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.
Biotechnology
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.”
Read More »Creating Headlines, Artificial Life, Ethical Concerns, and Ontological Perplexity
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… Read More »Synthetic biology: eroding the moral distinctions between animate and inanimate.
Playing God for the first time…
With his new paper Craig Venter is creaking open the most profound door in humanity’s history, potentially peeking into it’s destiny. The challenge is to eat the apple without choking on the worm.
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… Read More »For Sale: Body Parts?
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.