Isn’t bioethics worth a million bucks?
My mother was a great believer in the old adage of taking care of the pennies on the basis that the pounds would take care of themselves. I suppose that when you elevate that to the level of governmental spending it translates into the millions and billions. Perhaps that is why the Government, as part of its public sector cost-cutting measures, has decided to disband the Bioethics Council. With an annual cost of $1.2 million it would be a small player in the scheme of things.
It is disturbing news because of the speed at which biotechnologies are developing. General public understanding is simply unable to keep up with new scientific learning. How then is the community to be helped to form and support ethical views about the implications of these developments? The Council was established in 2002 as a result of one of the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification. The Commissioners reported the public concern that decision-making was not adequately addressing the ethical, cultural and spiritual dimensions of genetic modification and biotechnology. The Council’s objectives are to enhance New Zealanders’ understanding of those issues and to ensure that Government receives high-level advice about them so that decisions around the use of biotechnology are made in a way that reflects community values.
The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 has allowed the exploration of the science around cloning, genetic modification, and stem cell research. All of these pose ethical questions for society. Significant debate continues around the use of GM in relation to food crops. Like it or not, with an estimated 100 million acres of farmland worldwide planted with GM crops in the year 2000, bioengineered foods are becoming part of the world’s food supply.
Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1997 and at least six other species of animal have been cloned since. The technology now exists to clone a human being. Would we be prepared to go that far in order to contribute to the broadening range of assisted reproductive technologies? Or would we be willing to use the technology in order to provide human embryonic stem cells which are showing great promise in the processes of human healing, offering particular hope for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s that are proving beyond the ability of pharmaceutical drugs to effectively combat?
And in the news this month was the controversy being caused by a Los Angeles clinic stating that it expects to see a trait-selected baby born next year, that is, an assisted reproduction fetus with certain predetermined genetic characteristics such as eye or hair colour. Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) technology, used to determine the presence of certain genetic conditions which could cause severe impairment prior to the implantation of an embryo, could now be turned to the service of what are inevitably being called designer babies. A technology developed to avoid suffering could now be used for very questionable purposes.
Which brings us to the ethical rub in these matters. The capacity to relieve human suffering and to contribute to human healing is finding new horizons with such technologies, a fact that would have to provide one of the greatest arguments in favour of continued research and development and increased use of them. But at what point do we determine that such interference and manipulation has crossed an ethical boundary? Who decides and how do they decide?
Christian people might approach such questions from a particular theological worldview, though that would differ across the spectrum of Christian belief. People of other faiths would bring their own worldview, as do Maori, as do libertarians, as do utilitarians, and so on. A starting point for Christians would be the belief in God as Creator. The Creator remains deeply concerned for what has been created, and there is a special care for human life, God’s greatest gift and the pinnacle of Creation. Here are the creatures with both a capacity for God and who share in the spiritual life of God. Here then are the creatures able to act with God and for God for the good of Creation and humanity.
Or not, of course. For it is not a straightforward task and it is one that in relation to biotechnology offers strong parallels with the trees of Eden: the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The latter tree has always offered up danger to human beings. In fact at the conclusion of the human genome project when the scientists involved met at the White House to announce that they had succeeded in decoding the genome, then President Bill Clinton said this: “Today we are learning the language in which God created life”. That is a statement that reveals the kind of potential that now exists to meddle in the work of the Creator.
The gravity that I think many people feel around issues of biotechnology provides communities with a window for public deliberation before the onward rush of the application of that technology overwhelms us. These may be the years when non-scientists and scientists together have a chance at determining the direction and limits of biotechnological advances.
But how do we have such an ethical conversation as a nation? Where in our morally diverse and morally fragmented society do the pieces get drawn together in order to allow a value to emerge that we might in some way be able to claim as one for Aotearoa-New Zealand? I would think that a national bioethics council could be such a place, and I would think that it is worth spending a million dollars on it. Taking care of those few pennies that are a weighty issue might help the pounds that are the future of the human race to take care of themselves.
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