Genetic Engineering
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Genetics will increasingly enable health professionals to identify, treat, and prevent the 4,000 or more genetic diseases and disorders that our species is heir to. Genetics will become central to diagnosis and treatment, especially in testing for predispositions and in therapies. By 2025, there will likely be thousands of diagnostic procedures and treatments for genetic conditions.
Genetic diagnostics can detect specific diseases, such as Downs syndrome, and behavioral predispositions, such as depression. Treatments include gene-based pharmaceuticals, such as those using antisense DNA to block the bodys process of transmitting genetic instructions for a disease process. In future preventive therapies, harmful genes will be removed, turned off, or blocked. In some cases, healthy replacement genes will be directly inserted into fetuses or will be administered to people via injection, inhalation, retro viruses, or pills. These therapies will alter traits and prevent diseases.
Although genetics will be the greatest driver of advances in human health in the twenty-first century, it will not be a panacea for all human health problems. Health is a complex of interacting systems. The benefits of genetics will also be weighted more heavily to future generations, because prevention will be such an important component. Genetic therapies will ameliorate conditions in middle-aged and older people, but those conditions will not even exist in future generations. For example, psoriasis may be brought under control for many via gene therapy; if an effective prenatal diagnosis can be developed, then no future child would ever need be born with the condition.
“Natural” Rights
Within the long history of rights discourse, rights have also been essentialized as “natural” rights. Natural rights have historically been used in both conservative and radical defenses of what is perceived as given in the human condition. The right to procreate has been conceived as a natural right, and, by extension, technological reproduction has been recently promoted as the means to fulfill ones natural right to procreate. Thus the male-dominant tradition of property rights converges with a version of natural rights proclaiming a natural right to procreate, a natural right to a child, a natural right to use any means necessary to procreate, and thereby a natural right to use any person necessary to procreate.
When procreation is defined as a natural right, it is viewed as deriving from a natural instinct, comparable to eating and sleeping. Attempts to institutionalize procreation as a natural right divest the person procreating of moral responsibility, so that anything a man or woman does to reproduce is treated as an instinctive response beyond the control of human will and human relations. One way that the right to procreate becomes a law of nature is that, as a right, it becomes grounded in a natural need, that is, a compelling paternal urge or maternal instinct that demands an outlet. The right to procreate, portrayed as a natural right, renaturalizes motherhood and reproduction and grounds mens rights to “their” children in the natural order.
The challenge is to recognize the material contribution that women make to reproduction and pregnancy while at the same time not essentializing that contribution as natural female destiny. The challenge is also to argue that this contribution alone does not constitute the primary action or agency of female reproduction but grounds, in unique ways, the relationship of woman to fetus. The challenge is not to expand mens already prevalent rights over womens bodies by reinstitutionalizing male “genetic fulfillment” as a justification for reproductive technologies and contracts
Genes and Environment
All of this research is being done in the hope of finding a predictive test for a “predisposition” to develop a condition that many people could avoid by changing their diets and getting regular exercise. It would surely be better to educate everyone about the importance of diet and exercise and to work towards providing the economic and social conditions that could enable more people to live healthily, rather than spending time and money to try and find “aberrant” genes and to identify individuals whose genetic constitution may (but then again, may not) put them at special risk.
The susceptibility to Type 1 diabetes appears to cluster in families and in specific populations, for example, among people of northern European origin. If one child in a family has Type 1 diabetes, the probability of a sibling developing it is about 6 per cent, or twenty times the rate for the general population. While this might seem to indicate a genetic component, it turns out that an identical twin of someone who develops Type 1 diabetes has only a 36 per cent probability of developing the condition. This is higher than the probability for ordinary siblings, but proves that genes cannot be the sole determining factor. Indeed, since toxic environmental agents and viral infections are thought to provoke Type 1 diabetes, family correlations need not point to a genetic origin. Siblings who live together are often exposed to the same environmental agents
Human Life is Sacred
Our candid presupposition is that both humans and animals are more than the sum of their genetic code. In our view, genetic patenting of Homo sapiens is, however, a separate issue in some respects from patenting other organisms. Both are problematic, but for slightly different reasons.
Opposition to patenting human beings and their genetic parts is grounded in the unique nature of Homo sapiens. Human beings, alone among living organisms, bear the imago Dei. “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him” (Genesis 1:27). Human life is therefore sacred and possesses unique value derived from the Creator. Thus, as Philip Edgcumbe Hughes has said, “It is the image of God in which man was created, rather, which pervades his existence in its totality and is the cause of his transcendence over the rest of Gods creation.”The distinction between human life and animal life, as well as the prohibition against the unjustifiable taking of human life, is foundational to Jewish and Christian anthropology.
Human beings are pre-owned.We belong to the sovereign Creator.We are, therefore, not to be killed without adequate jus- tification (e.g., in self-defense) nor are we, or our body parts, to be bought and sold