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Ethical questions in a bio-engineered world

by Jackie Randles

At the recent Fifth Business Leaders Forum on Sustainable Development, Harvard Professor Jonathan West said that when people look back in one hundred years at what has happened with technology, it will be so obvious to them that the major application of computers was to decode DNA, that they will assume that this was the reason why we invented them.

We think of biotechnology as being primarily about healthcare and some nifty new drugs. It is so much more than that - it is the greatest technological revolution of all time.

If the discovery of the human genome is to be remembered as one of the century's most influential innovation, the biotechnology revolution also signals the pivotal moment at which fundamental beliefs about what it means to be human have been challenged in ways that transform our understanding about our very existence.

We now know that humans share many genes with plants and animals, and that we vary in only very subtle ways from other living organisms in the plant and animal kingdoms. The decoding of DNA provides us with a great deal of new knowledge about genetic predisposition to disease as well as inherited physical and personality traits. We can isolate mutations that may cause disease in embryos, and will soon be able to tailor customized medicines in order to cure illnesses before they even begin to develop.

While advances in genetic science signal the possibility of cures for some degenerative illnesses, and hopes for a greatly improved quality of life for people living with debilitating disease, such breakthroughs also bring with them the potential for serious side effects and unwanted consequences.

Genetic engineering is fraught with many difficult ethical issues: from fears of a subtle emergence of a super class of designer babies where some lives are valued more than others, the commercialisation of reproductive technology and the patenting of stem cell lines developed from publicly-funded research using donor tissue to the corporate dominance of biotech farming, irreversible, germ-level pollution of organic crops and adverse impacts on the environment.

This edition of Living Ethics attempts to explore just some of the complexities that we will encounter as our world is increasingly transformed by bioengineering. How far we will go and where will we draw the line? Who will gain access to new genetically engineered solutions and at what costs - to both ourselves, our relationships with other nations and the global environment? Who is set to gain and who will lose? How will we deal with the unwanted affects, many of which may not be discovered for generations?

There are no easy answers, but it is clear that further developments in such new and experimental technologies will continue to raise difficult ethical questions for all of us.

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