by Stefano Vaj
In 1984, in Melbourne, the first child developed from a frozen embryo was born. This was the onset of the practice that consists in explanting the desired number of ovules into a culture medium, to eliminate the stress of the continuous hormonal stimulation of the ovaries for the removal of ovules; these are collected, then fertilised, preserved and kept available for the future and possible implantation.[410]
Much more complicated, but already successfully performed for many species, is the preservation of the oocytes, which, as such and unlike spermatozoa or embryos, are often damaged by freezing, are rarely fertilised even when undamaged, and rarely yield a successful pregnancy even when they are fertilised.
However, in Italy alone, at least three children have already been born from frozen ovules. While sperm is by definition abundant in nature,[411] “large number of young women would likely bank eggs if they could do so easily,” thinks Gregory Stock. “If nothing else, that would calm the angst about their biological clocks running out.” Many such women, of course, would never use their banked eggs; they would conceive their children through sex [and keep their banked eggs as “insurance”]. But other women would choose embryo implantation [after having had some of their eggs inseminated], seeing it as a trivial procedure, too good to pass up.”[412]
Also in Italy, since the beginning of the nineties, “authoritative scientific journals have made similar suggestions,” remarks Luigi Frigerio, quoting “for example, the possibility of cryopreservation of the ovules of patients having to undergo oncological treatments with the risk of losing their fertility. Furthermore: this technology has been proposed to women who want […] to avoid the genetic risks of older mothers. And again: prior to tubal sterilisation, in case the woman changes her mind; or in case of genetic risk, in order to demand that the foetus be subjected to a quality control.”[413]
One odd aspect of oocyte conservation, as Kempf observes, is that these oocytes can even be taken from females in the foetal stage. It is thus possible to have babies born whose biological mother has never lived,[414] after fertilisation with the chosen sperm and implantation in a host mother, who can in turn be sterile or normally fecund.
In any event, the wide diffusion of these technologies does certainly have a great potential significance, not only today with regard to problems of individual fertility, but above all with respect to population birthrates and to segments of the population that are the most vulnerable to social anti-demographic pressures in the case of Western societies, connected for instance to the time it takes to gain economic independence, or to avoid that child rearing interferes with the social or professional development of the individual; and the importance of such factors in terms of negative selection, or of the aggravation of demographic differentials between different ethnic components, certainly does not need to be stressed at the present time.
Naturally, the ease with which it is today possible to conserve and treat spermatozoa, ovules and embryos, outside the uterus and in numbers that are not dependent on the biology of human (or for that matter animal) pregnancy, ensuring thereby their vitality at the desired time, is fundamental for any kind of examination, selection or alteration to the effects already discussed, and for the deliberate programming of phenotypic traits in personal offspring as well as in populations. This adds to the availability of refined techniques of prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion has already; as do methods of identifying with absolute certainty biological parents, and in particular fathers, by means DNA or rare blood-group analyses, and efficient, inexpensive and reliable contraceptives.[415]
Not only that. In a way, the opposition to IVF (in-vitro fertilisation) or “assisted procreation” as it is politically correct to call it in Italy in order to rule out any function other than as remedy to difficulties to procreate, is actually crucial in the agenda of bioethicists like Kass and his Italian imitators, for reasons that have little to do with rhetoric on human dignity or religious claims, and that consist precisely in the fact that the relative technology obviously represents the entry, in both the human and animal field, to all the reproductive manipulations discussed in this essay, with the sole exception of selective abortion.[416]
It is only in-vitro fertilisation that enables PGD (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, that is, embryo screening and selection), cloning, and direct interventions on germlines that is actual genetic engineering.[417]
As Stock remarks: “Another field helping to build a foundation for germline intervention is that devoted to the treatment of infertility. No one here cares about such wild notions as human redesign; everyone is too busy counseling patients, performing ultrasounds, aspirating eggs, overseeing lab procedures, and implanting embryos. They are occupied with the here and now – with women and men who cannot have the babies they badly want. The larger import of their work, however, is unmistakable.”
Moreover, Vittorio Possenti of the University of Venice, another member of the notorious Italian National Committee on Bioethics, admits:
The new techniques [of assisted fertilisation] are changing the way we view procreation, birth, life, family, kindle desires, create in the collective imagination a new perception of paternity, maternity, kindredness, stir up unseen fears and expectations, give man a feeling of omnipotence… Therefore it does not appear far-fetched that the victories of science and the resulting faith in it, in conjunction with a eugenic frame of mind that is gaining ground, lead one to think that true and safe procreation is entirely artificial, and no longer natural conception followed by pregnancy.[418]
And this despite the fact that Italian law explicitly restricts resorting to artificial fecundation to cases of sterile or infertile couples, to the exclusion of any other purpose.[419]
In the same way, anyone who today resorts to IVF, with the correlative selection of gametes or of the embryos effectively implanted, will be automatically inclined to make use of all the available tools inherent in the possibility to determine the characteristics of the child to be obtained, either by what becomes spontaneously available following the encounter of the gametes of the two partners, or by the alteration of the genetic code they have transmitted by those gametes.
In the meantime, while abortion remains generally allowed in view of an unshrinkable deference for the “human rights” of the mother, the already mentioned ridiculous issue of the existence of a “pre-embryonic stage,” particularly before the fourteenth day following conception,[420] is not just a means for Catholic morality to find a way out in matters of artificial fecundation that would be less complicated than the “technical” solutions currently discussed.[421]
Such a dubious developmental stage could in fact be necessary to bypass the regulations on biomedical research on humans contained in codes and international declarations, to begin with the Nuremburg Code of 1947, and up to the International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects of 1993.[422]
While assisted procreation has in any case once and for all introduced some of the technologies necessary for the future feasibility of intervening on the human germline, we have seen how another crucial component of these techniques has been generated as a by-product by the so-called “therapeutic cloning.” If it is unclear whether there are already cloned children walking among us, it would only require the implantation into an available uterus, with methods now tried and tested, for the human embryos reported to have been produced as soon as May of 2005 in England and Korea for possible “stem cell therapies” to turn into children; and this therefore guarantees the indefinite repeatability of interventions and experiments.
The last step to achieve full human control of our own reproduction and that of other mammals will be the creation of artificial uteri, and a gestation integrally taking place in incubators.
If today parturition is by and large medically “guided” and caesareans have been practised for two thousand years, medical technology has for long been endeavouring to shorten the time that a human being needs to s
pend inside a female uterus in order to survive, leading to its fall from the nine canonical months to less than six, thanks to the use of thermostatic cots, special nutrients, incubators with strictly controlled environmental conditions, and other therapies useful in case of premature birth, be it natural or induced.
At the same time, we have seen that a growing number of children are born in petri dishes, where the embryo undergoes a short developmental phase before being implanted in the uterus of the mother, or another woman willing to carry the pregnancy to completion. The accomplishment of the vision, which the biologist and eugenic theorist Jean Rostand considered inevitable, of an entirely extra-uterine gestation, is considered by many to be feasible within ten to fifty years, and applicable on a large scale soon after the development of the relevant techniques.
In 1995 Langer and Vacanti wrote:
Younger infants cannot survive primarily because their immature lungs are unable to breathe air. A sterile, fluid-filled artificial womb would improve survival rates for these newborns. The babies would breathe liquids called perfluorocarbons, which carry oxygen and carbon dioxide in high concentrations. Perfluorocarbons can be inhaled and exhaled just as air is. A pump would maintain continuous circulation of the fluid, allowing for gas exchange. Liquid breathing more closely resembles the uterine environment than do traditional ventilators and is much easier on the respiratory tract. Indeed, new work on using liquid ventilation in adults with injured lungs is under way. Liquid-ventilation systems for older babies are currently in clinical trials. Such systems will be used to sustain younger babies within a decade or so. In addition to a gas-exchange apparatus, the artificial womb would be equipped with filtering devices to remove toxins from the liquid. Nutrition would be delivered intravenously, as it is now by the mother’s body through the umbilical cord. The womb would provide a self-contained system in which development and growth could proceed normally until the baby’s second birth.[423]
Experiments of this nature are already under way. Following the pioneering work of Yoshinori Kuwabara in 1990 at the Juntendo University of Tokyo on perfluorocarbons and the possibility of using such a substance to ensure gas exchange to the foetus while keeping it immersed in a “breathable” liquid, noteworthy results have been obtained in 1997 with roe deer foetuses kept in an artificial amniotic liquid and fed via a system of out-of-body circulation. A mixed system, that conserves the original placenta, is being studied also on roe deer by Robert Guidoin at the Laval University in Quebec.[424]
In fact, the relevant techniques are applicable also with respect to animal reproduction, and it is unnecessary that in such uteri whole individuals be produced, since it is perfectly possible with genetic manipulation to inhibit the growth of all parts of the body except those one wants to grow (connected of course to a circulatory system and to a “heart,” natural or mechanical), for example a Parma ham or a beef filet or the “clone” of the pancreas of a diabetic patient.[425] Such products can then be the result of deliberate crossbreeds between gametes selected by the technician, or by cellular cloning, possibly transgenic, of already existing individuals.[426]
Ultimately, we shall see the slow progress by which the second man has gradually taken control over plant reproduction extended in the coming years to the whole of the living world, human life included.
As a consequence, in the biotechnological century, communities will end up being able to master in full, consciously or unconsciously, the (post-)human and natural landscape in its power, as well as its own genetic traits and demography.
13 .Alternative Futures
Of course, the only thing we know for certain about the future of our species and of its populations is that it lies in front of us. We also know that there is no possible “going back.”[427]
There can only be a return (namely, the Eternal Return) of that which in the past allowed us to confront new challenges and affirm our selves. Our restless exploring of the world, the technologies that derive from it, condemn us to choose, offer us powers, but cannot tell us what to make of them.
This is not the task of engineers or scientists or lawyers, but of the “founding heroes,” of poets, and of the élites who can translate into deeds the obscure collective will of the popular community whence they emanate, building it monuments destined to challenge eternity, and leave behind “undying glory.”
The questions discussed here are bound in any event to shape our future. The growing trivialisation of the possibilities that are progressively opening up makes it unthinkable that these can be unanimously repressed or ignored on a planetary scale for any significant period of time, whatever the strength of repression applied, of the cultural and political influence intended to deny its impact or prohibit its application, of the control by domestic or international law enforcement agencies that might be established to this end.[428]
Now, there are those who think, pessimistically, that despite all appearances to the contrary, fundamental theoretical and technological progress has for some time been slowing down; or even that, despite the incredible acceleration spanning the last two centuries, there is the risk that it might come to a halt, and that its halt is not unrelated to the gradual consolidation of a planetary, globalised system promising the Fukuyama-prophesied “end of history”; and it is plausible that the dazzling present applications, included those discussed in the present essay, are only “implementations” and “industrialisations” and “refinements” brought about by dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.[429]
But this is immaterial, because, as we have seen, the announced developments do not require any real breakthrough, no fundamental revolution of our knowledge and of the techniques available today. In the end, even a fundamental undertaking such as the completion of the Human Genome Project consisted in nothing more than throwing heaps of cash at a problem, which, generally speaking, we already knew how to solve. The “paradigm change” is well behind us.
For this reason, even allowing for the option of a radical attempt at collective repression, of an absolute prohibition, our way of life will still change irrevocably. For instance, in the case of reproduction and human genetic engineering, when the relevant procedures will be available to everybody, not much beyond the level of a children’s Chemistry set, if we are to prevent their use we shall have to enforce the sequestration of all ovules and spermatozoa from their natural holders in order to hinder their manipulation, institute a “natural” species and race bank that it will be prohibited to bypass, and create laws that make testing of all pregnancies compulsory to verify that they are the result of one’s own ovule, fertilised by a randomly selected partner of unknown genetic identity, and that all pregnancies are carried to completion while the nature of its fruit remains in the dark.
That such a situation could be maintained is however very unlikely, despite the efforts of “committees on bioethics” and of the most stringent reactionary laws:
Actions [in the form of government regulations] in this area are unlikely to alter the fundamental possibilities now emerging. The legal status of various procedures in various places may hasten or retard their arrival but will have little enduring impact, because, as already noted, the genomic and reproductive technologies at the heart of GCT [germinal choice technology] will arise from mainstream biological research that will proceed regardless. Bans will determine not whether but where the technologies will be available, who profits from them, who shapes their development, and which parents have easy access to them. Laws will decide whether the technologies will be developed in closely scrutinised clinical trials in the United States, in government labs in China, or in clandestine facilities in the Caribbean.[430]
Nothing, however, prevents that the momentous rupture that is coming into sight will accelerate the end of history instead of its regeneration.
It is certainly possible to imagine a scenario in which the System, especially through international conglomerates and complacent public agencies, makes use of the biot
echnologies to establish or strengthen its own power over food, energy and industrial resources, and makes them instrumental to a reinforced social control; including by a deliberate acceleration planetary uniformisation of the species and removal of potentially destabilising deviances via the direct genetic manipulation of entire populations.
In such a context these technologies could be reduced to mere instruments for the blind rule by a global “market,” now to satisfy an undifferentiated, rootless, decadent and swarming humanity, totally devoted to a pointless exploitation and destruction of the terrestrial environment, now to serve the ends of the bourgeois micro-hedonism of degenerate pseudo-aristocracies – possibly clinging pathologically to the personal survival of its own members, and doomed to become increasingly senile anyway –, but in any event in a context of gradual dehumanisation.
The ever more radical elimination of traditional selective factors, and their narrow and mechanical replacement on a global scale by those created by a mercantilist and globalised formicary, would hence come to ally themselves with a gradual transformation of the environment and of humans moved only by senseless economic mechanisms, and in particular by the perverse dialectics of the capricious preferences and ideological biases of self-centered consumers, and the means of mass brain-washing that at once determine, echo and amplify such biases.
Such a scenario, if anything because entirely out of control, certainly involves existential and catastrophic risks for our species and its environment, for the reasons given by those fighting the present “biological revolution,” as matter of principle from a reactionary stance, but also for reasons inherent in dysgenic perils and in the species “fragility” arising from the reduction of its degree of internal diversity, its plasticity, and it capacity to survive in conditions different from the totally artificial context currently granted most people, and not only in the West.