03/05/2020
More notes on suicide—assisted or not
As one with the letters “M” and “D” after my name, I get emails from a service called Medscape (subscription generally required), with links to a variety of articles on things medical. This week brings a link to a piece under the title “Inexact Science: is Patient Eligible for Medical Aid in Dying?” The upshot: …
In May of 2019 The New Bioethics carried a paper (purchase or subscription required) by Jennifer Gumer of Columbia and Loyola Marymount Universities, summarizing an argument against heritable genome editing (the kind in which an embryo’s genes are edited so that the change will be passed down to the subject’s descendants), based on Belmont principalism. …
Continue reading "A principalist argument against heritable genome editing"
02/06/2020
An argument for heritable genome editing
Some weeks ago, a utilitarian perspective in favor of heritable genome editing was published (purchase or subscription required to read). In it, the author, Kevin Smith of Abertay University in the United Kingdom, begins with a general defense of utilitarianism, the ethical philosophy that what is morally good is what produces the greatest good for …
01/16/2020
Controlling gene editing
The title does not mean societal or legal control of gene editing technology. Rather, it speaks of controlling, or shutting off, a specific gene editing process. In retrospect, it had to be the case that there is a resistance, or control, mechanism for the CRISPR system, the gene-editing machinery that functions as a way for …
12/20/2019
Can we hop the gene-editing train?
As Joy Riley pointed out on this blog on December 7, the world and the scientific community recently marked, with almost no fanfare, the one-year birthday of “Lulu” and “Nana,” the first (we think) and still only (we think) humans to have had their genes edited heritably—in a way that will be passed on to …
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 …
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