by Stan Dundon
Suppose you has just gotten
the news that you had inherited a castle
in
When you inherit some ancient and wonderful habitation make sure you know how it works
before you try to make any improvements and make sure you consider the
well-being of those who will live in it
now and in the future. How does this
apply to genetic manipulation? Let’s consider first of all the ancient nature
of this castle we call our bodies. Each
baby is wonderfully new, but if we only consider its genetic history back to
the earliest hominids, the first thing to consider is that our genome, the
record of 6 million years of recorded advantageous adaptations, holds
mysterious advantages we cannot even imagine. About mere babies in my life-time
we discovered that babies get both immunities and a painless opening of their
bowels from materials in the pre-milk brownish liquid from the breast,
colostrum. My father, who was a physician, told women to throw the colostrum out. We now know that a mother and a child are
both genetically constructed so that this “social” interaction of colostrum and baby’s health interact favorably. We also
know that husband and wife intimacy before birth prepare the mother and thence
the baby for the encounter with many of the rest of the bugs it will encounter
in the home. The most dangerous place for the healthy baby is probably the
hospital. We know now too that the baby is often soothed by the sound of the
mother’s heartbeat, her voice and the father’s too (and even the music it could
hear through the uterine wall) after birth since these sounds are already
familiar to it. Its digestion and mental alertness are improved by all the
jiggling, patting, and silly cooing that even crabby old men seem irresistibly
compelled to shower on a baby. Medicine now respects our genetic preparation as
babies and parents to be social animals
intimately affected, and usually for the better, by the natural environment of
conception, uterine development, nursing and constant fondling we give and they
get. Yet, somehow astonishingly, “experts” think that babies conceived when egg
and sperm meet in a petri dish instead of the fallopian tubes are not missing
anything which they are genetically coded to benefit from. Six million years of
evolution did not design anything advantageous into that very special
environment which is protective of the richness encoded into those first cells,
nothing which “selected” the best sperm to fertilize the egg in the first
place, using criteria which we have no idea of whatsoever? Fish conception occurs outside their bodies
in the water. Human conception occurs in the Fallopian tubes. Some scientists
think it hardly matters where human conception occurs. Or is it more likely
that they simply don't know what benefits accrue and what risks avoided doing
it where evolution designed it rather than in a foreign fluid in a dish? This
carelessness and completely unjustified minimization of the risks imposed on
one’s offspring by opting for a wildly unnatural locus of conception for a speculative cosmetic benefit is a tip-off
about a lurking moral distortion at the base of GM eugenics.
Like
Fiona’s clumsy effort to improve the
ancient castle of which she understood so little, these “experts” think that they can improve
on 6 million years of nature’s work and prove their ignorance of that work by putting conception in a petri dish. At
least Fiona did not take the roof off the castle to improve the lighting!
The
meddling with the early stages of embryonic development in order to improve its
genetic endowment could only be matched by Fiona if she had chosen to drive a
bull-dozer into the castle’s courtyard without knowing whether there were
ancient wine cellars stocked with finest wines and rare liqueur built beneath
its pavement. We now know that artificially introduced genes leave genomic
wreckage near the insertion point and produce totally unanticipated
“side-effects’ if the insertion occurs
in different places. We call it genetic “engineering” as if it were a
craftsman's skill of great precision like a dentist making a crown for a broken
tooth with perfect fit, matching color and strength. But the genome is a
living, organized “social” unit, and sticking a gene here or there is about as
crude as trying to scotchtape a fallen green apple back on the tree to ripen.
Given the evidence that the nucleus is under frequent viral attack and that
parts of our genome bear traces of successful viral introductions, it is almost
compulsory to believe that there is an intra-nuclear genomic “immune system” to
police and maintain the incredible stability of our genome, without which the 6
million years of evolution’s progress would leak out as fast as it is built up.
In fact, human molecular “eugenicists” should tremble at the completely
predictable phenomenon of
“gene-silencing” which worries agricultural biotechnologists who fear
investing huge sums of money in a genetic crop improvement only to have its
phenotypic expression disappear at some unpredictable time, perhaps in several
generations. Imagine the horror of parents who themselves had been
successfully altered for superior
intelligence having a child by normal conception who gazes on the world with a
blank stare each day.
Just
as you might suspect the purity of Fiona’s motives in meddling with the castle,
one has to wonder about motives of parents who seek the “superior” child. What
is so bad about the average little-leaguer? Does he or she really need the
parental pressure to show off some engineered superior athletic ability when a
child that age just wants to have fun chasing a ball or looking at the clouds?
Just because one has the physical ability to be a champion does not translate
into the desire to even compete, as any parent of gifted children will tell
you. And when that desire is supplied from the outside in the form of pushy
parents one begins to see the lack of purity in the motives. The kid’s
superiority is sought for the glory of the parents, not the kid.
But
such second guessing of parental motives does not get at the real ethical issue
of genetic manipulation of human offspring.
The fertility specialist Panayiotis Zavos is predicting a superior
chance of success in human cloning than agricultural scientists have had with
animals. About 299 embryos died or were destroyed to produce one sheep “Dolly”.
Rates today are at best about 4 failed (died, or destroyed because defective)
for every “successful” birth. And keep in mind that “successful” means “as far
as we can see or know at this stage.” And these animals are not able to report
their “mental” or brain functions, clearly more important in humans. Take a
clearly neural problem like dyslexia. We joke about it somewhat cruelly
(“Dyslexics of the world, Untie!”) not reflecting on how distressing it can be.
We see only normal looking, intelligent and successful people, unable as we are
to experience their hidden mental burden. Dr. Zavos assures us that he will
have a team and procedures for monitoring
the “health” of his experimental embryos and fetuses during all stages of
the pregnancy. [1]
You have to know what that "monitoring" means: If any significant visible defect shows up “it” (i.e., a fetus including stages of
maturity at which any mother would refer to it as a “baby”) will be destroyed.
Zavos is dealing with clones here, but his precautions are completely
consistent with the experimental nature of what he is doing and will certainly
be followed in any genetic manipulation of an embryo made from a normal egg and
sperm. These experiments will be butcher-shops for most of the fetuses.
Imagine
the conundrum of the “monitors” if the sonogram or sampling of the amniotic
fluid (which carries more than a 1% risk of killing the baby) reveals an
“oddity”. Should they pull the plug on this pregnancy? And if fear of lawsuits
or for the reputation of their clinic and for the whole reputation of GM
eugenics inclines them toward “termination” of any oddity, how many babies will
have to be killed in utero,
even ones that had no real problem? And
how many women will be exposed to the risk of breast cancer from the
termination of their pregnancy? [2]
But what of the parents who
sought a specially “bright baby” and because
gene silencing (the nucleus’s effort to repel an alien gene) produced
severe mental retardation and their baby is still staring blankly after 6 weeks
when most babies have their parents turning somersaults with delight with their
first smiles? Will there be a somewhat
more polite form of a butcher shop for this baby? Instead of the usual
compassion with which medical staff strive to repair or cure any deficiency in
a newborn, these "monitors" will be wiser than Victor Frankenstein.
When the recognition of some serious
defect which was invisible in utero hits them
and "breathless horror and disgust" fills their hearts they will not
repeat Victor's error and run away. They cannot, because unlike Victor, the
world will quickly recognize the living products of their laboratories.
Discreet “disposal” will be imperative.
Why catalog these completely
predictable horrors? Because we need to
recognize that when the human person is made
into an “artifact", a human construction, it is its creators’ goals and not its own
intrinsic value which are going to determine its fate. A person has become an
artifact, like a painting, a blue-print, a statue, a new model auto. If it
“fails” it will be terminated, where “fails” means not meeting the expectation of others. Nothing could more
directly overturn the traditional awe with which parents and their medical
helpers have treated the loved child and contradict the most basic form of
common-sense ethics: “Do no harm to others which you would not wish done to
yourself.”
These creators will use
impeccable logic in killing the defective ones. The proposal of Victor's monster to take the mate promised him and hide in the jungle is worst
nightmare of our molecular eugenicists.
To breed and spread the defect with themselves known as its creator! No, death will be sure and swift. Nothing could
more strongly confirm Kant’s insight about what moral chaos results when we
treat others as tools to satisfy our needs rather than as ends in themselves.
Here, although the experimenters and the cooperating parents may not realize
it, they have removed the prospective offspring from the category of “others” of
humankind entirely and put them in the category of tools, tools not even
treated with the care we would show to a rare but damaged piano or violin. How
these pursuers of child-perfection distinguish themselves from child abusers is
not clear. If death is the penalty for
failing to meet standards of perfection, how can they look down on molesters who
allow their victims to resume their lives after they have been “used”?
This reduction of human offspring to tools to satisfy the goals
of its creators is the key to the immorality of GM eugenics. Could Shelley have forecast
that publicly respected members of the scientific community, not an isolated genius working in an attic, would
propose to imitate the basic program of Victor? At least Victor shuddered at
the thought of creating a second monster. These latter day "creators"
will not need to fear repeating their experiments, since they can do again and
again what Victor was at first reluctant to do: kill a faulty creation. The
profligate killing inherent in this reduction of humans to mere tools carries
with it an additional paradox: Fiona would probably be restrained in her
invasive improvements because she knows that, for her son-in-law, this castle
cannot be replaced. But for any, even mildly defective, embryo or near-born no
such care needs to be exercised since we can easily get another. Life has
become astonishingly cheap.
Epilogue
Every analogy limps in some way. Fiona’s repairs were
presumptuous and offensive because she did not own the castle, not just because
she did not know enough about old Irish castles. The analogy limps because,
presumably someone could learn enough about Irish castles to be able to carry
out a satisfactory modernization. But ownership or permission of the owner
would still be required to make the risks of the learning process morally
just. All intrusive efforts at cosmetic
genetic manipulation are founded a completely immoral presumption of ownership
of one’s offspring, and this paper simply meant to show how that presumption,
implicit and unacknowledged, actually manifests itself in the willingness to
expose real offspring, first of all to the risks of in vitro fertilization and finally to the risks of being killed
due to mere suspicion of serious defects. Intrusive, non-consenting, cosmetic
alteration of the body of a living human being is directly contradictory to any
belief that that body belongs to a living human being with intrinsic value of
his/her own, completely apart from whether the perpetrators admit that the
intrusion is gross experimentation or claim that it is an act of consummate
proven skill.
[1] USA
Today, reported by Tim Friend,
[2] About 26 of 37 studies of the abortion-breast cancer link show a positive correlation. The political “incorrectness” of acknowledging this risk has been so intense that only court action is likely to force abortion clinics to reveal it to their clients. See www.AbortionBreastCancer.com