. Yes, there are unreasonable people who wouldn’t consent, but if you’re unconscious we don’t have to ask if you’re one of those unreasonable people, we can treat you.
So would a reasonable person have consented to the modifications you’re about to perform? If you’re turning the person into a circus freak, of course they wouldn’t consent. If you’re curing a serious genetic disease, then of course they would.
But if the procedure is likely to result in failure, like current cloning methods, then it is of course unethical to do on humans. It it were as safe and effective as regular IVF, then it would be fine. But it isn’t, so it’s not. If there’s a 50% or 10% or 5% chance a child is going to grow up permanently disabled because you tried to make sure he’d have blond hair and blue eyes, then the procedure is unethical.
You can’t just say that since it would be legal to abort an embryo it would be fine to do whatever you like to it. If you allow that embryo to grow into a human child, you’re legally and ethically responsible for what you did to that embryo that the child now has to live with. If there is no resulting baby, then fine. If the intent is to create a viable baby, then the best interests of that baby have to be considered.
No need to look to sci-fi, there have been plenty of fucked-up eugenics programs in real life. See the forced sterilization efforts of most of the US in the 20s and 30s, for example.
“I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized and feeble-minded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them.” - Teddy Roosevelt
Thank you for the summary. And, while it may be obvious, note that those dozen damaged children are the identical siblings of your healthy child. I can’t imagine it’s easy to walk away from them.
Modification at the embryo stage carries a much higher risk that the alteration could make it into the germ cell line and thus be passed on to any future children. Germ line differentiates just a couple days (around 6-7 post fertilization) after the stage that IVF created embryos are normally implanted (around 3-5 days post fertilization).
A genetic editing treatment could be delayed and targeted at a particular tissue in a more developed fetus (or child or adult) in which the edit wouldn’t end up in the germ cell line. Such treatments have been given experimentally (as early as 1993) without much ethical gnashing of teeth, though not always with the desired result. But sometimes it worked beautifully.
Yes, but that’s a feature, not a bug. If you’re fixing a genetic defect so that the child will be healthy, you don’t want that child to grow up and pass on the defect to his/her own children.
I don’t think I did. I pointed out that some people believe that embryos are morally equivalent, which is a factual statement that is relevant to the OP’s question about what’s so taboo about genetic experiments on humans. I also explicitly differentiated between that case and the ethical considerations for experimenting on embryos that do grow into adults.
I think Lemur866’s comments on the standard of implied consent are on point, as far as personal rights go. Since we can’t get consent, we consider what a reasonable person might consent to since we’re trying to save their life.
There are still some thorny societal issues as far as genetic modifications go, but they probably don’t apply much to attempts to turn off a gene for a known genetic disease.
I think it would be a bug in the near term. You would want to make sure that fixing the genetic defect doesn’t have some other unintended effect on the individual and be absolutely sure that the treatment didn’t have some effect on other genes via off site effects before you would consider it a feature.
There is a lot of actual history regarding eugenics gone wrong.
^ These are my biggest concerns.
At this point, we’d have multiple miscarries, dead, and maimed babies for every viable/successful effort. The ones that made it to birth would be live human beings condemned to live with other peoples’ mistakes impacting their lives.