Ethics commentary – Fraught with peril
One issue emerging from the recent media circus over Craig Venter’s apparent creation of a synthetic life form is the potential danger … of ethics commentary itself.
Putting GM in a Lead Coffin
by Julian Savulescu
It is time to put the GM debate in a lead-lined coffin. To lay it finally to rest. And get things in perspective again.
Creating Headlines, Artificial Life, Ethical Concerns, and Ontological Perplexity
Synthetic biology has been catapulted into the
public sphere after an article
in Science reported that
Craig Venter and his collaborators had managed to make a synthetic cell by
inserting a fabricated genome into a bacterium. The achievement made headlines
and was widely presented as a case of creating artificial life. Already there
has been debate about what impact it may be expected to have on future
biotechnological research and about what ethical concerns arise in relation to
synthetic biology. Unsurprisingly a third issue has been whether the
scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute have really created artificial
life?
With regard to the latter question the debate
has not focused on whether the synthetic cell is really alive, but whether it
is properly artificial. In an interview
with the BBC Nobel
Prize-winning biologist Paul
Nurse points out that not just the genome but the entire cell
would have to be synthesized for it to be properly artificial. What Venter
has produced is the first living cell which is entirely controlled by
synthesized DNA, not artificial life.
George Church, geneticist at Harvard Medical
School, doesn’t think that Venter has really created new life either. Commenting
in Nature,
Church says that the bacterium made by Venter “is not changed from the wild
state in any fundamental sense. Printing out a copy of an ancient text isn’t the
same as understanding the language.”
Is “playing God” just a meaningless phrase?
In a
recent piece for Prospect magazine, Philip Ball denounces the “playing God” objection, often made
against some proposed uses of biotechnology, as a “meaningless, dangerous
cliché”. More specifically, Ball mentions the objection in relation to Craig
Venter’s creation – already discussed on this blog – of the first microorganism
with a wholly synthetic genome. Though many people from the press have raised
the “playing God” issue in their coverage of Venter’s achievement, “no one”,
Ball writes, “seems in the least concerned to enquire what this phrase means or
why it is being used”.
Synthetic biology: eroding the moral distinctions between animate and inanimate.
Sometimes science reveals distinctions to be false. Time and space were thought to be distinct, separate things, until Einstein showed that they were fundamentally intertwined. Graphite and diamond were thought to be made of distinct substances, until Tennant showed that they would release the same gas when burned.
In a similar way, progress in the field of synthetic biology is eroding the longstanding moral and theoretical distinctions we make between life and machinery. The recent breakthrough by Venter's group proves that life may be built from its component parts, and set into motion, just like inanimate machinery. No divine spark is required, no soul need be blown into the cells. Life no longer even requires a parent or progenitor.
One of the most widespread and longstanding moral beliefs is that there is an important difference between living organisms and inanimate machines. Nearly everybody agrees that there are moral boundaries on our treatment of living things. For vegetarians or vegans, this may include a belief that we should never intentionally kill another living being. For others, it may include a belief that we ought never to interfere with the cellular mechanics of a living being, as we do when we produce genetically-modified foods.
By contrast, nobody thinks that it is wrong to destroy, create, or tamper with a machine — even if the machine in question is exceedingly complex. This moral distinction is put in crisis by the synthetic biology projects of Venter and others. Going forward, we will need to find a more meaningful moral distinction than the line between the animate and the inanimate. Failing that, we are faced with an unacceptable set of alternatives: either to grant machines the moral status we currently accord to living things, or to treat living things in the manner of machines.
Playing God for the first time…
by Julian Savulescu
With his new paper Craig Venter is creaking open the most profound door in humanity’s history, potentially peeking into it’s destiny. He is not merely copying life artificially as Wilmut did or modifying it radically by genetic engineering. He is going towards the role of a god: creating artificial life that could never have existed naturally. Creating life from the ground up using basic building blocks.
At the moment it is basic bacteria just capable of replicating. This is a step towards something much more controversial: creation of living beings with capacities and natures that could never have naturally evolved.
The potential is in the far future, but real and significant: dealing with pollution, new energy sources, new forms of communication. But the risks are also unparalleled. We need new standards of safety evaluation for this kind of radical research and protections from military or terrorist misuse and abuse. These could be used in the future to make the most powerful bioweapons imaginable. The challenge is to eat the apple without choking on the worm.
Other posts in PracticalEthicsNews on synthetic biology
Changing the Building Blocks of Life: Playing God and Being gods
Should bio-scientists think about bio-weapons?
Following the September 11 attacks and subsequent Anthrax attacks, the US began introducing new biosecurity regulations as a counter to bioterrorism. The centrepiece of the new regulatory framework has been a list of 'select agents' – pathogens with particular potential for use in weapons of mass destruction. Agents on the list are subject to special regulatory measures limiting how the agents can be stored, transported and used.
Last week, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published an analysis of the effects of the new regulations. The authors estimate that there has been a two to five fold decrease in the ratio of scientific progress to amount of funding for research on select agents over the relevant period. Picking up the story, an article in The Scientist magazine claims that the apparent loss of efficiency is due to the chilling effect of the new regulations on research (though see the comments for some alternative explanations). It quotes scientists bemoaning the huge amount of paperwork imposed by the regulations and noting the difficulties that they create for international collaboration and, given the need for extensive background checks and psychological testing, staff recruitment.
It's interesting to consider the extent to which the Scientist's complaints (and scientists' worries more generally) are are an objection to the way that biosecurity is being done, or to the very idea of biosecurity.
For Sale: Body Parts?
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics has recently published a consultation paper entitled Give and Take? Human Bodies in Medicine and Research: https://consultation.nuffieldbioethics.org/fileLibrary/pdf/Human_bodies_in_medicine_and_research_consultation_paper.pdf
The paper seeks responses from individuals or groups on a wide range of issues relating to the use of human bodies or body parts in medical treatment and research. Section 6 is on ‘Ownership and Control’, and one of the questions asked is: Should the laws in the UK permit a person to sell their bodily material for all or any purposes?
Why should the law forbid any sale of bodily material by any competent adult, whether for medical treatment or research or for any other purpose? One immediate response comes from the gut: it’s just plain immoral. But immorality isn’t sufficient to justify legal prohibition. It is quite consistent to think that, say, gambling is morally reprehensible, but that it should nevertheless be permitted by law, or that there are certain areas of human life (such as personal relationships) in which, though people might treat one another pretty badly, the law has no place. For immorality to justify legal prohibition it has to be of a particular kind and of a particular order.
One common objection to the sale of body parts is that it will bring about or constitute the ‘commodification’ of the body. There certainly do seem to be good arguments for seeking to prevent market principles from dominating certain areas of human life – personal relationships are again a particularly clear example. We all need friends. Imagine a world in which any time with your acquaintances had to be bought at the market rate. Spontaneity, generosity, and love must be protected. But often there seems no real case against commodification. Consider people’s talents. Most of us think that anyone with a particular talent – for window-cleaning, accounting, or playing football – should be allowed to market the exercise of that talent as they wish (within the rules and regulations of their chosen occupation, of course, such as those concerning ‘transfer windows’ in the English football league). On the face of it, body parts seem much more like talents than friendship.
At this point, an appeal is often made to ‘human dignity’, as something to be respected and something that would be severely compromised by a legal market in body parts. For this appeal to have any weight, the value of dignity must be elucidated. Otherwise it amounts to no more than the ‘it’s just immoral’ gut reaction. Well, let’s assume that rational human beings do have some special value, demanding respect by others. Why should that dignity itself not consist partly in a right to control one’s own body? If anything, forbidding grown adults from doing what they wish with their own bodies is to treat them and their autonomous wishes in an undignified way.
In his classic work of liberalism On Liberty, John Stuart Mill claimed that the state’s only justification for interfering with an individual’s freedom is to prevent harm to others. So even if the individual herself, perhaps through sacrificing her dignity or in other ways, is harming herself, the state can do no more than inform her of the facts about, and in particular the risks of, the activity in question. (Slavery is perhaps a special case, and Mill certainly thought it was. But selling an organ or other body part is not to sell yourself, into slavery or in any other way.)
It cannot be denied, however, that there would be the most appalling risks were an unregulated market in body parts permitted to develop. The opportunities for both buyers and sellers to mislead or to misrepresent, for example, would be widespread and tempting. As in other areas of civil life, then, the market in human organs should be regulated, with an immediate view to the avoidance of harm to those involved in the market itself or otherwise affected by it.
One further question is whether the state – in the UK, through the NHS – should itself enter the market. I see no strong reason why it shouldn’t. A weightier question is whether state regulation should involve price-setting or restrictions on sales designed to make the most effective use of available body parts. I’m inclined myself to think that it should, since the state should always be seeking to produce the best and justest outcomes for its citizens as a whole. Mill himself says clearly in On Liberty that his liberal principle is justified through its promotion of the good of all, and that is equally true of market principles governing the sale of body parts or indeed anything else.
Is the brain half full – or half empty?
There have been dramatic headlines in the media ('Coma Man. I think…I’m alive') following the publication yesterday of a new study using brain scans to detect consciousness in profoundly brain damaged patients. For the first time scientists and doctors have demonstrated that some patients diagnosed with persistent vegetative state may be able to communicate using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Is your fingerprint part of you?
In a report expressing concern about the increasing use of
biometric information to protect security and privacy, the Irish Council for
Bioethics (ICB) claimed earlier this month that “an individual’s biometric
information is an intrinsic element of that person”. Such claims are quite
commonly made in relation to genetic information, though the ICB’s extension of
the concept to other forms of biological information, such as that acquired from
fingerprinting, voice recognition software, and gait analysis, may be novel.
the person’ seems designed to invoke powerful intuitions about our ownership of
our own body parts: we own our biological information just like we own our
kidneys. Indeed, the ICB go on to say that “the right to bodily integrity…. should
apply not only to an individual’s body, but also to any information derived
from the body, including his/her biometric information”. But both the
metaphysical claim that biometric information is an intrinsic element of the
person,and the moral claim that it is covered by rights to bodily integrity
are highly problematic.
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