Genetic engineering is a series of techniques for isolating and manipulating genes so as to modify the genetic makeup of an organism. This might involve the removal of a gene, its reconfiguration in relation to other existing ones, or the addition of new genes derived from other individuals of the same or different species. The resulting change in genotype results in the organism being modified in its development and aspects of its form and functions – its phenotype. One reason to do this is to correct for the absence of malformation of usual genes, another is to add or create new gene types so as to transform the phenotypical features, e.g., and as has been done, adding genes derived from luminescent jellyfish to the DNA of mice with the effect that they ‘glow’ in the dark. That was to test possibilities, but the main aim of such research is to provide therapies and cures for human genetic defects and to enhance human capacities. CRISPR is a series of sequences of DNA derived from infection by micro-organisms which help to immunise organisms from subsequent DNA invasions. A technology developed for using this to create and immunise certain cultures, specifically yoghurt, and crops, but in 2019 it was applied to the treatment of a woman with a genetic defect and it has since been used on other human subjects. Its ease, economy and effectiveness of application suggests that its use will increase to heal and to enhance. Ethically, there are two sets of issues with genetic engineering relating to its consequences and to its very nature. Regarding the first, some argue for it on the grounds of its benefits in correcting and improving the human condition. Others argue against it because of unforeseen consequences and risks of misuse. The intrinsic objection is that it treats human nature not as something given by God or nature, or as something to be respected for what it is in itself, but as a state or condition that can interfered with and manipulated to suit various desires and preferences and that this instrumentalises it, also creating different classes of humans: natural and improved.
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— Our capacity to modify the human genome is about to increase enormously, raising a number of complicated moral questions
— What's wrong with designer children, bionic athletes, and genetic engineering
— Mish his Co THE FUTURE OF THE CONSTITUTION July 5, 2011 ... Eric Cohen and Robert P. George Adam Gault The Problems and Possibilities of Modern Genetics: A Paradigm for Social, Ethical, and Political Analysis B Governance Studies at BROOKINGS B Eric Cohen is executive director of the Tikvah Fund and editor-at-large of The New Atlantis. Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. INTRODUCTION magine a future in which any person, man or woman, could engineer a child as a genetic replica of himself or herself. Or a future in which a child could be the biological fusion of the genes of two men or two women. Or a future in which every individual could know, with reasonable certainty, which diseases they would suffer in the months, years, or even decades ahead. Would this new genetic age constitute a better world, or a deformed one? The triumph of modern civilization, or the realization of modernity's dark side? With a subject as large and as profound as modern genetics, we face a major question from the start about how to approach it. We could take a scientific approach, examining the use of information technology in genomic research, or the latest advances in identifying certain genetic mutations, or the use of genetic knowledge in the development of medical technologies. We can take a social scientific approach, seeking to understand the economic incentives that drive the genetic research agenda, or surveying public attitudes toward genetic testing, or documenting the use of reproductive genetic technology according to socioeconomic class. We could take a public safety approach, reviewing different genetic tests and therapies for safety and efficacy with a view to identifying regulatory procedures to protect and inform vulnerable patients undergoing gene therapy trials. As we think about the genetic future, all of these approaches are valuable. Yet there are even more fundamental questions that need to be addressed. These concern the human meaning of our growing powers over the human genome. The reason modern genetics worries, excites, and fascinates the imagination is that we sense that this area of science will affect or even transform the core experiences of being human—such as how we have children, how we experience freedom, and how we face sickness and death. Like no other area of modern science and technology, genetics inspires both dreams and nightmares about the human future with equal passion: the dream of perfect babies, the nightmare of genetic tyranny. But the dream and the nightmare are not the best guides to understanding how genetics will challenge our moral self-understanding and our social fabric. We need a more sober approach-one that confronts the real ethical and social dilemmas that we face, without constructing such a monstrous image of the future that our gravest warnings are ignored like the bioethics boy who cried wolf. What is the role of constitutional adjudication in confronting these dilemmas? In a word, that role should be limited. To be sure, American constitutional principles and institutions provide the frameworks and forums for democratic deliberation regarding bioethical and other important moral questions, but in most cases it will not be possible to resolve them by reference to norms that can fairly be said to be discoverable in the text, logic, structure, or historical understanding of the Constitution. Reasonable people of goodwill who disagree on these matters may be equally committed to constitutional principles of due process, equal The Problems and Possibilities of Modern Genetics: A Paradigm for Social, Ethical, and Political Analysis Governance Studies at BROOKINGS 1 protection, and the like; and it would be deeply wrong-profoundly anti- constitutional-for people on either side of a disputed question left unsettled by the Constitution to manipulate constitutional concepts or language in the hope of inducing judges, under the guise of interpreting the Constitution, to hand them victories that they have not been able to achieve in the forums of democratic deliberation established by the Constitution itself. It would be a tragedy for our polity if bioethics became the next domain in which over-reaching judges, charged with protecting the rule of law, undermine the constitutional division of powers by usurping the authority vested under the Constitution in the people acting on their own initiative (as is authorized under the laws of some states) or through their elected representatives. Possibility and Prediction In thinking about the new genetics, it is all-too-easy to commit two errors at once: worrying too much too early and worrying too little too late. For decades, scientists and science-fiction writers have predicted the coming of genetic engineering: some with fear and loathing, some with anticipatory glee. But when the gradual pace of technological change does not seem as wonderful as the dream or as terrible as the nightmare, we get used to our new powers all too readily. Profound change quickly seems prosaic, because we measure it against the world we imagined instead of the world we truly have. Our technological advances including those that require transgressing existing moral boundaries— quickly seem insufficient, because the human desire for perfect control and perfect happiness is insatiable. Of course, sometimes we face the opposite problem: Scientists assure us that today's breakthrough will not lead to tomorrow's nightmare. They tell us that what we want (like cures for disease) is just over the horizon, but that what we fear (like human cloning) is technologically impossible. The case of human cloning is indeed instructive, revealing the dangers of both over-prediction and under- prediction. So permit us a brief historical digression, but a digression with a point. In the 1970s, as the first human embryos were being produced outside the human body, many critics treated in vitro fertilization and human cloning as equally pregnant developments, with genetic engineering lurking not far behind. James Watson testified before the United States Congress in 1971, declaring that we must pass laws about cloning now before it is too late. In one sense, perhaps, the oracles were right: Even if human cloning did not come as fast as they expected, it is coming and probably coming soon. But because we worried so much more about human cloning even then, test-tube babies came to seem prosaic very quickly, in part because they were not clones and in part because the babies themselves were such a blessing. We barely paused to consider the strangeness of originating human life in the laboratory; of beholding, with human eyes, our own human origins; of suspending nascent human life in the freezer; of further separating procreation from sex or of treating procreation as a species of manufacture and a child as the operational objective of an application of technique. Of course, babies The Problems and Possibilities of Modern Genetics: A Paradigm for Social, Ethical, and Political Analysis B Governance Studies at BROOKINGS 2 who are produced by IVF are loved by their parents and are, in themselves, great blessings. Whatever one's views of the ethics of IVF (and the authors of this paper are not entirely of one mind on the question) no one would deny that it has fulfilled time and again the longing most couples possess to have a child of their own, flesh of their own flesh. But, by the same token, no one should deny that it has also created strange new prospects, including the novel possibility of giving birth to another couple's child-flesh not of my flesh, you might say—and the possibility of picking-and-choosing human embryos for life or death based on their genetic characteristics. It has also left us the tragic question of deciding what we owe the thousands of embryos now left-over in freezers-a dilemma with no satisfying moral answer. But this is only the first part of the cloning story. Fast-forward now to the 1990s. By then, IVF had become normal, while many leading scientists assured the world that mammals could never be cloned. Ian Wilmut and his team in Scotland proved them all wrong with the birth of Dolly in 1996, and something similar seems to be happening now with primate and human cloning. In 2002, Gerald Schatten, a cloning researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, said “primate cloning, including human cloning, will not be in our lifetimes.” By 2003, he was saying that "given enough time and materials, we may discover how to make it work." In 2007, researchers at Oregon Health Sciences University announced the successful cloning of primates, which has since been repeated by scientists across the globe. And today, leading laboratories around the world are eagerly—and confidently-at work trying to produce the first cloned human embryos for research. If they succeed, the age of human “reproductive cloning" is probably not far behind. The case of human cloning should teach us a double lesson: beware the dangers of both over-prediction and under-prediction. Over-prediction risks blinding us to the significance of present realities, by focusing our attention on the utopia and dystopia that do not come as prophesied. Under-prediction risks blinding us to where today's technological breakthroughs may lead, both for better and for worse. Prediction requires the right kind of caution-caution about letting our imaginations run wild, and caution about letting science proceed without limits, because we falsely assume that it is always innocent and always will be. To think clearly, therefore, we must put aside the grand dreams and great nightmares of the genetic future to consider the moral meaning of the genetic present. And we need to explore what these new ètic possibilities might mean for how we live, what we value, and how we treat one another. Humanly speaking, the new genetics seems to have five dimensions or meanings: (1) genetics as a route to self-understanding, a way of knowing ourselves; (2) genetics as a route to new medical therapies, a way of curing ourselves; (3) genetics as a potential tool for genetic engineering, a way of re- designing ourselves and our offspring; (4) genetics as a means of knowing something about our biological destiny, about our health and sickness in the future; and (5) genetics as a tool for screening the traits of the next generation, for The Problems and Possibilities of Modern Genetics: A Paradigm for Social, Ethical, and Political Analysis B Governance Studies at BROOKINGS 3 choosing some lives and rejecting others. We want to explore each of these five dimensions in turn—beginning with the hunger for self-understanding. Genetic Self-Understanding The first reason for pursuing knowledge of genetics is simply man's desire to know, and particularly man's desire to know himself. Alone among the animals, human beings possess the capacity, drive, and ability to look upon ourselves as objects of inquiry. We study ourselves because we are not content to live unself- reflectively. We are not satisfied living immediately in nature like the other animals do, asking no questions about who we are, where we came from, or where we are going. We do not merely accept the given world as it is; we seek to uncover its meaning and structure. Modern biology, of course, is only one avenue of self- understanding. But it is an especially powerful and prominent way of seeking self- knowledge in the modern age. Instead of asking who we are by exploring human deliberation, judgments, and choices, or human achievement in the arts, humanities, and sciences, or human polities, societies and cultures, the biologist seeks knowledge of the human by examining what might be called the "mechanics" of human life. Genetics fits perfectly within this vision: it seems to offer us a code for life; it promises to shed empirical light on our place in nature; it claims to tell us something reliable about our human design, our pre-human origins, and, perhaps, our post-human fate. But the more we learn about genetics, the more we seem to confront the limits, as well as the significance, of genetic explanation. As the cell biologist Lenny Moss put it: Once upon a time it was believed that something called "genes" were integral units, that each specified a piece of phenotype, that the phenotype as a whole was the result of the sum of these units, and that evolutionary change was the result of new changes created by random mutation and differential survival. Once upon a time it was believed that the chromosomal location of genes was irrelevant, that DNA was the citadel of stability, that DNA which didn't code for proteins was biological "junk," and that coding DNA included, as it were, its own instructions for use. Once upon a time it would have stood to reason that the complexity of an organism would be proportional to the number of its unique genetic units.¹ But in fact, the triumph of modern genetics has also meant the humbling of modern genetics. Big hypotheses now seem to require revision and greater measure. And in many ways, we are probably relieved that genetics does not tell Lenny Moss, What Genes Can't Do (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 185. Quoted in Steve Talbott, "Logic, DNA, and Poetry," The New Atlantis, no. 8 (Spring 2005), 66. The Problems and Possibilities of Modern Genetics: A Paradigm for Social, Ethical, and Political Analysis B Governance Studies at BROOKINGS 4
— A panel featuring Jose Bufill (Bur Oak Foundation), Richard Doerflinger (de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture), and Timothy Furlan (University of St. Thomas and Harvard Medical School). From the 2021 Notre Dame Fall Conference, "I Have Called You By Name: Human Dignity in a Secular World". Session chair: the Rev. Daniel Fitzpatrick (Pontifical Scots College). Full speaker lineup: https://ethicscenter.nd.edu/programs/fall-conference/2021-i-have-called-you-by-name/
— Dr. Aaron Kheriaty is a professor of psychiatry and human behavior and the director of the medical ethics program at UC Irvine.
— A whole new category of human life - but we need to stop and take a long hard look. After all, there are big implications at stake.
— Inevitable Progress: GenomeEditing, Sovereign Science &? the Politics of the Human Future J. Benjamin Hurlbut, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University קולוקוויום בר אילן למדע, טכנולוגיה וחברה יום א׳, 17ינואר, 18:00 Following the advent ofCRISPR/Cas9, leading scientists expressed worries that this powerful andaccessible genome editing tool might be applied to human embryos, creatingheritable genetic changes in the human germline. Even as the)’ called forstrict limits, many also asserted that heritable human genome editing wasinevitable. Several years later this prophesy was fulfilled when the worldlearned that a young Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, had produced babies whosegenomes had been edited. This talk will explore how an imaginary ofinevitability shapes approaches to ethical deliberation and governance ofemerging biotechnology, focusing on the case of human genome editing. Drawingon interviews with He Jiankui and his colleagues, this talk will examine hismotivations, the advice and support he received from senior figures in thesciences and government, and the reactions from the international scientificcommunity that followed. I show how He’s project was situated within, ratherthan an aberration from, an approach to ethics and governance that is regulatedby the presumption of technological inevitability. I argue that the imaginaryof inevitability is an imaginary of right governance: it asserts relationsbetween science, technolog)׳ and society that construct ethical deliberation asnecessarily reactive, science as at once intrinsically progressive andsovereign, and governance as driven by and subsidiary to technologicalinnovation. Predicting the inevitable illicitly authorizes science to definethe parameters of deliberation even as it empowers scientists to declare whatthe future shall be.
— On December 4th we were grateful to partner with the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention to host Stanford neurobiologist Bill Hurlbut. Bill, a physician, research scientist, ethicist and Trinity Forum Senior Fellow discussed exciting advancements in the field of gene editing, and the moral and social implications of this technological achievement. Hurlbut has referred to CRISPR technology as “the Swiss Army knife of genetics,” noting that it has opened exciting possibilities for the treatment, even eradication of various genetic diseases. At the same time, it has made urgent deep and thorny ethical dilemmas, such that Hurlbut has also called it “the deepest challenge our species has ever faced.” We hope you enjoy this conversation! Special thanks to our sponsors: Richard and Phoebe Miles and Bill and Lee Schroeder The song is Life by Matthew L. Fisher - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZf0qpYnukk The painting is California Ranch by William Keith, 1908 Click here to support the work of the Trinity Forum: https://rb.gy/pdugyd
— Fr. Kevin FitzGerald, SJ, who holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics and a Ph.D. in Bioethics along with Richard Doerflinger and Tim Hunt provide an introduction to genetic manipulation and explore considerations of what is practical, moral, and ethical when it comes to genetic engineering. See https://faithscience.org/genetic-engineering/ for more.
— WCAT TV is an en air wing of En Route Books and Media working with WCAT Radio to share the joys of the Catholic faith. https://www.patreon.com/wcatradio A webinar sponsored by the Institute for Theological Encounter with Science and Technology entitled "Do You Want to be genetically engineered?" will be held on October 10, 2020. The webinar that this interview introduces will be led by Fr. Kevin FitzGerald, SJ, who holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics and a Ph.D. in Bioethics. Two more excellent presenters will be Richard Doerflinger and Tim Hunt. After webinar participants receive an introduction to genetic manipulation, they will explore considerations of what is practical, moral, and ethical when it comes to genetic engineering. To register for the event, go to https://faithscience.org/genetic-engineering/
Genetic engineering is a series of techniques for isolating and manipulating genes so as to modify the genetic makeup of an organism. This might involve the removal of a gene, its reconfiguration in relation to other existing ones, or the addition of new genes derived from other individuals of the same or different species. The resulting change in genotype results in the organism being modified in its development and aspects of its form and functions – its phenotype. One reason to do this is to correct for the absence of malformation of usual genes, another is to add or create new gene types so as to transform the phenotypical features, e.g., and as has been done, adding genes derived from luminescent jellyfish to the DNA of mice with the effect that they ‘glow’ in the dark. That was to test possibilities, but the main aim of such research is to provide therapies and cures for human genetic defects and to enhance human capacities. CRISPR is a series of sequences of DNA derived from infection by micro-organisms which help to immunise organisms from subsequent DNA invasions. A technology developed for using this to create and immunise certain cultures, specifically yoghurt, and crops, but in 2019 it was applied to the treatment of a woman with a genetic defect and it has since been used on other human subjects. Its ease, economy and effectiveness of application suggests that its use will increase to heal and to enhance. Ethically, there are two sets of issues with genetic engineering relating to its consequences and to its very nature. Regarding the first, some argue for it on the grounds of its benefits in correcting and improving the human condition. Others argue against it because of unforeseen consequences and risks of misuse. The intrinsic objection is that it treats human nature not as something given by God or nature, or as something to be respected for what it is in itself, but as a state or condition that can interfered with and manipulated to suit various desires and preferences and that this instrumentalises it, also creating different classes of humans: natural and improved.