by Stefano Vaj
Gregory Stock reports that during a famous symposium where he was the moderator in 1998,[384] with the attendance of some big names in molecular biology like Leroy Hood, who developed the techniques for automatically sequencing genetic data, or French Anderson, founder of human gene therapy, when the usual litany was intoned of the difference between the “good” genetic engineering that aims at “healing,” and the “bad” one that aims to modify or enhance, the then seventy-two year old Watson, father of the Genome Project and discoverer of the DNA, stood up to say: “I understand that no one really has the guts to say it, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we?”
Stock adds: “Watson’s simple question, ‘If we could make better humans…why shouldn’t we?’ cuts at the heart of the controversy about human genetic enhancement. Worries about the procedure’s feasibility or safety miss the point…”
No one is seriously worried about what is impossible: “Some critics, like Leon Kass, a well known bioethicist at the University of Chicago who has long opposed such potential interventions, aren’t worried that this technology will fail, but that it will succeed, and succeed gloriously.”[385]
Along the same lines, in a survey completed in 1993, Daryl Macer, director in Japan of the Eubios Ethics Institute, remarked how a substantial segment of the population in all the countries included in the survey would have wanted to have access to genetic engineering, both to prevent pathologies, and to enhance the physical and mental abilities they passed on to their children. It is also interesting to see how the numbers given went from 22% in Israel to 43% in the United States to 83% in India.[386]
Ramez Naam observes:
Ironically, one of the most obvious responses to safety concerns about human enhancement, that is banishment, is counterproductive. Enhancement techniques are likely to be quite popular. Consider some of the precedents: in addition to the more than 8 millions cosmetic plastic surgery cases they underwent, U.S. consumers in 2002 spent $17 billion on sports supplements and herbal products intended to improve health or boost mental or physical function. Most of these supplements have little or no effect, yet they’re incredibly popular. When truly effective mental and physical enhancements are available, they’ll tap into a large existing demand. Bans on highly in-demand goods and services don’t seem to eliminate the market for such things – they simply move it underground. […] In a black market, safety suffers. There are no regulators to enforce safety standards. There is no threat or liability for botched services or procedures. It is difficult to perform long-term safety studies to spot emerging problems.[387]
Besides, prohibition finds a totally impracticable road ahead. Statistics prove that already today 90% of US couples who discover via prenatal test that they are expecting a baby with cystic fibrosis opt to have an abortion, including catholics[388]. Obviously, the percentage of people who would accept to have an embryo affected with such a pathology deliberately implanted, as the Italian law on IFV absurdly would want to impose, would be much smaller than the scant 10% of Americans who are ready to carry forth the pregnancy of an affected foetus.
Technologies that are relevant to the manipulation of germ lines, were they even to remain forbidden in most industrialised nations, would anyway be likely emerge, be it only as by-products of the research on adult stem cells and on genetically-based somatic therapies[389], which finds much harder challenges on its way.
Stock adds:
Compared with somatic interventions, germ line interventions are in a sense more natural, in that their regulation is like the rest of our genome. […] Somatic gene therapy, after all, is well within the accepted medical framework. No one who has watched people suffer serious illnesses like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anaemia would deny them a genetic treatment because of some vague philosophical apprehension about altering our genes. Germ line engineering represents a shift in human reproduction, but as effective somatic therapies become common, reduced public concern about genetic interventions in general will smooth the way for a move from screening and selecting embryos to actually manipulating them [why indeed deny an embryo a therapy available for a grown-up, and why not extend the cure from the individual to his offspring?[390]] In addition, research on somatic gene therapies will likely yield knowledge that can be used in germ line work.[391]
This implies by itself the idea of a human responsibility with respect to the general characteristics of its own descendants.
The American Academy for the Advancement of Science, editor of the review Science, and known for its caution, despite all bio-Luddite anathemas has declared: “Greater knowledge of genetics is also making it possible to contemplate genetic interventions not only to treat or eliminate diseases but also to ‘enhance’ normal human characteristics beyond what is necessary to sustain or restore good health. Examples would be efforts to improve height or intelligence or to intervene to change certain characteristics, such as the colour of one’s eyes or hair.”
In turn, the National Science Foundation declared in 2001, in a workshop held with the Department of Commerce which was entitled “Converging Technologies to Improve Human Performance,” that conference attendendants recommended “a national R&D priority on converging technologies focused on enhancing human performance, with especial regard to ‘nano, bio, info, cogno’.”[392] (nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive sciences).[393]
People like Craig Venter, who as already mentioned completed the mapping of the human genome with Celera Genomics, and the Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith are today recreating from scratch the functioning genome of an organism. Until now the “genome” of some viruses had been recreated, such as the phiX174 on which Arthur Kornberg worked. Venter’s project however concerns the reconstruction of the genome of the microbe mycoplasma genitalis, a very simple bacterium, but which presents all the normal cell functions. Among other things, this represents, as is obvious, a fundamental step toward the ancient objective of “creating life inside a lab”[394]; but its long-term potential effects with respect to the understanding and managing of the genetics of higher animals and man are equally clear.
In this scenario, with respect the direct intervention on the human genome, the “Beethoven objection”[395] that is held against any traditional eugenic measure, according to which policies geared towards limiting the ability to procreate by carriers of undesirable characteristics might stochastically entail the loss of exceptional genetic or phenotypic traits, throwing away the baby with the bathwater, so to speak, is no longer applicable. Such an intervention is in fact literally therapeutic, limiting its intervention on the deliberately chosen target, and allowing vice-versa for the potential preservation of positive traits randomly associated with other that are incompatible with viability or otherwise undesirable.
“Thus, this technological mutation is very probably abiding,” Kempf writes. “We will need to get used to the idea of thoroughly manipulating man, growing his parts, cloning him, programming him, implanting bionic devices in him, interacting with ever more intelligent machines, etc. This does not mean that all this will be done, but that all this will be possible. The artificial transformation of beings confronts society’s horizons.”[396]
In addition, objections founded on the complexity of the challenges that face us essentially miss the point. It is perfectly true that the genetic mechanism of some characteristics, even though certainly hereditary, is altogether obscure, and that the naïve model that imagines that DNA codifies in a simple and linear fashion the phenotypic characteristics is today being thoroughly revised. But our ability to manipulate genes is given not by our ignorance of many genes and combination of genes that indeed we don’t understand, but by the depth of our knowledge of the few genes that we understand today. As long as human, animal and plant genetics continues to unravel, we will find that many traits are too opaque to envision their alteration in the foreseeable future, for others such scenario is quite obscu
re but perhaps feasible in the mid-term, and others still will reveal themselves surprisingly easy to modify.
The apparent nature of a phenotypic trait does in any case offer little insight into the complexity of the underlying genetics.
Perfect pitch is the ability to identify a musical note without any external reference for comparison [for instance a diapason, or the tone emitted by a musical instrument]. The psychological and cognitive mechanisms for accomplishing this are not doubt complicated, so one would expect that the ability would have numerous genetic contributions, but family association studies suggest that the potential to develop prefect pitch may hinge on only a single allele (genetic variant of a particular gene). The realisation of the skill, however, correlates with early musical training, typically beginning before age four, so perfect pitch, like so many other abilities, requires both a genetic predisposition and early training.[397]
As Stock writes,
no knowledgeable person denies the complexity of biological systems, so a dash of skepticism amid the exuberance of daily headlines about the genomic revolution is welcome. But to conclude that we cannot surmount the technical and scientific obstacles is premature, to say the least. At this time, human germline manipulation is not feasible nor safe. A decade from now, it still won’t be. Two or three decades hence, however, the story may be different. Viable germline interventions in humans will require no fundamental breakthroughs, only a steady increase in the scale of our exploration of the human genome. Within ten years, we will know much more about how our genetic predispositions and vulnerabilities manifest themselves. Many of these influences will probably be impossible to manipulate using current technology, others will prove difficult to decipher but not unmanageable, and still other will be relatively easy to change.[398]
Alexander adds:
As far as biotech [is] concerned, there [are] at least 1,500 good reasons to rewire human biology. That’s how many diseases, at least, science [reckons are] caused by some balky gene or combination of genes. In fact, when you [stop] to think about it, we [are] pretty messed up. Yes, we have made it through four million years of evolution, but we’ve picked up a lot of garbage on the way. Every person’s genome [has] some thing or other wrong with it. White Europeans [suffer] from cystic fibrosis, their lungs filling with putty-like mucus, their bodies starved for breath. Africans [have] sickle cell disease, a mutated gene that turn their red blood cells into tiny boomerangs barely able to carry oxygen. Italians and Greeks and Cypriots [have] thalassemia; Jews [have] Tay-Sachs. There [are] harelips, Down’s syndrome babies, fragile X. People [are] born with genes for dozens of “syndromes” like Marfans, Kleinfelter, Rett’s, Cri du Chat, Wiscott Aldridge, Kartageners, Pelizaeus-Merzbacher, Leigh’s. There [is] myotonic dystrophy and cherubism and neurofibromatosis. And good god, the cancer genes! Evolution, Watson [says,] “[can] be pretty damn cruel.” […] Doctors saw a lot of patients who wanted to know everything possible about gene testing, about PGD, about embryo selection.[399]
Mostly these parents have no problems of fertility, but for reasons of family history prefer to undergo the rigours of assisted procreation so that their children begin their life in a petri dish and not it a uterus.
Today, this enables a purely diagnostic manipulation, that is, a mere selection of available embryos,[400] but the technology opens up the way for a direct modification of the genome.
Alexander continues: “What’s the difference, say between giving a kid insulin for the rest of his life, and inserting an insulin-making gene into an embryo that lacked a good one? […] Not only would the kid be cured, but he would not pass on the bad gene to his kids nor they to theirs.”
12 .Insemination, fecundation, gestation
The biotech revolution is complete with the maturation of technologies relative to animal and human reproduction.
The development of reliable and safe birth control methods, that hardly interfere with the sexual life of the adopters,[401] even though they may facilitate the “demographic suicide” of some populations (a constant trend in societal decadence), are relevant because they allow the explicit selection of the reproductive partners on whose offspring parental investment will be focused.
If the “traditional” and “natural” choice of sexual partners is, in humans and animals, chiefly regulated by the sociobiological “whisper of the genes,” the procreative choice that contraceptives enable has become an entirely conscious option, which tends to uncouple from the individual’s drives or (especially in the case of those inclined to promiscuity) from mere randomness.
Naturally culture plays a role in this choice, but one must also stress that, in a society of the “third man,” it becomes to a very high degree a matter of human responsibility. The identity of one’s reproductive partner can no longer be attributed to a moment’s distraction, to rape, to a night’s revelry, or to the first “interlocutor” who presents himself at the end of a period of forced abstinence.
Similarly, the fact that abortion has become relatively safe and painless, and (irrespective of its motives) practically discretional, at least in the first weeks of pregnancy, in most legal systems[402], makes it impossible, for better or for worse, to prevent prenatal elimination and/or selection of foetuses for essentially arbitrary reasons.[403]
But of course, there is more. The first human artificial insemination goes back to 1884, the year in which Nietzsche finished Gay Science, when a woman was impregnated with the sperm of a medical student unknown to her. The practical importance of this technology, however, changes dramatically in the seventies, when the preservation of spermatozoa in liquid nitrogen makes possible both to stock sperm samples in large amounts and to retrieve them at will, which among other things allows one to choose the characteristics of the donor, giving place to its large-scale adoption in animal breeding. Hence, at that time the first sperm banks were also created that make it possible in principle for a mother (or her doctor) to choose a donor on the basis of any characteristic or set of characteristics that are orderly recorded at the time of collection, among which are race, height, build, eye colour, IQ, religious and ethnic background, and even nationality.[404]
And of course personal identity. At the time of the Vietnam war, young Americans were already depositing their sperm in specialised banks in order to guarantee that their wives would be able to conceive a child in case they did not return.
Thus, even a feminist like Chiara Valentini remarks:
The association of paternity and going to war is ancient, as attested by a large number of sources, and testified by popular culture. When the soldier sings, “Fare well, my fair friend, and fare well,” he adds as a partial consolation, “but I don’t leave you alone, since I leave you with a child, my beloved.” Today, the soldier can leave, rather than a child, simply the option of a child, extending his capacity to procreate beyond the end of his own life. […] But you are not pushed to deposit and freeze your sperm only at death’s door; today, soldiers and others high-risk individuals may want to be guaranteed the ability to procreate should an injury or intoxication impede their fertility. For years people have resorted to sperm banks precisely when fearing that the effects of, e.g., surgery might result in the loss of one’s ability to have offspring.[405]
In 1978 the time came of the first out-of-body fertilisation or IVF,[406] where an ovule taken from the mother was fertilised in the laboratory and reimplanted after three cellular divisions (in this case into the biological mother), saw the birth of a girl, Louise Brown, conceived in Manchester with the assistance of Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards.[407]
This proved wrong the US National Academy of Sciences, that in 1970 had charged a commission to evaluate the time required to develop the technology of in-vitro fertilisation, and concluded that it would take at least twenty five years to complete.
Such a breakthrough experiment however had been anticipated almost a decade earlier, when in 1961 an Italian, Daniele Petrucci, successfully performed a
test tube fecundation, and maintained the embryo alive for thirty days (even though eventually, overcome by panic, he destroyed it, without escaping for that matter the rebuke of the Jesuits’ journal, Civiltà cattolica); and then was allegedly interrupted, a few years later, by the intervention of a priest, sent by the bishop of Bologna, when he attempted to implant an embryo in an already anaesthetised patient.[408] (!)
Today, more than one million so-called “test tube babies” have been born throughout the world. Of these, at least ten thousand have been born following gestation inside the body of a woman other than their biological mother, and genetically foreign to the child. These cases occur of course either when the sterile “mother” receives the donation of an ovule or when the mother resorts to a surrogate uterus because she is not able or willing to go through a pregnancy. Alarms that children born this way would not be perceived and treated normally, originally voiced by Kass and Rifkin (the former abandoned his initial opposition to IVF, while the latter even denied he had ever opposed it, despite his earliest writings proving the contrary),[409] ran into the utter indifference of the communities of these children, who in some cases are now twenty-five or thirty years old, and are on the whole not looked upon as anything “more special” than those among us who were born through a caesarean instead of the normal parturition.