Should humanity use technology to alter our natural condition? Canadian bioethicist Margaret Somerville and American bioethicist James Hughes met last Friday at U of T to explore the issues surrounding cloning, genetic engineering, and life extension. The event, “Debating the Future: Bioethics From Science Fiction to Science Fact,” was organized by Betterhumans, a Toronto-based organization devoted to the use of science and technology for advancing humanity.
The first issue on the table was cloning. Somerville, founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, argued that cloning should be banned. “Everybody has a right to a unique genetic identity,” she says. “Cloning causes loss of authenticity. Children become replaceable.”
Where Somerville stated that individuals have the right not to be simply a copy of someone else, Hughes, who teaches health policy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut argued that individuals have the right to choose how they reproduce. “As soon as we have guaranteed ourselves that it is safe, then it should be legal.”
Should parents have the right, if not to clone, then to modify their children’s genes? This would involve germline manipulation-that is, manipulation of the DNA in sperm or eggs. By selecting specific traits you desire for your offspring you can alter the line of human heredity. Somerville stated that it is inherently wrong to intervene on the human germ cell line-each of us has our own unique place in the human lineage of genetic diversity.
According to Somerville, we will eliminate whole groups of people if we manipulate the human gene pool. She reasoned that disease elimination does not justify the act of intervening with the germ cell line. “[Genes] don’t have just one function. We could eliminate the diabetes gene, but goodness knows what else we’d eliminate in the process.” As an example, she said that eliminating the gene for manic-depression may mean wiping out many creative individuals.
Hughes believes once safety is guaranteed, germline manipulation should be legal. Not only does he believe that having the right to germinal choice will benefit parents, children, and society, he also thinks that eventually we will have computer models to predict the consequences of the genetic modifications we make.
“Not all variation is good,” replied Hughes, citing a predisposition for developing diseases such as Alzheimer’s. “Why defend that kind of variation?” he asked. “The vast majority of parents will want their children to be brighter, healthier, and stronger.”
The debate then turned to the question of radical life extension. “A lot of people born today will probably not be dead in two or three hundred years,” Hughes said, who believes that by the middle of this century the average life expectancy for most people will rise one year with every year.
He sees it as a natural human desire to increase both the quality and the duration of life, which is why all governments run on such a platform. While the current priority is disease treatment, he proposes that if funds were allocated to research the fundamental mechanisms of aging, all diseases associated with aging would disappear at once.
Somerville argues against the desirability of having societies where people live forever. “I think this is where our clash in world views comes in between James and me…whether you really believe that there’s something inherently good in the natural, and I do.” Somerville argued that aging is not a tragedy, but is “rather a continuous lifelong process whose natural integrity should be respected.”
She compared life to a holiday, in which “if it’s shorter we enjoy it all the more,” and sees life extension as a useless means of trying to fill the emptiness of life by extending it indefinitely. She argues, in fact, thatit is death that gives life it’s meaning.
“It’s not death that gives meaning to life, it’s what we do in our life,” Hughes countered.
