Should genetic modification in children be banned?
All this week in Next News, I am writing about the wisdom of human enhancement, an issue also tackled in the current issue [related story] of U.S. News & World Report. In my story, all of the anti-enhancement folks I quote tend to land on the conservative side of the political spectrum. But there are also liberals who are against some prospective forms of enhancement. Prof. George Annas, a bioethicist at Boston University, has repeatedly taken issue with the idea of germline engineering, which would involved tinkering with genes in eggs or sperm. The modified genes, according to the Center for Genetics and Society, a nonprofit that encourages the use of certain human genetic technologies, would appear "not only in any children that resulted from such procedures, but in all succeeding generations ... and open the door to the alteration of the human species." I recently E-mailed Annas about his concerns with germline engineering and why he is pushing for an international treaty to ban inheritable modifications to the human genome. His brief responses:
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Next News: What most worries you about this sort of genetic tinkering?
Annas: The protection of children (and future generations) is the key here. Competent adults (I believe) should have the right to do what they want with their bodies and minds (assuming it is not so crazy as to amount to mutilation or suicide). But they do not have and should not have this type of dominion over their children or planned children. The children cannot be assumed to agree to whatever modification the parents want to make, and the parental choice deprives the child of its own freedom to be what it wants to be instead of what its parents have pre-programmed into the child. It makes no sense (to me anyway) to argue for self-changes in the name of freedom of choice, and then deny that same freedom of choice to one's children and subsequent generations.
Next News: You have also spoken about the potential for germline engineering to spawn violent acts in the future. Could you elaborate a bit on that?
Annas: The "violence" I talked about is far in the future and assumes that the genetic/cybernetic alterations actually "work" and thus ultimately create a new species or subspecies of humans who will come to see us "regular issue" humans as subhuman and thus subject to slavery or extermination–and if we regular types see this coming, we may also act pre-emptively to destroy the "enhanced" types. It is this prospect for what I have called "genetic genocide" that should make us move very slowly and cautiously in this arena. One strategy, which I advocate, is to adopt the environmental movement's precautionary principle, which shifts the burden of proving that the benefits to humanity are more likely than the harms before any of these interventions is attempted on a wide scale.
