People have known since time immemorial that it is possible to breed animals and plants to enhance their desirable characteristics and to ‘breed out’ their undesirable traits. And they have argued that, since it is possible to breed horses for speed or stamina, it ought to be possible to breed human beings for specifically human qualities such as intelligence and kindness and sociability.
Ethical and moral arguments are based on the fact that in spite of its benefits and advantages, recombinant DNA technology hides many threats for community and future generations.
The main ethical issue of recombinant DNA technology concerns the nature of investigations and their impact on future generations. Recombinant DNA is an artificial DNC created by two or more DNA strands that would not usually occur together in natural environment. “Recombinant DNA technology is thus a process whereby genetic material is manipulated in order to develop biological compounds. It is here where industrial capitalization is the greatest and popular imagination fixates” (Pepa 1998, p. 416). For if to settle the moral question about recombinant DNA technology is not thereby to settle the legal question as to whether and how recombinant DNA technology should be controlled and regulated, so also to settle the legal question is not thereby to settle the moral question. In other words, society must resist the idea that if the law is silent about a given area then ‘anything goes’ in that area (Dadachanji 2001).
There are many kinds of behavior that people may consider immoral or objectionable or undesirable, but which are not the business of the law. In a liberal democratic and pluralist society the law is not really concerned with the enforcement of morality but rather with providing a framework of peace and order within which people may exercise their personal liberty to the greatest possible extent and make their own personal moral choices and engage in their own ‘experiments in living’. The nature of recombinant DNA suggests that it would be difficult if not impossible to control all experiments and laboratories dealing with this technology. In these circumstances, scientists can create monsters or creatures (animals and even human beings). These results violate human and animal rights, freedoms and social protection from exploitation (Hanson, 1997).
The main moral argument against recombinant DNA technology is that these researchers can work with human genes and DNAs. Sixty thousand of those appear within genes, and so are one source of our biological individuality, including the diseases to which we are susceptible, and our idiosyncratic responses to medications. Those same genetic differences also provide the raw material for the genetic fingerprinting that now helps convict rapists and murderers, free wrongly convicted prisoners, and identify the victims of political “disappearances” and “ethnic cleansings” (McKelvey 2000). As important as knowledge of the human genome is, it is incomplete. True, researchers are currently filling in details missed in the first draft, chromosome by chromosome (Navidi and Arnheim1999).
But several critics of the project have pointed out that the genome is more like a list of parts than, as it has been described, the instruction book for creating a human being. A modern jetliner has about the same number of parts—100,000—as humans have proteins. But it’s a long way from those parts to a working airplane, and an even longer one from a list of our genes to a newborn baby. It will take many decades of work by thousands of researchers to identify all our genes and their controlling elements, map genes into proteins, and determine the structure and functions of those proteins. Hence the current focus on “proteomics.” The ultimate goal—mapping, modeling, and controlling the incredibly complex interactions of the network of genes and gene products over the course of development and in response to the environment—is just visible on the scientific field (McKelvey 2000).
It may then very well be the case that some of the practices and procedures in the area of biotechnology are held to be immoral or unethical by many people, but that nevertheless they are not made illegal or subject to legal control. To be made illegal it has to be shown not just that they are unethical or raise social problems but in addition that they are likely to have harmful implications for others, that is, violate people’s rights in some clear and obvious way (Notes on Moral Theology Ethical 1999). All the most recent work in genetics has shown how extraordinarily complex the genetic control and regulation of human characteristics and functions are, and how impractical it is to manipulate most of the genetic mechanisms in any direct way. Some human characteristics and pathological conditions are controlled by a single gene and these are mostly manipulable, but many others are regulated by a number of genes interacting with each other in very complex ways (Neuwald and Lawrence 1999). Some genes directly determine specific human characteristics, but others provide conditions or dispositions for human traits and functions (Pepa, 1998). Again, there is a continual reaction between genetic factors and external environmental factors. What this means is that, while it is quite feasible to predict that a number of single gene-based diseases will be able to be remedied by genetic manipulation, positive eugenics or the reshaping of human beings is, scientifically speaking, likely to remain an idle dream (Pollack 2006).
In contrast to these views, some critics admit that recombinant DNA technology proposes great opportunities for medicine to treat incurable diseases and create new species. They state that society needs as many groups in the community as possible keeping watch on developments in biotechnology, raising questions, initiating discussion, issuing reports. The community as a whole needs to educate itself so that it can deal in a positive way with the possibilities disclosed by the new biotechnology. “Transgenically-created animals function as living test tubes that permit scientists to imitate human diseases, attempt better treatments, and produce larger amounts of beneficial proteins more cheaply than ever before” (Pepa 1998, p. 416). In particular the media has a central function here, avoiding sensationalism and what critics call the science fiction approach and trying to promote a genuine and responsible public debate on what are really matters of life and death. In my opinion that debate is of the greatest importance and my hope is that these six lectures may have contributed to it. Anyone who knows something about the dehumanising, effects of some genetic diseases would want animals and plats to escape them if it were possible. It’s not a matter of wanting to have a ‘perfect’ animal made to order (Pollack 2006).
In sum, recombinant DNA technology hides many threats but proposes great opportunities for the society to overcome incurable diseases and create new plants. Recombinant DNA technology should be based on strong moral principles and rules in order to prevent violation of human and animal rights and prevent misconduct of researchers working with this technology. It needs also to be shown that the prohibitions of the law are likely to be obeyed by the generality of people and that enforcement of the law will not bring about more harm than good in a society where there is a plurality of widely differing moral views and convictions. This disjunction between the sphere of law and the sphere of morality cuts both ways.
Bibliography
Dadachanji, D.K. September 2001, Unraveling the Human Thread of Life. World and I, 16, p. 136.
Hanson, M.J. 1997, Religious Voices in Biotechnology: The Case of Gene Patenting. The Hastings Center Report, 27, p. 1.
Navidi, W., Arnheim, N. 1999, Combining Data from Polymerase Chain Reaction DNA Typing Experiments: Application to Sperm Typing Data. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 94, 726-729.
Neuwald, A.E., Lawrence, Ch. E. 1999, Markovian Structures in Biological Sequence Alignments. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 94 (445), p. 1.
Notes on Moral Theology Ethical, Theological and Legal Issues in Genetics. 1999, Theological Studies, 60, p. 109.
McKelvey, M.D. Evolutionary Innovations: The Business of Biotechnology. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Pepa, S.M. 1998, International Trade and Emerging Genetic Regulatory Regimes. Law and Policy in International Business, 29 (3), 415.
Pollack, L.E. Spring 2006, The Price of Science without Moral Constraints: German and American Medicine before DNA and Today. Cross Currents, 56, p. 4.