Designer Babies

THE ANNOUNCEMENT CAME in the closing days of 2002: the world's first cloned human being had been born. The news was greeted with some skepticism -- which was understandable since it came from a group that believes human beings were created as a project of extraterrestrial scientists who have communicated their message to us through prophets including Moses, Jesus, Muhammad and, most recently, a French-born and now Quebec-based writer, musician and race-car driver who calls himself Raël. The Raelians promised to provide more information about the cloned baby, but as the months passed this promise was not fulfilled.

Belief in an improbable story of human origins and destiny is not unique to the Raelians. They also share with older religious traditions an emphasis on such themes as peace and love. Nor is their lack of belief in a transcendent god -- they describe themselves as both atheist and religious -- their most striking divergence from those older traditions. Rather, what makes the Raelians stand out is their unqualified enthusiasm for the contemporary ethos of progress and pleasure. For the Raelians, "Man's ultimate dream of eternal life, which past religions only promised will occur after death in a mythical paradise, becomes a scientific reality." Technology will create "an amazing future" in which our "unimaginably beautiful world" is "turned into a paradise where no one needs work anymore!"

Though the Raelians are a fringe group at best in the religious world, their doctrines are in many ways closer than those of Christianity, Islam or Buddhism to the operational beliefs of Western society. For the history of our time suggests that any technological innovation that can be done, will be done, whether or not it represents a net benefit for humanity. Nuclear weapons, cell phones and twenty-four-hour-a-day news television are all there to prove the point.

And yet, even for people who are generally sanguine about the effects of technological innovation in other areas, technologies that take the very creation of life out of the hands of larger forces -- God, fate or chance, depending on your outlook -- and place it in human hands raise special questions. For if control over the creation of life is to be in human hands, whose hands exactly will those be? And how will the decisions be made? What factors will be taken into account: ethical guidelines, religious teachings, cultural patterns, scientific principles, political considerations or commercial interests? No doubt all of these will be present in some proportions, but the prevailing patterns of our society suggest that the last two will carry the greatest weight.

Not many people share the Raelians' unbridled enthusiasm for human reproductive cloning, but other promises held out by biotechnology appear more clearly beneficial. Stem cells, first isolated in 1998, offer the possibility of generating new tissue that could be used to treat diabetes, Alzheimer's and other diseases. Stem cells can be derived both from tissue taken from adults and from embryos, but whether adult stem cells have the same therapeutic potential as embryonic ones is a matter of debate. The main source of embryonic stem cells at the moment consists of unused embryos from in vitro fertilization procedures; since the embryos are destroyed in the process, many Christians who maintain that life begins at conception are opposed to what they see as the destruction of human life, whatever the therapeutic possibilities. In August 2001 the Bush administration, balancing religious, scientific, commercial and other pressures, allowed stem cell research on existing cell lines but banned the creation of new ones for research. Under proposed Canadian legislation before Parliament (Bill C-13), stem cell research would be permitted.

Put stem cell research and cloning together and both the promises and the issues escalate. If stem cells taken from an embryo cloned from a patient were used to generate tissue, then this tissue would be a perfect genetic match for the patient, avoiding the risk of rejection. Proponents say that such "therapeutic cloning" needs to be carefully distinguished from reproductive cloning (Ottawa's Bill C-13 would ban both); critics say that one will inevitably lead to the other, leading us down a slippery slope to a eugenic society in which people will choose "desirable" genetic characteristics for their "designer babies."

Selection of desirable characteristics through biotechnology will no doubt be different from the images of diabolical experiments in Nazi death camps that the word eugenics tends to evoke. But even if it can be carried out cleanly and clinically, the quest for "perfect" human beings raises disturbing questions, eloquently evoked in this issue by Clare Ferguson. Who decides what is desirable? Will we be promoting human welfare by reducing the pain and suffering that come from disease and disability - or narrowing the range of essential human experience? What is the value of "perfection" in a society where no imperfection is allowed?

One aspect of parents being able to design their own baby would be their ability to choose that baby's sex. This is a prospect that has its own set of ethical, spiritual and political implications, which we asked seven people from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds to reflect on from their own perspectives. Not that sex selection is, in itself, new. It has been practised in various parts of the world for centuries, primarily by killing female babies or allowing them to die. Now that the sex of a fetus can be reliably identified and the fetus can be safely aborted if it is of the "wrong" sex, sex selection has been pushed back to the period between conception and birth.

Is selecting a baby's sex at conception through biotechnology any more morally problematic than these earlier methods? Is there some inherent value in maintaining the rough numerical balance between women and men, which as Navsharan Singh and Shree Mulay note is already being seriously upset in some parts of the world? Would the traditional preference for male babies in most cultures threaten the progress made towards social equality of the sexes, arguably the most profound and positive social change of our time?

In her recent collection of essays Small Wonder, the novelist Barbara Kingsolver, who was trained as a biologist, describes herself as "a scientist who thinks it wise to enter the doors of creation not with a lion tamer's whip and chair, but with the reverence humankind has traditionally summoned for entering places of worship: a temple, a mosque, or a cathedral." She would rather place her faith in the outcome of millions of years of evolution than in the manipulations of genetic engineers, especially when they are motivated by commercial gain. Ethicist Margaret Somerville sounds a similar note in this issue's lead article, recommending an "intrinsic value" rather than a "gene machine" view of human life and therefore a very cautious approach to biotechnology -- although science journalist Stephen Strauss suggests that some of the prospects that arouse the greatest fears, like cloning a human being, may not be scientifically possible in any case.

Reverence for life need not mean a blanket condemnation of all forms of biotechnology. Nor do all those motivated by religious convictions share the same stance as conservative Christians. Others, including Orthodox Jewish rabbis and Muslim scholars, have expressed positions that are far more open to stem cell research and therapeutic cloning, as Michael Broyde and Ebrahim Moosa explain in these pages. Sikhs and Hindus have questioned whether these are issues that engage religious beliefs at all. Readers of this issue will encounter a wide range of individual voices.

While none of these writers can be said to speak for their religious tradition as a whole, there is growing acceptance of the idea that people of religious faith have an essential place in this discussion. Even the biotechnology industry has begun to recognize the merit -- or at least the political necessity - of including a religious dimension in its deliberations; in 2002, for the first time, religion and ethics were among the panel discussion topics at its annual convention, held in Toronto. Scientific, economic, political and even secular-ethical considerations in themselves do not provide an adequate basis for making the decisions that technology will thrust upon us. By looking beyond these considerations, this issue of Voices seeks to help find a way of proceeding through this minefield with wisdom and care.

Bob Chodos, Managing Editor