Designer babies and human germ-line editing: is this where the future of scientific research is taking us? With new and advancing genetic technologies, these seemingly sci-fi sounding phenomena may not be far from reality. As we enter the new era of genetics, we simultaneously perch ourselves on a slippery slope in terms of ethics. If we possess these technologies to improve the human germ-line, should we necessarily be using them? This begs the question, how are new technologies going to be reviewed and regulated by an ethics board?
Engineering embryos has been a focus of modern genetic editing. This is mainly done through a technology called CRISPR, short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, which include a set of enzymes that can be programmed to edit DNA at certain locations within the genome. Although this technology has potentially powerful public health implications, increased accessibility to CRISPR editing can lead to ethical dilemmas. Oregon Health and Science University recently revealed they had conceived a way to manipulate human embryos to correct a mutation contributing to sudden heart disease and death. “Potentially, we’re talking about thousands of genes and thousands of patients,” said Paula Amato, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at University of Portland, who was one of the main investigators in the study. If we start engineering embryos to eliminate congenital defects and diseases, it may be the needed segue into using the same technology for cosmetic procedures and designer babies.
Human embryonic editing is the process of altering a zygote and its progeny, so it does not affect just one individual, but rather the lineage of individuals that succeed the edited embryo. If we flashback to the eugenics movement, it is eerily similar to what we are trying to achieve with human genomic editing today. We are selecting for a certain type of genetic composition, which may further marginalize minority groups who do not possess the popularly coveted traits of that time. There is potential for “genetic disease, once a universal common denominator, could instead become an artifact of class, geographic location, and culture,” and this compounds the struggles minority and impoverished groups presently face.
Public policymakers will have to find a balance between fostering the use of genetic editing technologies while also maintaining the ethical considerations of extending uses of such a technology.
Feature Image Source: Girl Forward Digital Digitization by Gerd Altmann
