Experiments with Inheritable Genetic Modification

Posted by Jessica Cussins March 13, 2013
Biopolitical Times

An important and timely article, “The British Embryo Authority and the Chamber of Eugenics,” appears this week in The Huffington Post. Stuart Newman, Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy at New York Medical College, discusses the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority’s (HFEA) public consultation on the social and ethical considerations of “mitochondria replacement,” and takes the agency to task for entertaining the legality of a procedure that he sees as inherently unsafe and problematic.

Unlike in vitro fertilization (IVF), which “generates embryos from the biological components that evolved to serve this function,”  mitochondria replacement radically alters an embryo through the introduction of genetic material from a third person, piecing together various parts of cells in novel ways. Newman notes that humans are the product of evolution, not design, and that it is a fundamental misconception to believe that billions of years of complexity could be tweaked with any predictable outcome.

Furthermore, Newman separates the question of the desirability of avoiding mitochondrial diseases, which affect 1 in 5,000-10,000 people, from a supposed right to have one's own children by any means necessary, and points out that a technique to modify people who do not yet exist should not be conflated with medical treatment for actual sick people.

The attempt to improve future people is not medicine, however, but a new form of eugenics. In its willingness to risk producing damaged offspring by modifying embryos' genomes, this "correctionist" eugenics goes even beyond the "selectionist" version of the forced sterilization programs for criminals and others considered biologically inferior conducted in the United States and Europe throughout most of the 20th century (and brought to an extreme in Nazi Germany).
Activities that are clearly covered by the Nuremberg Code prohibiting nonconsensual human experimentation are recast by proponents of gene-altering technologies as within the alleged rights of parents to exert proprietary control over the characteristics of their prospective offspring.

Why would the HFEA toy with a technology imbued with such problematic implications for individuals and society? Newman concludes with some words of caution:

The ironic lesson of the new drive toward DNA-based eugenics (of which the mitochondrial replacement techniques would be the thin end of the wedge), is that despite its being the special initiative of an avowedly progressive sector of biomedicine, it actually brings together some of the most regressive strains of traditional and modern society: valuation of people according to their biological characteristics, parental proprietorship, the marauding entrepreneur and evolution denialism.
The HFEA's members may imagine that they are taking cautious steps toward a genetically brighter future, but in actuality they are drawing on darker forces promoting the misuse of technology with clear potential for individual and social harms.

Many of the scientists currently working on mitochondria replacement are eager to promote their techniques as safe and ready to move to human clinical trial; a cautionary look, such as this, from notable scientists is thus extremely valuable and timely.

Previously on Biopolitical Times: