It seems that integration of technology into our otherwise healthy bodies may be on the horizon. Motorola has applied for a patent for a throat tattoo that can act as a microphone for many devices. PC Mag has the story:
Motorola has applied for a patent for an electronic skin tattoo that acts as a mobile communication device.
This isn't your usual parlor inking, though. The tattoo, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office application, can include an embedded microphone, a near field communication (NFC) transceiver, and a power supply.
As the wearer speaks, the throat-printed tattoo streams the audio to a controller, which then transfers it to the accompanying mobile communication device — a.k.a. your smartphone, gaming device, tablet, or, say, Google Glass.
Other stories indicate that Motorola, owned by Google, mentioned a lie detecting capability:
The patent states that this temporary tattoo could “include a galvanic skin response detector.” If the user is “speaking falsehoods,” the tattoo can detect skin response caused by nervousness.
PC Mag says this is "permanent" while others say it is a "temporary" tattoo. This seems like a big detail. If it is a permanent microphone tattooed on your neck, then that is clearly transhumanism. If it is temporary then I would say it is just technology that can be removed at the user's discretion.
Motorola does not seem to want to talk about it, declining to make a statement about their application.
The piano player at my parish died last week. Her name was Maralyn. We barely knew each other. I didn't even know her last name. But I will miss Maralyn every Sunday, probably until the day I die.
Chelsea puts together another awesome episode of BioTalk:
In recent years, modern academics have managed to recast “eugenics” as a positive term, distinguishing their vision from past government-mandated eugenics policies. The emphasis now is on “selective reproduction” and the parents’ “choice” to decide what kind of child they want to have. The result has been a search and destroy mission to wipe people with Down syndrome off of the planet through eugenic abortion. And it has taken so much love and joy out of the world.
In the latest episode of BioTalk, Rebecca Taylor and Chelsea Zimmerman “raise awareness” about the good news about Down syndrome. Not only is life with Ds not as bleak as most parents are told when their child is prenatally diagnosed, but scientists are making significant advancements in the treatment some of the more serious side-effects of the disorder.
Google has launched a new company called Calico (California Life Company) whose focus is to "solve death." CNN reports:
Last month Google announced a new medical company called Calico, whose explicit aim is to take on aging itself. But what will Google's approach be? And what other research into prolonging life already exists?...
Calico -- or the California Life Company -- has been set up to research subjects related to aging and its associated diseases. Announcing Calico at a media briefing, Google said that the new and independent company will largely focus on age-attendant conditions such as Alzheimer's, cancer and heart disease.
Larry Page, Google's ever youthful CEO said: "Illness and aging affect all our families. With some longer term, moonshot thinking around healthcare and biotechnology, I believe we can improve millions of lives."
But the question is, what will Calico actually do?
The article, titled "How Google's Calico aims to fight aging and 'solve death'," speculates about everything from cryogenics to cloning to nanotechnology as Calico's focus.
Calico may be looking at diseases like Alzheimer's, heart disease and cancer initially, but I speculate that part of Calico's approach will be working on an interface between man and machine. This is a Google company after all.
To stop the latest of the Brave New World movements, we need a cacophony of resistance. Luckily, it is not just pro-lifers that are sounding the alarm about three-parent IVF, also called mitochondrial replacement (MR).
People from all sides are voicing their concerns about the ethics and safety of this technique where a donor egg's nucleus is removed and replaced with the nucleus of a woman with mitochondrial disease. That genetically-engineered egg is then fertilized with sperm creating an embryo that has genetic material from three persons, the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from the donor, and nuclear DNA contributed by the parents.
And while it sounds like a nice thing to be able to help women who have mitochondrial disease to have healthy children (a woman with a mutation in her mtDNA cannot help but pass on that mutation because we inherit our mitochondria from our mother), there is a laundry list of ethical issues that finally seem to be gaining traction.
Jessica Cussins, an IVF-conceived adult, pretty much hits them all in her piece at the Huffington Post.
There is the fact that there is a shocking lack of animal studies which means that no one really knows that this is safe, and yet many are willing to move forward with this blatant experimentation on the next generation.
There is also the fact that this is a germ-line genetic modification which means it will be passed on to further generations. I will add that the only way to prevent that would be to toss out all the female embryos and transfer only males since they could not pass on their mitochondria. This has been suggested already.
Finally, Cussins points out something I have yet to cover: the fact that mitochondrial replacement has more in common with SCNT, better known as cloning, than it does IVF. In both cloning and MR, the nucleus of a donor egg is removed and replaced with another. In cloning, the egg is made to think it has been fertilized. In MR, the egg is fertilized.
We know that SCNT in animals has had some serious problems. Cloning trials in agricultural animals in New Zealand were halted because an unacceptable number of the cloned animals and their gestating mothers had to be euthanized.
Cussins writes:
So, I just can't agree with the recent article in The Scientist, which compared the unease around mitochondrial replacement techniques to the initial unease surrounding traditional IVF. I'm glad that people were concerned about the welfare of us IVF kids, but mitochondrial replacement (which is much closer technically to reproductive cloning than it is to traditional IVF) is exponentially more problematic.
On a certain level, she is right. This is not just another reproductive technology. We are on a threshold. Will we move forward in genetically-engineering our children, forever changing the course of humanity? Cussins points out the importance:
There are larger social and ethical considerations that mitochondrial replacement also forces us to confront. Most importantly, this technology raises one of the thorniest questions humanity will ever face: are we willing to genetically modify future generations of humans?
The technique under consideration isn't like gene therapy, which modifies a specific location in the genetic makeup of one person who consents to the treatment. What is at stake here is much broader: the modification of the germline, the inheritable genetic code that connects humanity from one generation to the next. Members of the Council of Europe recently declared that such technologies are "incompatible with human dignity." And, as Bill McKibben puts it in his book Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, "The stakes in this argument are absurdly high, nothing less than the meaning of being human."
Cussins last thoughts hint at the same suggestion that I have made. Instead of engineering people to not have mitochondrial disease, how about we focus on cures and treatments for mitochondrial disease, not just for future generations, but for people who are living with it right now:
I hope that this discussion will also raise awareness and improve access to healthcare for the people who are already alive and struggling with mitochondrial diseases today.
Of course we Catholics reject IVF in all its forms and we understand that the three-parent IVF is just a logical progression of making life outside the body. But, we have allies in this fight against the creation of genetically-engineered children in those who may disagree with our views on reproductive technologies. I am certain it will take all our voices together to halt this bullet train.
This is so horrific and evil that it almost defies reason. Officials have rescued a girl from Somalia that was brought to the UK to harvest her organs. They are sure that this is not an isolated incidence. The Telegraph has the story:
The unnamed girl was brought to the UK from Somalia with the intention of removing her organs and selling them on to those desperate for a transplant.
Child protection charities warned that the case was unlikely to be an isolated incident as traffickers were likely to have smuggled a group of children into the country.
The case emerged in a government report which showed that the number of human trafficking victims in the UK has risen by more than 50 per cent last year and reached record levels.
This is exactly what I mean when I say that we abandon the embryo at our own peril. Once we accept the exploitation of one of our species for parts, then we all start to look like harvestable biological material that could be used better somewhere else.
Is it just a coincidence that as the West creates and destroys embryos on a massive scale, exploitation of those in the third world for their body parts by rich Westerners is on the rise? I doubt it.
This is the world we live in. Without a fundamental shift back to the understanding that human life is sacred no matter the stage of development, skin color, or socioeconomic status, this is going to continue and likely get worse.
Maybe it is time to consider Scott Carney's proposal to get rid of anonymity in the flesh trade. Carney is an investigative journalist who has covered the red market, the market in human parts, all over the world. His book, The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers, covers everything from blood transfusions, to kidney transplants, to egg donation, to surrogacy. The book sadly exposes the exploitation of the poor and weak that is rampant.
Carney asserts that it is the anonymity of organ transplants, blood transfusion and even egg donations that allows body brokers to exploit the poor and allows the recipients of ill-gotten parts to turn a blind-eye. Would you be so quick to accept that kidney if you knew it came from a girl from Somalia? Would a doctor transplant such an organ?
Obviously, anonymity is in place to protect both donor and recipient. But that is in a wholesome system were parts are obtained ethically. Anonymity in a world such as ours, where the West seems to have an insatiable appetite for parts, just protects the black marketeers and keeps their victims out of sight. No one is responsible because no one knows anything.
It is time to bring sunlight to the dark shadows of a growing organ market. Maybe getting rid of the anonymity that clouds the trade in body parts is a step in the right direction.
This clip reminds me of Wesley's quote on Starbucks cup The Way I See It #127 (which sits on my desk holding a variety of writing implements):
The morality of the 21st century will depend on how we respond to this simple but profound question: Does every human life have equal moral value simply and merely because it is human? Answer yes, and we have a chance of achieving universal human rights. Answer no, and it means that we are merely another animal in the forest.
This year scientists announced a major breakthrough and a possible gene therapy for Down Syndrome. In cells taken from a person with Downs, they were able to silence the extra 21st chromosome. This may mean a targeted therapy to help fix the health and cognitive problems caused by have that extra bit of genetic material.
Reactions were mixed. Some thought that people with Down Syndrome are perfect as God made them and we should do nothing to change them. I understand this reaction very well. We live in a society that kills 90% of people with Down Syndrome before they make it out of the womb. It is entirely natural to want to protect those with Downs because they are wonderfully lovely people that, frankly, the world needs more of, not less.
I saw this breakthrough a bit differently. I found the news exciting and full of hope. I too believe that God made those with Down Syndrome as perfect people, but they are not defined by their chromosomes. They do have an extra that causes all kinds of problems from cognitive difficulty, to heart defects, to cancer. I feel it is important to treat these issues. We would not hesitate to treat cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease or even autism if there was gene therapy available.
That being said, I find it hard to comment on these very important discussion because I do not have a special needs child. I look to other parents of special needs kids to help guide me. This piece, Down Syndrome Research, Hope for My Daughter, by Leticia Velasquez at Amy Julie Becker's Thin Places blog is so fantastic I had to share it with you. Leticia is the author of the blog Cause of Our Joy, co-founder of KIDS (Keep Infants with Down Syndrome), and the editor ofA Special Mother is Born. She also has a daughter, Christina, with Down Syndrome who has regressed over the years. Christina no longer speaks. Leticia hopes this breakthrough will help bring her daughter back:
My daughter is trapped by Down syndrome’s confused messaging in her brain. Do I love her as she is, even if she never speaks again? Of course I do! Do I want her to speak with all my heart so that she can find more happiness in the world, in friendships, reading, and fulfilling work?
Of course I do.
So, excuse me if my heart skips a beat when I hear about medical breakthroughs which might bring back my daughter, my true daughter to me. She is not the sum total of her chromosomes. Christina is far more than that, but she is deeply affected as we all are by her genetics. They do not affect her soul, but who else but those of us who love her will see the beauty in that soul if she can never speak again?
Beautiful. I share Leticia's hope that someday all people with Down Syndrome can live the fullest lives possible. I think gene therapy may be a step in that direction.
This week the genetics world exploded with discussion about a new patent just issued by the U.S. Patent Office to a California company, 23andMe. 23andMe is a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company that offers genetic information to anyone who sends in a saliva sample and a fee.
23andMe was offered a patent on their inheritance calculator, a feature where prospective parents can figure out the likely traits their children will have. The controversy surrounds the patent's extension into the fertility industry where this technology could be used to screen donor egg and sperm to create a child with desired physical attributes.
Nature reports some of the options listed in the patent:
Figure 4 of the patent application lists the following alternative choices: “I prefer a child with”: “longest expected life span”/“least expected life cost of health care”/“least expected cumulative duration of hospitalization.” Figure 6 visualizes a choice between the “offspring’s possible traits” of “0% likely endurance athlete” and “100% likely sprinter.”
I worry for young people these days. I know every generation says that about the one that follows, but today's youth may face a world where simply being human won't be good enough. Augmentation may be required to participate in society. A cyber-brain here, a bionic limb there with some genetic engineering and a few nanobots sprinkled in for good measure. Being without such tech integrated into their bodies may be a one-way ticket to second-class citizenship, maybe even slavery. Choosing to live as God created them could become a great sacrifice.
I have argued many times that once we must violate our bodily integrity with technology, not to get ahead, but to just keep up, that is the moment when we no longer are masters of our technology. That is the point where technology is our master. That is when we become slaves to the things we have created.
Ironically, the very technology that might enslave the human race is being sold today as the only thing that can liberate us. Case in point, this interview with "Elysium" and "District 9" director, Neill Blomkamp, where he is clear that, to level the playing field, we must genetically enhance. Blomkamp told The Guardian:
You'd literally have to change the human genome to stop wealth discrepancy.... The only way things will change is if we're smart enough to develop technology that can think us out of this, meaning augmenting ourselves genetically to be smart enough to change sh**.
I have said many times that we abandon the embryo at our own peril. Once we allow some human organisms to be ripped apart for their cells, then we all start to look more and more like harvestable biological material.
No where is this more apparent than in the debates about organ donation. Donating organs in the event of death used to be considered something that should be completely voluntary and without incentive. But because the demand for organ outweighs the supply, more and more we are hearing that organ donation should be "opt-out" instead of "opt-in" where doctors presume consent unless otherwise specified and family members have no say in the matter.
After all, you are a bag of organs that could be used better elsewhere.
Ted Rall, American columnist and cartoonist, goes one step further and says organ donation should be mandatory, no "opt-out" allowed, and the government should just take organs for those who need them. From "Mandatory Organ Donation":
On the other hand, it is estimated that 18 people die every day due to a national shortage of organ donations. This crisis can be solved.
Don’t worry: This is not one of those pieces calling for you to consider signing the donor section on the back of your driver’s license. My solution is more radical: When you die, the government should take your organs....
If the government can save 18 people a day by harvesting every available organ, why doesn’t it pass a law making it so?...
About 2.5 million Americans die every year. Most are burned or planted in the ground, completely wasted. Vast numbers of them rot away, their bodies containing potentially lifesaving organs, left intact — or embalmed — for only one reason: Politicians are too cowardly to challenge the ancient idea that there is something sacred in a hunk of flesh.
First of all, of those 2.5 million American deaths every year, only a very small percentage of those would be eligible for organ donation. A patient has to have suffered brain death where their brain is no longer functioning but, with the help of a ventilator to keep oxygen flowing, their heart is still pumping blood keeping their other organs intact.
Does anyone really want a bunch of government employees running around hospitals deciding who is brain dead as who is not?
Even doctors get this wrong. Just ask Caroline Burns who woke up on the operating table as doctors were about to harvest her organs. Or Sam Schmid, a 20 year-old college student who woke up from his coma after doctors declared him brain dead and were prepared to harvest his organs. Or Steven Thorpe, a British teenager that was declared brain dead by four specialists. His parents were approached about organ donation, but they were sure that there was still life left in Steven. They persisted and Steven was reevaluated. Two weeks later he woke from his coma.
How many others like Caroline, Sam or Steven have been misdiagnosed as "brain dead?"
How would Caroline, or Sam, or Steven faired if the government had decided that their organs were better used by someone else? Would the cries of Steven parents have been heard? Or would the decision have ceased to be theirs?
That is the problem with making organ donation mandatory. The assumption really is that your organs are of better use somewhere else. Once brain death is "established" then you become a bag of harvestable biological material, a "hunk of flesh" according to Rall. You are no longer valuable other than for your parts. (Sounds like the plight of the embryo.)
And does anyone really trust the government to make those determinations?
In the last year there has been a push in both the United Kingdom and the United States for permission to create children with three genetic parents. This technique, often called mitochondrial replacement (MR), is presented as a simple switching out the mitochondria in the eggs of women with mitochondrial disease. We inherit all of our mitochondria from our mother, so a woman with mitochondrial disease cannot help but pass that onto her offspring.
In reality, the technique is far from simple. The nucleus of a donor egg is removed and replaced with the nucleus of the woman with mitochrondrial disease. This creates a genetically-engineered egg where the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in the cytoplasm of the egg is from the donor and the nuclear DNA, the chromosomes we all learned about in biology, is from the woman with the mitochondrial disease.
The embryos created with IVF using these genetically-engineered eggs have the nuclear DNA of a woman and a man, like all other embryos, but would also have the mitochondrial DNA of the woman who donated the egg. These children would have the genetic material from three individuals.
In addition, these genetically-engineered children, well at least the girls, could not help but pass this engineering onto their offspring. This is a modification that would affect generations.
In the UK, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust all came out in favor of pursuing the technique saying that because the chromosomes were unaltered, mitochondrial replacement was analogous to "replacing batteries in a camera" and would have no effect on other traits in the children.
Also, there are suggestions that sex selection be used in conjunction with MR. If all the female embryos are tossed out and only male three-parent embryos are transferred to the womb, then the modification will not be passed on to further generations because only women pass on their mitochondria. This is would be a fail-safe in case some defective mitochondria hitch a ride with the nucleus into the donor egg or something else goes wrong.
During all of this debate, I have wondered where is all the data to suggest that this technique is safe. There is a delicate balance of signals between mtDNA and nuclear DNA. Where is the evidence that replacing mtDNA has no ill effect? How can we even be discussing moving forward with this kind of human genetic engineering unless it has been shown to be safe in generations of animal studies? Where are those studies?
A recent paper in Science exposes the reality that there is little data on this technique and the data we do have suggests that MR is not just like "replacing batteries."
So far the only primates created with this technique are four macaques that have only reached 3 years of age. Other animal models show that in males, a mtDNA-nuclear DNA mismatch has some serious effects that may not be apparent until adulthood:
Studies on model organisms, ranging from mice to fruit flies, indicate that MR can profoundly change the expression profiles of nuclear genes and affect a range of important traits such as individual development, cognitive behavior, and key health parameters. These studies also suggest that males of reproductive age are particularly sensitive to MR-induced effects....
Altered respiratory metabolism and reduced performance, learning, and exploratory capacity in males were reported when mitochondrial-nuclear genomic interactions were experimentally mismatched....
Two points may deserve careful consideration prior to any change in legislation. First, studies in humans have only tracked health through to the blastocyst stage and in macaques to 3 years of age. The results from mice and invertebrates suggest that many deleterious effects of MR would not be revealed until adulthood.
So here is the reality: many are willing to move forward with this technique in humans when 1. there are no primates created with this technique that have reached adulthood or even had another generation and 2. it is clear that mtDNA does have an affect on the nuclear DNA and a mismatch between the two could have serious effects that may not be apparent until later in life.
This would be pure human experimentation with little or no regard for the people who are being experimented on.
So I ask: When will it be enough?
At what point will we stand and say, "No more unethical experimentation on the next generation!"
When will we turn to parents and say, "Sorry but your desire for a child does not trump the health and safety of that child."
When will we turn to academics in their Ivory Towers and ask them why they have such little regard for the health and well-being of future children?
Earlier this year, Dr. Robert Sparrow published a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics entitled "In Vitro Eugenics." In it, Sparrow explores the possibility of creating generations of human beings in the laboratory.
He explains that the stem cells from embryos could be used to make egg and sperm cells, which, in turn, could create more embryos.
This would bring human reproduction into the laboratory not just for one generation, but for generation after generation. Sparrow explains that these embryos would be "orphaned at conception." They "would have no genetic parents: There would be no living individual … who could be described as the genetic progenitor of such embryos."
Sparrow calls this new possibility in human reproduction "in vitro eugenics."
While this sounds like something that could only happen in science fiction, producing egg and sperm from stem cells is now a reality. Scientists have already accomplished this in mice and are discussing doing the same in humans.
Why would anyone want to create multiple human generations in a laboratory?
One of the modern zeitgeists that scares me the most is the growing love affair with eugenics among the elite. Whether the masses are aware of it or not, elite ideas trickle down and infect our subconscious. More and more dropping from Ivory Towers are notes that say, "Eugenics is good," and "The problem last time was the state," and "Personal choice is the key to success."
These days eugenics, which means "good birth" is being presented as a worthy endeavor as long as there is no coercion from government. Parental choice is paramount and we are told that if parents can choose what kind of child they want, what kind of child would be a "good birth", then the horrors that accompanied eugenics last time (i.e. millions exterminated as "unfit") will not repeat themselves.
The latest push for this view is a paper entitled "Eugenics and the ethics of selective reproduction" by two UK academics, Stephen Wilkinson and Eve Garrard. They discuss at length what eugenics is and what it isn't and they conclude that eugenics is simply "the attempt to improve the human gene pool." Then they conclude:
But even where selective reproduction is eugenic (which it sometimes is) it does not follow automatically from this that it’s wrong (despite the fact that many instances of eugenics historically have been morally abhorrent). For provided that the means used are ethically acceptable, and that people freely consent, it’s not clear that attempting to improve population health (‘the gene pool’) is a bad thing for us to be doing. On the contrary, it seems on the face of it to be a good thing – given the high value that most of us place on good health, and on preventing ourselves and our loved ones from acquiring diseases or impairments.
NeoStem, a New York adult stem cell company that has partnered with the Vatican to increase awareness about adult stem cells, has been awarded two grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue their work.
NeoStem works with what they call VSELs (Very Small Embryonic Like cells) which are adult cells found in the bone marrow that seem to be pluripotent, or able to become most or all of the cell types in the body.
One of the grants is to study the effect VSELs have on skin wounds in mice that mimic symptoms of scleroderma. Scleroderma is an auto immune disorder that attacks the skin and other organs making them harden. Over 300,000 Americans live with scleroderma.
School is upon us. With two now in high school, I am beyond swamped. Senior pictures, registration, try outs...oh my!
To focus on the coming year and get a good start, I will be taking a couple weeks off of blogging.
In the meantime, peruse this excellent article on the iPSC human trial starting in Japan. Yours truly is quoted throughout. From Catholic News Agency:
Quest for ethical stem cells prompts moral questions
The first human trials for the treatment of blindness using induced pluripotent stem cells has brought the hope of creating stem cell therapies that do not rely upon destroyed embryos back in the public eye.
However, moral and medical questions surrounding the research on “iPSCs” have raised questions about whether the process is living up to its hopes of providing an innovative advance in biotechnology without relying on the destruction of embryos.
“Morally, there is no doubt that iPSC technology is a huge improvement over destroying IVF embryos or cloning embryos to gain pluripotent stem cells,” Rebecca H. Taylor, a clinical lab specialist in molecular biology and author of the Catholic bioethics website “Mary Meets Dolly,” told CNA, “but they are not totally free from ethical issues.”
Back in May I wrote a piece for LifeNewson H.R. 2164, Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2012. This proposed legislation would ban all somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) in humans. The point I wanted to make was that many times "cloning bans" do not actually ban the cloning of human embryos; they just ban the transfer of those cloned embryos to a womb for gestation. I highlighted that H.R. 2164 would actually ban all SCNT in humans for both reproductive and research purposes and urged pro-lifers to support it.
Dr. Dianne Irving at LifeIssues.net took me to task for that piece. She has some good points. Her issue with H.R. 2164 is that it only bans SCNT when there are other ways to produced humans asexually. (Asexually means reproduction without the union of sperm and egg producing a genetically identical organism.) Dr. Irving writes:
The Taylor article itself, as well as the proposed bill, define "human cloning" only in terms of one kind of human cloning technique -- somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) -- a form of cloning, by the way, that most researchers have long abandoned because of the scientific problems involved. Instead they have been and will continue to do research using dozens of other different kinds of cloning -- none of which will be banned by this bill, all of which can be used both for destructive research purposes as well as for reproductive purposes.
She is right. There are many other ways to asexually produce human embryos besides SCNT.
In hindsight, I should have mentioned that the legislation proposed is incomplete and only a step in the right direction. I struggle with keeping posts informative without being overwhelming for the average reader. I truly just wanted to get readers to be aware of the fine print in cloning bills.
I saw the support of a ban on SCNT, even though it is not comprehensive, just like I do a ban on late term abortions, or abortions based on sex or gender. Such legislation is not ideal, but a step in the right direction. Once a ban on one type of asexual reproduction in humans is passed, I felt it would likely be easier to implement more. Not ideal of course, but progress.
In private correspondence, Dr. Irving responded that she holds this is not a case of incrementalism. To legally define human cloning as just SCNT is problematic. To which she wrote:
...to formally define "cloning" per se as only SCNT in a legal document is to create a legal loophole for other kinds of cloning to continue.
She has an excellent point that I had not considered. Will legislation that legally defines human cloning as SCNT only give a green light to other types of human cloning? This is an important question to consider when reading and deciding on human cloning "bans."
So besides checking to see if a cloning ban only bans a transfer of cloned embryos for reproductive purposes, we should also look carefully at the procedures defined as cloning. Are they sufficient to gain our support?
Clearly, the best legislation would ban any and all means of asexual reproduction in humans. Short of that, a pro-lifer must decide whether to support a human cloning ban with a limited definition of human cloning or not because such legislation may cause more problems in the long run by allowing other forms of human cloning to continue.
Could it be that people are starting to notice that the fertility industry puts parental desire and profits above the health and well-being of children?
Looks that way in the United Kingdom. The Telegraphreports on a study to reduce regulation costs where the authors recommend that fertility clinics be required to report complications:
Safety drive to stop IVF clinics putting profit before embryos
Action on safety at IVF clinics has been ordered by ministers after a wide-ranging review of the fertility industry.
An expert study raised fears that some clinics may be offering techniques that put the embryo at risk for their own profit.
In the future, all clinics will have to publish the number of complications suffered by their patients.
The review, carried out by Dr Justin McCracken, the former head of the Health Protection Agency, was ordered to reduce the cost of regulating the fertility industry, which has grown rapidly in recent years.
However, he made a series of recommendations on how patients should be dealt with when they have fertility treatments, all of which have been accepted by ministers....
It highlighted a new technique, known as Pre-Implantation Genetic Screening (PGS), as one which is possibly being offered inappropriately for commercial reasons.
For a fee, which can run into thousands of pounds, clinics can check embryos created by a successful IVF cycle for certain genetic abnormalities and only implant those that appear normal....
Dr McCracken said the jury was still out on whether PGS improves the chances of having a baby and warned there is a risk of harm to the foetus. He said it was vital that the regulator checks that clinics are not simply recommending it to boost profits.
“I was told that the scientific evidence base for the use of PGS is not strong despite the fact that the technique has been offered for a number of years,” he said.
“I understand that there is no clinical consensus regarding its efficacy, but there is a real risk to the embryo in carrying it out.”
If only the lawmakers in the United States were willing to look closely at our fertility clinics which remain the "wild west" of the fertility industry around the world. Only in the United States would cost-conscious couples be able to get cheaper embryos made in bulk.
I think if we took a very close look at what goes on in the fertility clinic we would be shocked and horrified by the full scale commodification of human life.
Just in case you haven't had enough of the "ethics" coming out of Oxford these days, here are more disturbing musings by Oxford ethicist, Rebecca Roache. You may remember Roache co-authored "Human Engineering and Climate Change" with Matthew Liao where they explore engineering humans to have cat eyes or to be smaller as a way to combat "climate change."
On the Practical Ethics blog in a post titled "Enhanced punishment: can technology make life sentences longer?," Roache laments the "laughably inadequate" sentence of 30 years in prison for Magdelena Luczak and Mariusz Krezolek. Luczak and Krezolek were convicted of murdering Luczak's 4 year-old son, Daniel. Daniel was beaten, starved and basically tortured before his death. These are terrible acts of evil that rightfully inspire anger in anyone who knows about the case.
Roache points out that Luczak and Krezolek will get what Daniel never did: humane treatment.
Autism researchers at the Autism Center of Excellence in San Diego have found a network of genes that they say signal a risk of autism. A blood test for this “genetic signature” for children as young as 1 year old is in development.
From News.com.au:
A GENETIC “signature” of autism in babies as young as 12 months has been identified for the first time, an international conference is to be told.
A simple blood test is now being developed and may be available in one to two years, Professor Eric Courchesne will tell the Asia Pacific Autism conference in Adelaide today.
“This discovery really changes the landscape of our understanding of causes and effective treatments,” says the director of the Autism Centre of Excellence at the University of California in San Diego.
Barnaby Jack uses a mannequin equipped with an insulin pump to show the vulnerabilities of wireless medical devices.
Many people (until recently that included this writer) are not aware that medical devices like insulin pumps and pacemakers can be "hacked," that is remotely controlled by someone that should not have access to control the device. Such activity was made famous by Barnaby Jack, a New Zealand man who demonstrated to an audience that he could wirelessly hack an insulin pump from 300 feet away. He was able to make the insulin pump deliver a lethal dose to a mannequin. He also demonstrated the ability to hack a pacemaker. Barnaby was set to remotely "shock" a pacemaker at a conference in Las Vegas. He passed away in San Francisco last month before he made that presentation. His death is still under investigation.
Barnaby Jack was a "good guy" using his hacker skills to expose risks in these critical medical devices. His work raises serious concerns about the ability to wirelessly control medical implants by "bad guys." Clearly medical device makers need to address these flaws in implants for the safety of patients who need them.
Barnaby's work got me thinking about transhumanism. In the case of pacemakers and insulin pumps, these devices are needed for medical reasons. But transhumanists want such devices for their otherwise healthy bodies. Neural implants, nanobots, cyber-brains, all integrated into our organic systems.
Why would someone voluntarily expose their healthy body to a cyber-attack? Is it naiveté that nothing bad will happen? Is it a trust in companies that their products will be "hack-proof?"
The truth is we can't trust software companies to create hack-proof software. I doubt any of the enhancement devices that transhumanists dream about will be any different. I ask, "Why put your bodily integrating at such risk?" If you have a medical need that is one thing, but just to be augmented? I don't get it.
Of course, Bryan Singer, has already addressed this scenario in a fictional format. Singer, creator of The Usual Suspects and the X-men movies, has made a digital series on transhumanism called H+.
In H+, a company provides an implant that connects the user's nervous system to computers and the Internet. Everything we love about technology, social media, music, sports, all accessible directly to our brain without any other device. This implant may even replace doctors. It seems to be a technological triumph until someone creates a virus that remotely kills everyone with the implant.
One of my friends, who doesn't really follow the biotech scene, said to me one time, "When you tell me to worry about it, I will worry about it." I replied, "Worry. Now."
Human cloning is not coming. It is already here. It is time to stop pretending that this is a problem for our children and grandchildren. This is our issue to tackle.
In the latest episode of BioTalk, Chelsea and I discuss the realities of human cloning and what we can do to stop it.
You remember Julian Savulescu, the Oxford "ethicist" who is telling parents that we are morally obligated to choose the child among many "possible children" that is determined by genetic testing to have the "best life." He wants us all to use IVF, whether we are infertile or not apparently, to create a batch of embryos and choose the best of the bunch based simply on their genetics. I have discussed Savulescu's wrong-headed, scientifically-suspect notion of "procreative beneficence" already.
Of course, in our "right is wrong," "wrong is right," "wait...there is no such thing as wrong anymore" culture, Savulescu won't be outdone in his race to CrazyTown. Some other Oxford "ethicists" want to take it one step further. (I am telling you, something wicked this way comes...out of Oxford.) Thomas Douglas and Katrien Devolder argue that parents should consider not just choosing the child that has the possibility of the "best life," but also the one that will be genetically better for the rest of society. They call their principle "Procreative Altruism."
This is big news in the stem cell arena. Scientists from China have reprogrammed adult mouse cells to a pluripotent state with a few chemicals. Previously, researchers used genes inserted into the cells by an engineered virus which raised concerns about the safety of the technique for use in treating patients. But now these small molecules can cross the cell membrane without the aid of a virus and can reprogram the cell without the insertion of genes. The Scientist has the details:
Scientists first developed the ability to reprogram somatic cells into pluripotent stem cells—cells that could give rise to any of the body’s cells types—in 2006. However, the technique has required the insertion of “master genes” that could increase the risk of mutations and cancer, limiting its potential clinical applications. A new study published Thursday (July 18) in Science demonstrates the creation of pluripotent stem cells in mice using a cocktail of small molecule compounds that can substitute for the potentially dangerous genes.
Though scientists have steadily reduced the need for additional genes to trigger pluripotency, one gene, Oct4, has been indispensable. Researchers led by Hongkui Deng at Peking University spent a year screening 10,000 compounds that would facilitate the reprogramming of mouse somatic cells into pluripotent cells without the need of Oct4. They identified a combination of seven small-molecule compounds that created pluripotent cells at a frequency of 0.2 percent, a rate comparable to the yield using gene insertion. The team dubbed its cellular creations chemically induced pluripotent stem cells (CiPSCs).
So CiPSCs are an improvement over previous methods to induce pluripotency. The next step is to try the technique in human cells and see if it works.
This may also eliminate a pro-life objection to iPCs. While iPCs provided an important viable alternative to therapeutic cloning and other embryo destructive research to obtain pluripotent stem cells, the viruses used to induce pluripotency in previous research were grown in a cell line that came from an elective abortion performed in the 1970s. The fact that researchers have used this cell line morally tainted the very important breakthrough. If viruses are no longer needed and researchers did not use cell lines of illicit origin in their work, it is possible that particular moral stain on induced pluripotent stem cells can be eliminated.
Amazing news was announced in the field of gene therapy this week. Scientists in Massachusetts have taken the cells of a person with Down Syndrome and have silenced the extra 21st chromosome in those cells. The Guardian has the story:
Scientists have corrected the genetic fault that causes Down's syndrome – albeit in isolated cells – raising the prospect of a radical therapy for the disorder.
In an elegant series of experiments, US researchers took cells from people with DS and silenced the extra chromosome that causes the condition. A treatment based on the work remains a distant hope, but scientists in the field said the feat was the first major step towards a "chromosome therapy" for Down's syndrome.
"This is a real technical breakthrough. It opens up whole new avenues of research," said Elizabeth Fisher, professor of neurogenetics at UCL, who was not involved in the study. "This is really the first sniff we've had of anything to do with gene therapy for Down's syndrome."
The scientists used a gene normally found on the X chromosome to shut down the extra chromosome. Men have one X chromosome in their cells, and women have two. Only one X chromosome is needed for a cell to function, so the Xist gene inactivates one of the X chromosomes by covering it in RNA. Researchers were able to insert the Xist gene in the chromosome 21, which then silenced it.
This breakthrough could also be applied to other disorders like Edward syndrome which is trisomy 18, and Patau syndrome which is trisomy 13.
Researchers were very clear that any treatment from this technique maybe a decade or more away if at all. Anytime you insert DNA into the genome it is dangerous and safety needs to be the foremost concern.
That being said this is excellent news. This technique could possibly be targeted to cells in the body where an extra chromosome 21 causes problems. People with Down Syndrome can suffer from physical problems like gastrointestinal issues and blood cancers. Scientists envision using this technique, for example, in the bone marrow to prevent leukemia.
Of course this begs the question: Could such a technique be used early enough in development to turn off the extra chromosome in all the cells of the body? In theory, yes. If the modification was done in the embryo, then the modification may be incorporated into every cell during development. But that would require creating and manipulating life in a laboratory which we cannot support.
I know there are many who worry that breakthroughs like this imply that their beloved child with Down Syndrome needs "fixing" and that it is not good enough to love them they way they are. I am not a parent of a special needs child so it is incredibly difficult for me to comment on these very valid concerns. Making genetics my profession, I have always thought a person is more than just a sum of their genes. So for me, a person with Down Syndrome is so much more than their extra chromosome 21. The syndrome is not who they are. It does not define them. And so therefore I have never personally perceived treating the cognitive and physical issues associated with Downs as a rejection of their person.
I also do not believe that a person with Down Syndrome needs to be "fixed." But I could certainly see how such measures could be perceived as such. At the same time, we do not see treating other genetic disease like cystic fibrosis with gene therapy as "fixing" the person, but instead as "fixing" the disease. I think the same applies here. Gene therapy that allows children to live a healthy life is not a rejection of who they are.
And yet, every time I read about another such breakthrough in gene therapy, it is always bittersweet for me. After the initial hope there is despair. Despair for those who are denied the possibility of such a treatment because they were killed in the womb.
That is the problem with using abortion to "treat" genetic disease: it is the fallacious assumption no treatment will ever be developed or that no cure will ever be found. Instead of putting faith in the advancement of medicine, we instead deny children the promise of cutting-edge research by terminating their lives before they make it out of the womb. Death is never a real medical treatment. In death there is no hope.
So while this news is exciting and I pray that in the future it will improve the health of those with Down Syndrome, I also mourn for those who have been denied its promise.
It seems that integration of technology into our otherwise healthy bodies may be on the horizon. Motorola has applied for a patent for a throat tattoo that can act as a microphone for many devices. PC Mag has the story:
