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First Genetically Modified Human Embryo Under Review
Wired is reporting that Cornell University researchers genetically modified a human embryo in 2007, but have only recently been gaining publicity as their work is being reviewed. "The research raises a number of thorny ethical questions. Though adding a fluorescent protein was merely a proof-of-principle step, scientists say that modified embryos could be used to research human diseases. They say embryos wouldn't be allowed to develop for more than a few weeks, much less implanted in a woman and brought to term."
Wouldn't that mean they were murdered? That is if you accept the religious side of the house...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
We have glowing mice and they're doing fine. Why not a glowing human? I think that would be pretty nifty. I really don't see why there would be people who are against such things. This has other implications too. Imagine if we could remove the defect that causes Huntington disease in an embryo. Would people have ethical issues with that?
No, I don't want to be preaching "gloom and doom," but it does raise ethical questions. The biggest question: are the ethical questions that such an act raises actual issues of right and wrong, or are they simply the products of Western culture and my own philosophical prejudices? Here's the corrected link.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Children are born to parents who don't want them, they neglect them, abuse them, and even kill them.
There are parents who know they have medical problems related to their genetics, and yet are still selfish enough to "try for one" instead of adopting one of the 50,000+ or so that die of starvation somewhere in the world.
There are people out there who believe that having a baby can help save their relationship / marriage, and so create a whole human being just so they don't have to face up to the fact that they don't belong with somebody.
There are a host of ethical issues about this genetically modified human embryo, but nothing worse than already exists in the world today.
First, you lump all religious people (hint: this is most of the planet) into the category of "people who cause genocide." Second, you offhandedly pronounce that, on the whole, the effects of religion are evil. Then, you conclude that religious viewpoints should not be heard. I say that you can't back up any of those statements.
It would be just as easy to out-of-hand dismiss Slashdot users (the only group I can knowingly lump you into) as incapable of reasonable political debate.
The fact is, this is an ethical question. It presumes that human life is valuable, and asks whether embryos qualify, and then asks how their interests balance against the other considerations.
The idea that human life IS valuable is just as much a belief as the idea that embryos do or don't qualify as humans. Whether you call that belief "religious" or not, it's still a belief.
I happen to believe that human life is valuable because we "are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights." I make no argument about the faith of the Founding Fathers, but they did start with that premise. If you toss out the Creator, I assume you have some alternate rationale, but I don't think it's reasonable to say that any religious basis for valuing human life is irrelevant.
> You are presenting one side of an issue as the only side. You've chosen the side that embryos are human and alive and thus this is murder.
Forget whether it's "murder" or not for a second (that's an emotive word that will only derail discussion) and focus on the "human" aspect of things, please.
Fertilized embryos and zygotes are living homo sapien organisms--not some other species, right? They're becoming something we all recognize as human, or would given food and shelter?
So what's the other side of that (and ONLY that--no "murder" discussion, please)? They can't feel or understand pain so it's speciesist to give them special treatment merely because they're homo sapiens. Or perhaps, "What's the difference between them and cell cultures removed from your body? Especially if we could clone those?", ignoring that fertilized embryos are becoming human and samples are not?
I merely want to understand, so no flames please. I would like to hear your reasoning and your philosophy, not your anger.
When you're deciding on who gets human rights, and who doesn't, you have to err on the side of caution.
For example, assuming wild swings in opinion over time (as tends to happen), would you be more concerned about chimpanzees being granted full human rights (something I consider overly drastic), or about the severely retarded (and I mean severely - minimally functional vs a funny-looking slow guy who can't make it on his own) having their rights downgraded due to missing critical elements of a human mind?
I'm not personally concerned about the fate of an embryo - it's not quite a "baby" yet. I AM concerned about the precedents set by it's fate, and the inevitable results of applying too much logic to the value of human life. Your life only has as much value as society gives it, and the only safe standards have to be overly accepting - otherwise you see how quickly they can erode.
Another issue... are these embryo's property? If some experimenter chose not to terminate, and had the technology to keep it going, at what point would they cross a line? Definitely not sentience, as it would be very easy to prevent a developing human from ever having that level of intelligence. Would YOU like to see a number of purposefully brain damaged homo sapiens vat grown for medical experimentation?
Sad thing is, I'm pretty certain that's the future. When opportunity meets ethics, ethics never wins (given time).
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
Number 7: Profit.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
Many would accuse you of dodging the issue with that definition. The problem is that to get those stem cells, a fertilized human egg is, at some point, stopped from developing farther. If life begins at conception, trying to tell people you only killed a blastocyst, not an embryo, isn't going to do much for you.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
And the ethics of a particular matter can sometimes really hinge on nitty-gritty specific details. Thanks for your post.
I would be against genetically modifying a viable human fetus, or even something that would normally develop into one. However, I wouldn't be against culturing human cells, and would love to hear that they're growing kidneys in a lab someday.
But when you're doing experiments on individual stem cells, it becomes hard to tell those two situations apart, and our common-sense notions of morality get befuddled. It's like an ethical version of quantum mechanics.
You raise some very valid points here. You say you are certain that this is the future - I am not so sure. It certainly will be the future in forward-thinking jurisdictions, but I am pessimistic about the United States ever allowing any sorts of restrictions though. The conservative religious voting block is simply too large to ignore.
That having been said, however, I personally wouldn't have an issue with embryos being property, should they be developed. There's incredible applications for vat grown homo sapiens - least of which I can think of being transplants, and absolutely incredible insight into how disease develops. The medical and scientific knowledge to be gained from this type of experimentation certainly outweighs the negative implications - we simply need refinement in the law to state what is, and isn't permissible, and have that stand to court challenges.
The truly hard thing about living in a time when humanity is on the cusp of a second renaissance pertaining to knowledge and the ability to push beyond is the holdouts who prevent the progress. Litigate it, I say!
I don't believe there is necessarily a religious connection to saying "this is wrong." Why is it wrong? For starters, do you actually believe no such creations will be allowed to come to term? If you were offered, secretly, to have a "superior, genetically enhanced" child would you not take the offer? Don't you want your offspring to be the very best they could possibly be?
Genetic modification holds the promise and the threat of changing the face of humanity. Literally in some ways. But the real problem isn't just making green people but people that are not human and do not share humanity with the rest of the people on the planet. This is a fundamental point; we can have a society because of a shared heritage. Messing around with things that at this point we have little knowledge of is an open invitation to creating a branch of the human species which shares no common heritage.
What would we, meaning the current humans on the planet, do with someone that was both human and not human? Not human because they, for example, believed and acted like they were a superior form of life and that all others were placed within their view for their own amusement? OK, one such being would be a curiosity. 100 would be a threat and 1000 would be a war. What part of the Star Trek episode "Botany Bay" did you not understand?
I'm not sure I would say this is an "ethical" problem, but it certainly is a problem that we do not have to address. We can choose not to go down this road. We, as the humans on the planet, must not go down this road as it stands a really good chance of leading to disaster, potentially on a global scale.
I personally believe we don't yet have the wisdom or foresight necessary to manipulate our genes
Nonsense. What do you think the thousands-of-years-old practice of arrangement marriages was all about? Not strictly village economics. Parents also sized up prospective mates for their kids based on the health, history, and talents of thei prospective mate and his/her family. Yeah, yeah, eugenics. Except, that's exactly what it is, and was for a long time.
We can (the old fasioned way) make new specialized breeds of livestock, dogs, and chickens with only a few decades of paying attention to cause and effect. Cultures do the same thing - it just takes longer. And that's why - whether anyone wants to admit it or not - you can spot, in a given geographic region - people that have a "peasant" look/build and other people that have an "aristrocratic" look/build. Genetic manipulation.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Not at all. If I truly believed "not now, not ever" I wouldn't have said this was a good thing or a milestone.
I think we can reach a consensus on ethical issues. After all, we've done it before. How many cultures used to sanction slavery as part of a viable economic model? I think we've pretty much rejected that today. In the same way I think we can reach a consensus on specific ways to use genetic engineering in humans. It won't be easy. Nor should it be. Consensus doesn't mean everyone agrees. But the dissenters should have their say and they should be listened to and their concerns should be addressed before we blindly press ahead.
As I said, I doubt if anyone would object to using genetic manipulation to cure diseases, and I'm sure we could reach a consensus quickly on some of the more horrible ones. But like all powerful scientific tools the potential for abuse and misuse is pretty great, and the only way to prevent that from happening is to tread carefully during the early stages of the tools' development.
Another poster said that this is just another stage of our evolution, and perhaps that's so. But unlike natural selection we're consciously choosing to manipulate our DNA without regard to external factors or competition. At this stage we don't *need* to do this to survive. What's wrong with taking our time to consider the ramifications?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
> Am I the only one here that has no problem with the genetic engineering
> of humans? Why wait millions of years for evolution to fix things that
> are obvious?
Because we are currently clueless. When it comes to understanding how biology actually works we aren't even close to being ready to do more than randomly tinker and watch what happens. That is fine for plants and unless you are a PETA member you are probably OK with that for aminals up to some point where most people go YUCK! The exact point varies from person to person but almost everybody has a limit beyond which they aren't OK with experimenting on animals. For people that line has forever been clouded by the first assholes who experimented on humans like they were animals.
Eventually we will understand. Eventually we will create Human 2.0 in our own image and we will become obsolete. And we will be OK with it because it won't have to involve a bad scifi storyline where we get massacred because the 2.0s won't have a problem waiting us out. Or better yet we will reenginner ourselves and upgrade to 2.0. But it ain't yet time to be thinking about that sort of thing as something that will happen in our lifetime.
Democrat delenda est
Thanks for taking the time to address my points.
You can't create a law purely from logic. You can try to create a system of laws derived from as few subjective value judgments as possible, but then you end up blindly overriding some concerns with others, ala Libertarianism.
That's kind of a tangential debate, so we don't have to beat each other up on that.
Making irrelevant (is there a verb for that?) the emotional link between mother and child would definitely crucial in infant experimentation. I don't think it's good enough, though. It's an emotional strain on the scientists who work with them, and it's an emotional strain on the citizenry who find themselves contemplating the horrifying existence of experiment-babies. It's not rational, but it doesn't have to be.
I conveyed the wrong idea with my last point. My point was that there's not much to be gained with experimenting on infants as opposed to chimps, at least at this stage. When I wrote that, though, I was thinking of neuroscience. There are plenty of advantages to experimenting on infants in other contexts, so it really isn't a good point.
In this limited slice of history, the western world has very negative feelings about eugenics, genocide, and forced abortions. This hasn't always been the case, and it isn't the case everywhere in the world. We've been sensitized. You risk losing that sensitivity when you start challenging people's perceptions of the value of life. This is simultaneously a very weak point and a very important one.