Editing Our Future

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Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology Emerita Trinity International University

The recent (March 6-8, 2023) meeting of the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing in London has brought ethical concerns about heritable human genome editing to the forefront once again. Recall that the previous meeting five years ago exploded into international furor over revelations from He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who edited the genomes of three embryos and brought them to term. He was jailed for his actions in China and was only recently released. Apparently, he is unrepentant and still harboring visions of reactivating his genome editing pursuits. Not surprisingly, ...read more

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What Does It Take to Alter Our Next Generation?

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D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director

I have been thinking about how one generation proactively alters the succeeding one. As I contemplated this conundrum, I found myself writing a story instead of a list. That story was published as a SALVO blog piece, and the link is below. The \”angsty\” pirate lives in a dystopia created by childhood desire, indulgent parents, a cooperative, complicit medical-industrial complex, and a legal climate in which desire is codified into law. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Click here to read the story. Then, send any comments to us through the Contact Us feature here ...read more

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GATTACA: 25 Years On

Blog, Born Human, Emerging Technologies / /

Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology Emerita Trinity International University

(Editor’s Note: The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture screened GATTACA at the end of June at the international bioethics conference held by the Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity at Trinity International University. Dr. Shelton presented opening remarks, which, lightly edited, are presented here.)

The movie, GATTACA, is entertaining to watch as is, but is also rife with symbolism and subtle—and some not so subtle—philosophical messages. 25 years on: it has proved to be prescient in a number of ways.

GATTACA depicts a dystopian world in which there is a new type of social ...read more

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What We’re Reading

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www.CartoonStock.com  

C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D. Distinguished Fellow

Medically assisted deaths rose by 17% in 2020, continuing upward trend: Health Canada

By Joan Bryden The Canadian Press Posted June 8, 2021 1:01 am

I have several concerns about this situation:

For Health Canada, the government health service, to provide access to P-AS is a financial conflict of interest. Medicalized suicide should not be in the hands of those who hold the purse strings. Pain is manageable but other forms of suffering are not best treated with analgesics. True palliative care must address all forms of suffering. Medicine should not be coopted by the P-AS ...read more

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Human Flourishing in an Age of Gene Editing

Blog, Book Reviews, Engineering Humans, Other Voices / /

 

A Book Review By R. Henry Williams, M.D., F.A.C.P., M.A. (Ethics) Board Chairman, The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture

Human Flourishing in an Age of Gene Editing Erik Parens and Josephine Johnston, Editors Oxford University Press, 2019

 

 

As we now live in a time when our genetic code can be altered, whether for better or worse, how should we think about what is best for ourselves? How can we as a human species and as individuals flourish? These are the questions posed in the new volume, Human Flourishing in an Age of Gene Editing. The essays here are interactive, frequently referencing one another, as the ...read more

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Statement on the Clinical Use of Human Germline Genome Editing

Blog, Engineering Humans / /
The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture responds to the Public Call for Evidence for the International Commission* on the Clinical Use of Human Germline Genome Editing

 

Given that According to the canons of research on children, experiments are only ethically justified when there are clear benefits to that individual child and proportional burdens to that child. Risks and burdens beyond truly “minimal” to individual children are not justified to benefit other children. To do so is to treat one child as a means to another child’s ends (i.e., to instrumentalize that child).

 

Whereas Human germline genome editing is experimentation on embryonic humans who cannot give consent, ...read more

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A Moratorium on Heritable Human Genome Editing: Illusory or Real?

Blog, Emerging Technologies, Engineering Humans, Genomic & Genetics Issues / /

D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director

In March, 2019, Nature published a commentary penned by Eric Lander, Françoise Baylis, Feng Zhang, Emmanuelle Charpentier, and Paul Berg, and signed by 13 other notables. The name of the commentary is “Adopt a moratorium on heritable genome editing.” This document requires analysis.

First, some definitions are needed. A moratorium is defined as a “suspension of activity,” or “an authorized period of delay or waiting.” Heritable means “capable of being passed from one generation to the next.” Additionally, clinical can refer to a “scientifically detached” attitude or “the observation and treatment of patients directly.” Each of ...read more

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A Book for (Y)our Time – A Review

Blog, Book Reviews / /

D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director

Reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene: An Intimate History (NY, NY: Scribner, 2016; paperback, 2017) is to take a 150+ year print journey with an English-speaking physician and scientist, who is also a renaissance man. Mukherjee, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for his non-fiction work, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. I have not read that earlier work, but have spent time delving into The Gene.

The Gene: An Intimate History begins with the author’s 2012 trip to Calcutta with his father to visit a ...read more

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What Say You?

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Update: See the bottom of this post for the National Institutes of Health’s response to our letter. 

An Open Letter to Dr. Francis S. Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health

D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. Director National Institutes of Health 9000 Rockville Pike Bethesda, Maryland 20892 [email protected]

17 December 2018

Dear Dr. Collins:

The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture lauds the position of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as evidenced by your concluding statement of 28 November 2018: “NIH does not support the use of gene-editing technologies in human embryos.” As embryonic humans represent the most vulnerable amongst our species, the ...read more

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Crossing a Bright Red Line: Human Embryo Editing

Blog, China / /

D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director

On Monday of this week, He Jiankui of Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, shocked the scientific world prior to the beginning of a conference on gene editing. Dr. He announced a first: that he had edited the genes of embryos for seven couples undergoing fertility treatments, and that one pregnancy has resulted to date. It should be noted that there is no corroboration of this claim currently: it is an announcement; no scientific paper has been published about it.

Some of the specific claims, published in The Guardian, are as follows:

All of ...read more

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