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from the Kwisatz-Haderach-breeding-program dept.
GungnirSniper writes:
The US Food and Drug Administration is holding hearings to help determine if they should allow oocyte modification of mitochondrial DNA, which could prevent hereditary diseases that cause issues, such as such as seizures and blindness, from being passed on by mothers. In layman's terms, this "three-parent IVF" would allow the mitochondrial DNA of an unaffected woman to replace that of the mother while keeping the main DNA, so the child would still look like the mother and father.
From Scientific American: "Once the mtDNA has been swapped out, the egg could be fertilized in the lab by the father's sperm and the embryo would be implanted back into mom where pregnancy would proceed. The resulting child would be the genetic offspring of the intended mother but would carry healthy mitochondrial genes from the donor."
The New York Times has a shorter version of the story, as well as an opinion column urging ethical and moral consideration of this procedure.
Is this an ethical way to prevent future harm, or the start of a slippery slope to designer babies? Is the creation of designer babies immoral?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by morgauxo on Friday February 28 2014, @05:06AM
"So it's not OK if only the rich can afford it"
Why? If the reason that only the rich can afford it is that providers have a patent and they have chosen to price it that way then I agree with you. You didn't say that though. What if a procedure is just too difficult or requires too rare of supplies to be practical at a price that most people can afford? Is it moral to make those babies whose parents could have afforded it suffer just because everyone else can't be helped?
"hey, may be it will do more harm than good, so how about testing it first"
I don't think anyone is suggesting offering this or anything else to the public without testing first. Then again, there is the history of artificial sweeteners, trans fat, etc... I could be wrong!
"hey, I am a bigot, and you just can't play God"
I think the religious opposition to this would be mostly be due to the fact that artificial insemination usually involves creating a lot of embryos, using one (maybe a few if the first don't take) and throwing the rest away. People who believe that God said that people become people at conception would have to believe that is murder.
Personally I am divided on this. I want to see the human genome improved. Given our very unnatural existence full of safety laws, modern medicine, etc... we may very well NEED to artificially manipulate our genes to avoid serious problems with future generations where everyone is loaded with genetic diseases or maybe just an Idiocracy type senario. Survival of the fittest just doesn't mean for us what it once did.
The question is are embryos people. I'm not religious but I don't need some "600+ year old texts" to make me concerned about the way our society defines the beggining of life. I certainly don't think an embryo has a conscious awareness of it's own existence. Many babies who are aborted however are that far along. I think consciousness is the usual pro-choice test for personhood right? (while denying that last part about many babies that are aborted) That should make throw-away embryos ok (it's just a cluster of cells). But is consciousness even the right question? Science can tell us a lot about when a brain is and isn't conscious (and an embryo doesn't have one) but what does that mean? What really makes me me and not a big bag of chemicals configured in such a way that if you vibrate my ear drums the right way (ask me if I am me) I will say yes, I am me? An MRI can show that a certain part of my brain is active therefore I am conscious but that is just neurons passing sodium ions around. What makes a person?
I am a human being, a person. I think the other humans I see are people too (can't really prove it). I don't know why we are people, not just complicated chemical machines that act as people. I don't think any other human being knows either. That makes me disturbed by the idea that anyone thinks they know enough to define something/one as non-person thus ok to destroy. Even if it is just a cluster of cells.
But.. like I said, I think we need to manipulate our genes eventually. No easy answer here.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by melikamp on Friday February 28 2014, @11:50AM
Yea, that's fine, I mentioned reasonable price before as a condition.
Where exactly to draw the line is indeed a hard question in the realm of ethics. But embryos are nowhere close to where the line would be. Whether embryos are people can only pose a serious problem for someone motivated by superstition. Cockroaches are more people than embryos: they crawl around with a total sense of purpose, are self-aware to a degree, and we share a common ancestor. If it's OK to thoughtlessly to squash a roach, it should be OK to treat embryos as pieces of inanimate matter. The only argument against that would come from someone who believes that humans are inherently better than other species, and Abrahamic religions cultivate this sentiment very strongly. If embryos are somehow more people than adult insects, then I am afraid a super-intelligent, but unrelated species would not be considered "people" either, and we should be able to kill the aliens at will. This is simply speciesism.
Emphasis is mine. I wish Ludwig Wittgenstein was alive, so that he could slap you around until you start screaming "uncle" and "I won't try to prove a proposition, denial of which makes people wonder, whether or not I even understand the meaning of the word 'humans'". :P
(Score: 1) by morgauxo on Friday February 28 2014, @10:00PM
You seem to be just stating the idea that consciousness makes personhood and adding inteligence to the equation. A computer can have an internal representation of it's state as being on/off. It can also have a form of inteligence. Why is it not a person? I think there has to be more to it.
I don't know what exactly personhood really is
I believe I am a person (thus invested in the question)
I don't believe anyone else knows
Therefore I gravitate towards a very conservative answer (if it can become a person it is a person)
Unfortunately that conservative answer conflicts with a desire to see disease eliminated (includeing genetic). Beyond that.. I hope that one day we have genetic advancement making our descendants smarter, stronger, healthier... I want them to live better lives than we do. (Honestly I want that life but I can't have it)
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Friday February 28 2014, @10:45PM
This does not make a lick of sense. Our common ancestor with roaches could become a person, and in fact it did, so was it a person? You are seriously over-thinking the matter. An embryo is a microbe at best. It's not a person. Being able to transform into a person, given the right circumstances, is irrelevant. If it was relevant, then stardust, which transforms into a person after a long period of chemical and then biological evolution, is a person.
If we keep following your reasoning, then being able to transform into a non-person would make you a non-person. Anyone is capable of jumping from a tall building and becoming a non-person, so are we all non-persons? No. You are a person while you are alive, and you are very much not when your brain blanks, even if the tubes keep you breathing and your blood running. What you may be in the future is irrelevant for your current personhood status.
While personhood is indeed mysterious, the non-personhood of things like rocks, roaches, and embryos is not. An intelligent humanoid robot poses a challenge. An organism consisting of a handful of cells does not, especially if it absolutely cannot sirvive outside of a womb-like environment. An implanted embryo is simply a part of the mother. A removed embryo is as much of a person as a hair from her head. You can take the DNA from the detached hair and clone a brand-new person. Does this make hair a person?
(Score: 1) by morgauxo on Tuesday March 11 2014, @10:09PM
"If we keep following your reasoning, then being able to transform into a non-person would make you a non-person."
Nope! My reasoning is that personhood is something none of us are even in a position to fully comprehend. But, as we "I assume" are all people ourselves it is a very important question. Thus, we should err on the side of caution. Your suggested conclusion to my reasoning is the exact opposite of caution.
"You are a person while you are alive, and you are very much not when your brain blanks"
So I can infer from this it is all about brain activity for you? The brain is just a bunch of neurons. Is one live neuron a person? If not then how many does it take? Is it the unique pattern that the neurons make that makes it a person? What if this pattern is simulated on a really powerful computer? Is that a peson? If so is it the same person? Or a new one? What if the simulation were started right at the death of the original? Is that the same person now immortalized? What if the copy is made before the original dies? What if there are many copies?
"An intelligent humanoid robot poses a challenge."
Yes 'it' does. And that line of thinking is exactly why I don't like the idea of defining personhood as involving brain function. Would an intelligent humanoid robot be a person? I don't know. I hope so.
If such a robot were built I don't think anyone could truly 100% understand all of it's programming. Different pieces would be written by different people. Much of it would probably be made through some sort of learning algorithms. But... all of the individual pieces would be easily understandable by anyone with a basic understanding of electronics. It would just be a huge mass of digital switches. Everything could be deconstructed down to logic gates. And yet... the sum of it all is a person?
Our own neurons are more complicated than boolean logic gates. But.. they are still far too simple to grant "personhood" to a single neuron any more than a logic gate is a person (whatever person is). So.. that is why I think there is something more to personhood. Personhood must be more than just the sum of it's parts. Reducing it to brain function just brings it back down to the level of it's parts.
"especially if it absolutely cannot sirvive outside of a womb-like environment"
Ok, here is another definition candidate for personhood... "independance". That one is even worse than brain function! First, there is no clear cut line when a fetus/baby is capable of surviving a premature birth. Just look at the babies who were born as part of a failed abortion. One side of the opening and they are discardable fetuses. On the other side they are people? I guess the magic soul fairy shows up right at birth then?
Babies are still very much dependant on adult care after birth. As are many injured, diseased and old people. I hope we agree that they are people. What's so special about being dependant on a womb?
"An implanted embryo is simply a part of the mother."
Umm... because you say so? You just made a convenient definition of embryo and then used your definition as part of your argument. Just because it is inside her doesn't make it a part of her. She isn't born with it. Nor will it remain in her permanently. It doesn't serve any purpose for her body. It doesn't match her DNA. An embryo is no more a part of the mother than is any other parasite living within her body.
"You can take the DNA from the detached hair and clone a brand-new person"
Nope. Hair only has mitochrondial DNA. You at least need the follicle to get the rest. Not that this matters to the argument but I thought I would point it out.
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Friday February 28 2014, @02:59PM
Good, thoughtful post, thanks
The example I normally give for this is: ... myself. I have fairly severe hyperopia [wikipedia.org], so I need to wear spectacles all the time. If I'd been born before spectacles were invented (or were available to the masses), I may not have survived childhood. I would certainly have had a lower chance of reproducing. If this condition is even slightly influenced by genes, the invention of spectacles has worsened the human gene pool, and will continue to do so. It is currently a small price to pay, but the price will keep getting bigger from one generation to the next, accelerating as medical science creates more and more workarounds for problems that would previously have been subject to selection pressures. We are lucky that we have genetic engineering available to us to counteract this effect.
This is a good point, and it's why I don't condemn people who wish to criminallize abortion, yet I do condemn those who try to diminish access to contraception.
Maybe if the mind-body problem [wikipedia.org], for one thing, were ever to be solved, then I'd be willing to promise a religious person that their objections to abortion and/or embryo use were wrong.
As it is at the moment, I'm confident their objections are wrong, far beyond any level of doubt that should prevent society acting as such. (Just as I am confident that the cremation of dead bodies is not unethical.) But I still have to respect these people's views. I'm just glad they are not in the democratic majority in my country (for now).