11/07/2019
More on Physicians’ Conscience Rights
Yesterday’s post to this blog addressed physicians’ conscience rights. The standard shape of arguments about preserving individual physicians’ conscience rights goes, broadly, like this: certain actions now sanctioned by society (e.g., abortion, assisted suicide) have been embraced by the medical profession as standard medical care which all physicians should be willing to perform, but this …
One caution when objecting to the prospect of heritable human gene editing is to take care not to overestimate what it technically possible. That is, an all-too-easy argument is that attempts to edit a disease gene will lead, by momentum if nothing else, to “designer babies,” with children not just being genetically selected but in …
Continue reading "Skepticism about polygene scores to select for IQ and height"
10/24/2019
Future new CRISPR baby in Russia?
Nature reports that Russian scientist Denis Rebrikov has started experiments intended to lead to editing a gene, in human oocytes (egg cells) associated with human deafness. Prior reports had claimed that he was working on eggs from deaf women in an attempt to repair the defect and, presumably, provide a normal egg for IVF. This …
Yesterday’s post on this blog, by Steve Phillips, warned that a narrow, “rules limited” approach to bioethics reduces ethics in science and medicine to matters of regulatory compliance and risks making thoroughly logical conclusions based on faulty premises that are adopted without regarding “deeper ethical thinking” for which scientists’ thinking must be brought under the …
Continue reading "Addressing gene editing with “thin” bioethics"
10/04/2019
Fewer U.S. Twins and the Development of IVF
Readers of this blog may have seen the report in the general press that, after three decades of increases, the rate of twin births in the U.S. has declined by 4% from 2014 to 2018. Those three decades correspond to the era of IVF, since the birth of Louise Brown in England in 1978. It … Continue reading "Fewer U.S. Twins and the Development of IVF"
09/19/2019
“Velvet Eugenics”
Human Flourishing in an Age of Gene Editing is a new collection of essays, edited by Erik Parens and Josephine Johnson. In the introduction, the editors explain they are concerned with “nonphysical harms” of human gene editing. That is, these harms would not affect bodily systems, but harm “people’s psyches…[their] experiences of being persons,” and …
09/12/2019
Two developments
A new effort at “somatic” gene editing in China is reported this week. The key summary: “As the researchers report in the New England Journal of Medicine, they transplanted [blood stem] cells that had undergone CRISPR-based editing [of a gene that encodes for a receptor, or “docking station”] into a patient with HIV and acute lymphoblastic …
Last week, I discussed efforts by a US/UK commission formed to recommend a framework for regulating and monitoring heritable human gene editing. This commission has called for “expert evidence” to assist them in the task “to develop a framework for considering technical, scientific, medical, regulatory, and ethical requirements for human germline genome editing, should society …
Continue reading "Heritable genome editing: a too-short list of 12 questions"
08/30/2019
Much going on about heritable genome editing
The first meeting of the International Commission on the Clinical Use of Human Germline Genome Editing was held in Washington, DC on August 13. This is a US/UK commission convened by the UK Royal Society, the US National Academy of Medicine, and the US National Academy of the Sciences. Space for in-person attendance at these … Continue reading "Much going on about heritable genome editing"
08/30/2019
Much going on about heritable genome editing
The first meeting of the International Commission on the Clinical Use of Human Germline Genome Editing was held in Washington, DC on August 13. This is a US/UK commission convened by the UK Royal Society, the US National Academy of Medicine, and the US National Academy of the Sciences. Space for in-person attendance at these … Continue reading "Much going on about heritable genome editing"
Bioethics TV