What Happened to Concerns About Human Enhancement?
By R. Jean Cadigan, Margaret Waltz, Rebecca Walker, Rami Major and Incidental Enhancements Research Group,
The Hastings Center: Bioethics Forum
| 04. 25. 2023
Prominent science policy reports that set the stage for the recent Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing all raise questions about human enhancement. Enhancement concerns also consistently loom large in public attitudes on possible uses of these genomic technologies. It may seem surprising, then, that enhancement received little formal attention at the Summit. Instead, the Summit focused elsewhere–on issues of access to emerging forms of somatic cell genome editing for genetic disease. Here we report our observations on the Summit’s de-emphasis of enhancement questions and suggest some consequences of continuing this trend in subsequent science policy deliberations.
Despite its absence from the Summit’s agenda, the topic of genome editing for human enhancement did spontaneously bubble up at the meeting in interesting ways. On the first day, outside the Summit’s venue, London’s Francis Crick Institute, protesters passed out pamphlets titled “Stop Designer Babies.” At first it seemed as if the protest would succeed in making enhancement an important topic at the Summit. In the opening session, Robin Lovell-Badge, chair of the Summit’s organizing committee, referenced the protesters and also noted...
Related Articles
Not the species, certainly, but the Institute of that name, which was founded by transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2005 as a research group at Oxford University. According to a recently posted Final Report, its goal was “to pursue the big questions in a transdisciplinary way” by pulling together “researchers from disciplines such as philosophy, computer science, mathematics, and economics.” This evolved before long into the study and promotion of “effective altruism” and “longtermism” as...
By Yelena Biberman and Jonathan D. Moreno, Bioethics Forum | 04.16.2024
A quiet biological revolution in warfare is underway. The genome is emerging as a new domain of conflict. The level of destruction that only nuclear weapons could previously achieve is fast becoming as accessible as a cyberattack.
Now for the...
By Tristan Manalac, BioSpace | 04.02.2024
Verve Therapeutics has suspended enrollment in the Phase Ib Heart-1 study evaluating its lead gene editing program VERVE-101 following a serious adverse event, the company announced Tuesday.
A patient, who received a 0.45-mg/kg dose of VERVE-101, developed a grade 3...
By Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, First Monday | 04.14.2024
The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can...