This season on Brave New Us, we’re exploring the field of genetics, its human applications, and the ethical question that arise when we think about using this knowledge to alter the building blocks of who we are.
First up, we take a look at human enhancement. What are some of the ways this technology might be able to improve our capabilities or help us ensure that our children have particular characteristics, and why, just maybe, we ought to be cautious about doing so.
Guests appearing in the episode:
At Boston College (Boston, U.S.A.), Andrea Vicini, S.J., is Michael P. Walsh Professor of Bioethics and Professor of Moral Theology in the Theology Department; he is also affiliate member of the Ecclesiastical Faculty at the School of Theology and Ministry. M.D. and Pediatrician (University of Bologna), he is an alumnus of Boston College (S.T.L. and Ph.D.), and holds an S.T.D. from the Pontifical Faculty of Theology of Southern Italy (Naples). He is co-chair of the international network Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church. His research and publications include theological bioethics, sustainability, global public health, new biotechnologies, and fundamental theological ethics.
Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, O.P., is a Dominican priest and a professor at Providence College, RI. His areas of expertise are the biology of cancer, aging, and programmed cell death, health care ethics and bioethics in the Catholic tradition, and philosophical and theological implications of modern evolutionary theory.
TRANSCRIPT
Transcript
My fascination with genetics began with the 5th grade science project. I visited. The local library wandered up and down the science aisle, and landed on a thin black book with a colorful double Helix on the cover. I'm not sure how much I understood of it at the time, but I do remember being fascinated. That was the year that I vowed I would be the scientist to figure out how to genetically. Cancer. I saw the Time magazine cover I made for another project with a picture of me showing off my Olympic gold medal for my 100m breaststroke and the Nobel Prize for media. Like all kids, I was optimistic both about my own potential and that of medical knowledge and technology to solve the world's problems. And then I just sort of forgot about it for a while. My plans for the. Future shifted I. Realized I was not in the running for an Olympic medal and much to my father's chagrin, my interests lay more in writing and the other liberal arts than science. I didn't really think about genetics again until my freshman year of college. I was taking interdisciplinary classes and for one assignment we watched the movie Gattaca. It was made in the 90s starring Uma Thurman, Jio law. Ethan Hawke. It's set in a not too distant dystopian future, one in which parents specify characteristics for their children through genetic modifications, choosing traits meant to secure success in life. Essentially mapping out their futures, for instance 1 character has 6 fingers on each hand, making him an especially skilled piano. This genetic improvement leads to a tiered class system in which the genetically modified have such a leg up that those who are normal left to chance are seen as unfit. They form the underclass. Ethan Hawke's character is one of these, born with a genetic heart defect and a dream of traveling into outer space. He will never get there. Because of his genes, he is not worth investing in. So he goes to great lengths to disguise himself to deceive everyone into thinking that he is one of the genetically modified that he does belong among the elite. It's a very American film, optimistic. You root for the underdog who sets out to defy the odds as an idealistic college freshman, I found myself wholeheartedly buying into the message of this film. It's a message of freedom and self determination. But we can be whoever we want to be, but our genes don't matter. Now that I'm a mother, I'm not so sure. In 2018, a pair of twin girls in China were. Born. Lulu and Nana's genetic structure has been altered to be resistant to HIV. I've been pregnant three times and each time I did my best to ensure that they were. Born healthy. I avoided alcohol and a lengthy list of foods, although I could never force myself to give up sushi. I've never spoken or done St. drugs, so I did not take up those habits. I took prenatal vitamins and tried to stay active. All because I believe that my choices could affect the kind of future my children have. Now when I think about genetics, I think about these twins in China. I think about my own children. If I have access to the kind of technology that can protect them from disease, give them a shot at a better future, why not use it? Maybe genetic modification isn't playing God, but actually a gift from God. A tool like vaccines and other medicines we use to combat illness. What if I actually have an obligation to use this process to give my kids a better future? Here. This season on brave nuance, we're exploring the field of genetics, its human applications, and the ethical questions that arise when we think about using this knowledge to alter the building blocks of who we are. First up, we'll take a look at human enhancement. What are some of the ways this technology might be able to improve our capabilities or ensure that our children have particular characteristics? And why? Just maybe we ought to be cautious about doing so? I'm Samantha Stephenson and this is brave new US.
The message that we might be communicating is that we wouldn't want them around if we could have prevented them, we. Would have.
We don't talk about a pencil and say both inherently good. It's inherently evil.
We all are given this gift of suffering. This moment where God is asking us to walk closer with him, to cling to the cross. It's.
Pain. They'd suffering, and none of us. Could out of it.
We're at a point where we're trying to get to a perfect generation that.
That puts an insane amount of pressure on people to earn or deserve their.
Grace.
We're dealing with not simply shaping a life, but actually shaping the person.
We have the power to change our genetics.
But should we?
And how might using this power change who? We really are. This is bioethics in the light of faith. Welcome to Season 1 with Brave new US.
What does it tell us about us as society if we think we have no boundaries?
This is father Andrea Vicini. He's a Jesuit priest, which means that his preparation for the priesthood was long, as long as what doctors go through to practice medicine. You literally wrote the book on the ethics of genetics. Really. You can look it up and read it well, as long as you can read Italian. These days he works as a professor teaching bioethics at Boston College. I spoke with him about human enhancement, about the emerging capability we have to exercise increasing control over the genetic makeup of our offspring. Here's what he had to say.
What might be a concern is that we simplify the complexity of genetic information. Thinking that is simply just not a few bases in the DNA that can lead to a particular type of.
Here he's explaining to me why altering our genetics might be sort of misguided, a fool's errand.
What we are discovering in the recent years is the genetic information does not depend only on the genes, only on the DNA, but it depends also on 1st. The way in which the genetic information is communicated to the whole cell, so those who were considering only mediators like or mailing service of the cells from genetic information to the production of proteins. Now we know influence the genetic information, so they modified so they are players in how the genetic information is expressed and then now with epigenetics, we know that the whole cell and the whole context where the cell is the whole environment, the whole organ, the whole body, the whole. External environment influence our genetic information is expressed and manifested, so it seems to me that maybe it is naive to think that we can change complex traits in human beings simply by modifying. In the genetic makeup through gene editing.
In other words, our traits are complex. They aren't just determined by our genetics. Although our genetics in many ways do inform the raw material that eventually manifests as the stuff of who we are. He pointed out to me that there are many other ways to strengthen our intelligence through education, through study, even our nutrition.
We want to strengthen our intelligence is not sufficient to think that we might want to modify generally formation ourselves. What can help us to be more educated, to stimulate our reflection, our reasoning, and expand our experiences and our intellectual horizons so that we. Strengthen our intelligence. What about care, affection, love, friendship, all human dimensions that have an influence on who we are as human beings so that we don't focus on human beings, not only thinking in biological or genetic terms, but relying on all the humanities and how the history of the culture. Has helped us to understand who we are and develop as human beings.
Then he gets to what I think is the more fundamental question, not a question of the. But a question of value who is in charge? Who gets to choose which traits we correct and to what degrees we alter them? Traditionally, of course, this rule belongs to God or fate if you're secular. But now that we are the ones wielding this power, who's to say that God hasn't given it to us? Maybe we should see this technology as a blessing, as the answer to so many prayers of hope and of healing. Father Virginie isn't so optimistic.
Who is deciding what is in need of correction? If you look at our history, we see how in many instances there has been someone else who has decided what was not acceptable, so we do not want this. I wouldn't want this. We as human beings might project on others what is our vision or what is normal. What is considered acceptable socially, and this might be a bias in our reflection on therapy and enhancement. So again, here we do not think about. Technologies. But we think and how they are used in society to project visions of the other, where we consider the other different. We want to correct the other. We want to eliminate the other, etc.
It's true that these types of impulses to improve future generations by selecting particular qualities haven't gone well in the past. Even within the last 100 years, we see forced sterilizations of the unfit right here in the United States, to say nothing of the atrocities of the Second World War. Still, there has to be a way to distinguish the use of genetics to eliminate whole classes of people and its potential to improve the lives of millions of people. Think about all the genetic conditions you've heard of. Maybe you have a loved one who's suffering from one of them. Maybe you're suffering from one of them. What if we had the ability to snip it out and replace it with something healthy? Why would we not do that? I suppose it's only fair to tell you that there is a commonly recognized ethical difference in what I'm talking about here. The ability of genetic editing to heal a deficit. To bring a person back to normal functioning and what we've discussed so far in this episode, which is human enhancement or altering the human genome to be in some way better than the norm. And we will. Talk about this difference and whether there even is a difference more in a later episode. For now I just want to introduce the idea that this is not a simple issue, not scientifically and not morally. Like our genetic code itself, and the way that it is influenced by any number of factors and how it manifests itself, this is a complex issue. Genetic editing is so complex, in fact, that it throws one of the most straightforward relationships, that of a parent and a child, into utter disarray. As it turns out, genetic editing. Adds an additional dimension for parents to exercise control over them. Children you may be sitting there thinking, well, what's new there? Parents have always tried to control their children and children, especially adolescents. By nature. Tried to resist that control. How is selecting traits for your children any different than forcing them to learn their piano or eat their piece? As genetic editing advances, we may be able to order a child with the same degree of specificity as Meg Ryan ordering a meal in. When Harry met Sally. We can already choose which embryos to implant based on gender and other genetic characteristics. We can choose which implanted embryos we want to survive through selective reduction, IE abortion. Is it only a matter of time before we start seeing designer babies? What exactly does exercising this degree of control do to the nature of the parent child relationship? Here's father vicini.
Love becomes conditional. If we transform the other person in an object that we sort of choose and our own like. This might be a problem because it doesn't respect the dignity of the other as other and not as the result of our own manipulation. It tells something about us and our need to manipulate others, and did objectify the other shows the inability of respecting, loving, caring for the other, as the other is and with the ability of accepting the other with his or her own differences. If we manipulate the genetic information of who will be a newborn, we are inhibiting the ability of newborn, of being free, and so we somehow disempower the person from being equal in terms of freedom. So we are influencing with the other. Will be. And that we have implications for society if we create persons who are the result of our manipulation.
Maybe it is true that choosing traits for our children deprives them of freedom in some way, but I wanted a second opinion. Parents force their children to do a lot of things, like get vaccines, obey curfew, even play football. In most cases we have good reason to protect the influence parents have or for children who don't quite have the intellectual resources to choose what's best for themselves. What is so wrong with putting together those traits that you wish you had, or that you think will give your children the best shot that they have in life? To find out, I talked to another priest, Father Niko Austriaco is not only a priest with a degree in theology. He's also a scientist. He has a pH. D and does research in the field of molecular biology. Because of his background, I expected he might have a more optimistic view about the potential to enhance our human capabilities using these technologies. I was wrong.
How do you know what to design? You know, I I tell people this I go. OK. You know, it's very clear that tall people get benefits in our society. So you design your kid to be tall, then where's your kid? How's your kid going to fit in an in a, you know, in an international flight. You know what kind of seat is he going to sit in where his legs are jammed up against the sit, the seat in front of him because the world is designed for average height people and so. Tallish very tall people are actually deeply uncomfortable. So what you think is an advantage will actually have disadvantages. And So what you have is you've you've now intentionally created manufactured your child. World in your image and likeness in such a way that there are yes perceived benefits. You may think they're benefits, but his life may be uncomfortable. His life may be inconvenience because of the choices you made, and this is part of the concern that designer babies is simply an area that we should not. Get into as a society, but tragically that I don't think our society has the moral resources to push back against the desires of those tragically, sadly, or carrying the cross of infertility who want to have kids. That are designed in the, you know in their image and likeness we're dealing with not simply shaping a life, but actually shaping the person and creating that person in in the image and likeness of the parents. And that's really the concern that. That what's happened now is that the child has become. A means by which parents are trying to fulfill their dreams and their desires, rather than allowing their child to have what is called an open future, a future where he or she can discover with God's grace the great adventure which is their vocation. And and so it limits their future in a way that should not be limited. And that should be a concern. The concern is that the ever changing fads of human society would influence enhancement, and so kids would be simply. Well, a product of the moment, you know they would be products of the changing whims of their parents and and that kind of culture. So it's not just particular things, it's it's the, it's the kind of culture that would be released that would be allowed to flourish once. Our kids became products that were manufactured rather than persons who were welcomed.
So in some ways, it sounds like maybe the the real problem isn't necessarily what we might do to them, but it's what. Using that kind of manipulative power does to those who yield.
It well, I think it's both right. The fact that we can imagine we can do this to our kids is problematic and then the consequences of those acts are also problematic. Human beings are not cattle. They're not crops. We simply can't change them, make them fill our desires and satisfy our needs, and and again, it's it's really hard because we as a society are not quite sure if we are special anymore. For a lot of people, we're simply another. We're simply another kind of living thing, and if that's the case, why not change them, change babies in the way we change animals?
At the close of these conversations, I feel cautious at the least and. Maybe even a bit repulsed by the idea that our society might soon be making use of these technologies in a regular and systematic way. It isn't too hard to imagine us marrying the society in Gattaca, parents feeling compelled to match the leg up being given to other children by their. Maybe not in America, I hope. But then I remember countries like China or even South Korea places where the push to achieve these scientific developments is even stronger and the societal push back much less, I think, of America standing as a world power and how our reluctance to alter our children might shift if it means. Keeping up with the capabilities being engineered into children across the world. And then I think, yeah, I could see that happening here.
All will be well and all will be well and all will be well. I will be well and I will be well and I will be well.
Of course, maybe these worries are all too premature. I wonder if my distress over a generation of designer babies is unrealistic, maybe even a bit silly. Making that call requires access to information I don't have information on, where the science is actually at, what research is being done, and how far are we from being able to implement genetic modifications. On a larger commercial scale.
Well.
Where exactly are we on this road to dystopia? Is there even a Rd. What do we know about our genetic structure and what can we actually do with that information? That's next time on brave US.
Will be. Well, will be well. And I will be well and I will be well. Will be well, will be well and will be well.
This episode is. And then produced by me, Samantha Stephenson. Special thanks to Mackenzie Kim, Lauren Kleeman, and Jessica Gearhart for her track. All will be well. You can find Jessica on her page. Beyond and we have a Patreon as well. If you would love to the interviews in this episode, please visit our Patreon, brave new US you can hear full length interviews, check out the conversations that are happening there, and vote on the topics for our next seasons.
Well. Well.
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All will be well. Will be well, will be well. All will be well and I will be well and all will be well. Well, and I will be well, will be well, will be well and I will be well and I will be well. Will be well and I will be well and all will be well.