The Ethical Implications of Genetic Engineering

Genetic engineering is defined as the deliberate modification of the characteristics of an organism by manipulating its genetic material. In medicine, genetic engineering has been used to mass-produce insulin, human growth hormones, Follistim (for treating infertility), antihemophilic factors, vaccines, and many other drugs. In research, organisms are genetically engineered to discover the functions of certain genes. In humans, genetic engineering is the process of using rDNA technology to alter the genetic makeup of an organism. Humans have been known to manipulate genomes indirectly by controlling breeding and selecting offspring with desired traits. Two major forms of genetic engineering that have been in the news in the past years are designer babies and the CRISPR Baby Scandal.

Since the 1990s, the prospect of futuristic technologies such as human cloning or selecting superhuman traits has stoked public fears about “designer babies.” Back then, these techniques were speculative, but now several methods for genetic selection are either already possible or will soon become so. For example, parents can choose to screen embryos created via in vitro fertilization for sex or diseases. This process is known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Scientists have discovered a way to extract defective mitochondria from a woman’s egg and replace them with healthy mitochondria from a donor egg.

One of the main ethical concerns with designer babies is that if parents think they are actually choosing and controlling their child’s outcome, then the dynamic of parents having tyrannical expectations over what their child will do or be is a very real possibility. Two major medical societies, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) have wildly different attitudes about when and where these techniques should be allowed. The ASRM defers to a client’s wishes on issues such as sex selection, for instance, whereas the ACOG advocates prohibiting sex selection because of its potential to lead to sex discrimination against women in society. It is also thought that giving the parents the ability to select genetic traits for their offspring could worsen the relationship between parents and children.

On November 25, 2018, Chinese researcher He Jiankui broke headlines when it emerged that he had allegedly made the first CRISPR-edited babies: twin girls named Lulu and Nana. Jiankui focused on a gene called CCR5, which the HIV virus uses as a doorway for infiltrating human cells. Scientists have tried extracting the immune cells from HIV patients and deactivating CCR5 using gene-editing techniques before injecting the cells back into the body. Although Nana and Lulu’s father was HIV-positive, neither of the infants actually had HIV. Jiankui’s team deactivated a perfectly normal gene in an attempt to reduce the risk of a disease that neither child had. Even if you wanted to block CCR5 specifically, there are drugs out there that could do the job—the rationale behind using a method as extreme and untested as gene-editing doesn’t hold up.

There was also a problem in informed consent; Jiankui relied on AIDS association to reach out to patients, and falsely described his work as an “AIDS vaccine development project.” One participant who dropped out of the experiment claimed that he was not informed about the risks, or about the fact that gene editing was a prohibited and ethically controversial technology.

Genetic engineering, to this day, is still a highly debated topic because of the ethical implications behind it.

 

• ethics