One good reason to buy a costly ($189 a year) subscription to The Economist, Britain’s international weekly, is regular coverage of science developments like American newsweeklies used to provide.
Journalists should be alert to a significant scientific scoop in the Nov. 9 edition. Sometime in 2020, the Genomic Prediction Company of North Brunswick, New Jersey — GenomicPrediction.com — plans to fertilize donor eggs with mixed sperm from two gay fathers in California. This couple will then pick embryos to be implanted in a surrogate mother on the basis of purported lower health risks identified through SNP tests (single-nucleotide polymorphism or “snip”).
If successful, such experiments could launch a relatively smooth new path for “playing God” to create human “designer babies.” Not long ago this sort of thing was the stuff of sci-fi novels by H.G. Wells or Aldous Huxley. Now the human species itself enters the public furor over animal and vegetable GMOs and “Frankenfood.”
Writers pursuing this should start with The Economist’s three-pager (behind pay wall), which details the biological complexities of SNP that The Guy must bypass here. There’s also this accompanying editorial. Genomic Prediction’s Web site has further explanation, and you’ll want to keep in contact with the company for the news pegs (973–529-4223 or contact@genomicprediction.com).
Of course, environment and behavior also affect health outcomes. Proposed disease prevention would provide what seems to be a benign start for the Snip Era, but we can likely expect eventual efforts to pick embryos for implantation on the basis of, say, height or intelligence, as humanity veers toward the breeding of a super-race. Applications will inevitably be tilted toward affluent parents, posing a moral quandary.
Also, The Economist reports, eventual efforts to maximize scores that enhance brainpower and such could “increase the risk of genetic disorders” through spillover into a DNA malady known as pleiotropy. SNP has already been tried for animal husbandry with other species of mammals. Since 2008, it has proven to boost milk yields in dairy cows. But, The Economist says, these experimental cows “have become less fertile and have weaker immune systems. … Genetic tinkering may sometimes improve things. But by no means always.” Humanity beware!
Nonetheless, the business-oriented magazine wants experiments to proceed.
“For the moment there seems no reason beyond envy to oppose SNP profiling.” But journalists should fill the gap by interviewing experts in ethics and theology about moral concerns. For example, medicine’s prime moral tenet is “do no harm.” In experiments with embryos that will become human infants and adults, informed consent is impossible.
Should all power be handed to the parents alone?
Rreligious traditionalists, of course, have serious problems with the whole business of artificial methods for human reproduction, even the widespread practice of in vitro fertilization that underlies the SNP process.
GetReligion readers with good memories may recall this is a hobby horse for The Guy, who assessed the top news stories of 2018 by proposing that “without question, first place belongs not to political or economic eruptions but scientists’ onrushing efforts to ‘play God’ and re-engineer the human species.”
That conclusion stemmed from reports of manipulating the genetics of human embryos using CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). A broader news analysis would combine the prospects for SNP, a follow-up on the whole CRISPR debate and an update on the newborns in China used as experimental subjects, and the ongoing odds for cloning of human beings.
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