Sowing the Seeds, commissioned work by Carol Harkness for The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture. View the full-size image here.
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A.
In February, The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture made a public comment at an FDA committee hearing. The New York Times Magazine on 27 June published an account of that meeting about three-parent embryos. The author of the article conflates normal human sexual reproduction (i.e., having babies with a chosen partner) with genetic modification. She opines:
What often gets lost in the loaded language of the debate over three-parent babies is the fact that ordinary human reproduction is, by definition, genetic modification. The risks involved are unpredictable and potentially tragic; the subject of the experiment is a future person who cannot consent. We constantly try to control this process, to “design” our children, starting with our choice of sexual partner. During pregnancy, we try to “enhance” them by taking folic acid, not smoking, avoiding stress; once they’re born, we continue the process with vaccines and nutritious food, education, clean air and drinking water. Some of these pre- and postnatal environmental factors, we now know, change their biology in heritable ways. Is mitochondrial replacement, because it takes place in a petri dish, any more unnatural or morally repugnant than this? Would the answer change if the technique turns out to cure age-related infertility in addition to preventing disease?
This paragraph is worth our attention — and dissection. Let’s begin.
Sentence 1: “What often gets lost in the loaded language of the debate over three-parent babies is the fact that ordinary human reproduction is, by definition, genetic modification.”
Response: Hold on a moment while we check definitions. According to the public knowledge base that is Wikipedia:
Human reproduction begins with sexual intercourse, followed by nine months of pregnancy before childbirth. Many years of parental care are required before a human child becomes independent.
What about the term, “genetic modification”?
Genetic modification (GM), genetic manipulation (GM) and genetic engineering (GE) all refer to the same thing — the use of modern biotechnology techniques to change the genes of an organism, such as a plant or animal (CSIRO: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation of Australia).
It seems that Ms. Tingley is over-reaching in her definitions, but she may not be alone. The stage was set many years ago, and the first “production” was born 25 July 1978. Since that time, more than five million babies have been born through in vitro fertilization (IVF). The question for each participant in the process is, “How do you view the child?” That is, is the child a gift or an experiment? That question does not only apply to IVF children and their parents, however. It applies to all of us.
In the sciences, I was trained early to see the steps involved in complex processes. Over time, I came to believe that most everything could be reduced to its component parts/processes. It took three children, more education, some significant losses, and Oliver O’Donovan to teach me otherwise:
We discern persons only by love, by discovering through interaction and commitment that this human being is . . . irreplaceable and irreducibly important, we do so only after, and not before, we have committed ourselves to them in personal interaction
Begotten or Made?, p.16
Sentence 2: “The risks involved are unpredictable and potentially tragic; the subject of the experiment is a future person who cannot consent.”
Response: a) “Unpredictable and potentially tragic” can describe much of life. Parenting has no guarantees, except perhaps for the fact that you, as a parent, will be forever changed.
b) Normal procreation and usual medical practice (including IVF) do not require Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval in America, but human experimentation does. The fact that producing three-parent embryos represents actual human experimentation should not be lost in this confusing verbiage.
Sentence 4: “During pregnancy, we try to ‘enhance’ them by taking folic acid, not smoking, avoiding stress; once they’re born, we continue the process with vaccines and nutritious food, education, clean air and drinking water.”
Response: The Free Dictionary defines “enhance” as “to make greater, as in value, beauty, or effectiveness; augment”; and “to provide with improved, advanced, or sophisticated features.”
Taking folic acid supplements and eschewing smoking, pregnant women give their developing children the opportunity to grow normally. The other interventions Ms. Tingley mentions also allow developing children to grow normally. In fact, of her entire list, the only possible “enhancement” included is the vaccines.
Sentence 6: “Is mitochondrial replacement, because it takes place in a petri dish, any more unnatural or morally repugnant than this?”
Response: Location aside, mitochondrial replacement is decidedly “morally repugnant” for several reasons. First, mitochondrial replacement truly does make each child involved an experiment. And it doesn’t end there. Mitochondrial replacement results in multiple generations of experiments, for it is not known how stable the induced mitochondrial changes will be. In fact, the licensing and regulatory body that oversees embryo research in the UK has proposed that any females born through such mitochondrial replacement technology should be advised to undergo IVF and PGD (preimplantation genetic diagnosis) if they wish to have children. Thus is fulfilled C. S. Lewis’ prophetic description: a few “man-moulders . . . armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state . . . who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.” Abolition of Man (San Francisco: Harper, San Francisco, 1974), p.60.
Finally, what do you do with the mistakes? Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg wrote about “Experimental Genetics and Human Evolution” in The American Naturalist (1966): “Paradoxically, the issue of ‘subhuman’ hybrids may arise first, just because of the touchiness of experimentation on obviously human material” (p. 531). A mistake involving genetically modified plants is one thing: you can simply kill the plant produced. What happens when the experiment involving the genetic modification of a human being goes awry?
