This is a question fraught with ambiguities. First of all, exactly what is considered to be genetic engineering, and second who’s definition of ethics do you want to use. Finally, is our analysis to be limited to logical and rational deduction or are we to engage in the minutia of amorphous emotional implication, so endemic to the human thought process.
In the simplest example, pulling weeds in your garden is in fact an act of bio-genocide, and therefore also a convention of genetic engineering, because one genetic strain is being encouraged or favored and the others eradicated. Humans have been practicing biogenetic engineering on this level for thousands of years, and never before has there been any question as to its ethical stature. All of the domesticated animals that exist today are not the result of natural evolution, but the genetic tinkering of human kind to produce unorthodox varieties of plants and animals. The plant life we depend upon for sustenance, to feed our exploding human population now in excess of 6 billion, can hardly be considered of any natural variety. All of it is the result of selective breeding, and with out the genetic engineering that has taken place with our food stocks, famine and starvation would today be a much more prevalent scourge.
Genetic engineering has also been the source of miraculous medicinal potions without which many of the 6 billion I mentioned above would not be here today. Almost every vaccine modern medical science has produced, has been the result of genetic engineering when you get down to the basic proposition of its manufacture. Of course, in the past we depended more heavily on viruses and bacteria to handle the more complex functions of molecular manipulation at the DNA level. Then in the mid twentieth century, when human intelligence invaded the world of the chromosome, we were able to take a more direct route in the advocacy of DNA recombination. Not long after the world of the DNA molecule had been unveiled by Watson and Crick, biochemist Arthur Kornberg discovered DNA polymerase, an enzyme which actually brings about the division and replication of DNA molecules. For the first time, genetic engineering at a macromolecule level became possible, the ability to create and tinker with the basic elements of life itself in a test tube, a certain reality. Had genetic engineering crossed some invisible ethical line?
In a world where millions of humans starve to death each year or die from disease which could be prevented, while other humans enjoy a life style of excess and opulence, the line between what is ethical and what is not is somewhat obscure. When hundreds of thousands of Americans loose their homes to natural phenomenon the government purported to be for them turns instead against them, but when the aristocracy of wall street faces monetary loss, based largely on unbridled greed, suddenly the government increases the tax burden of every citizen to provide a safety net for the rich, so their status can be maintained. So much for ethics.
Down syndrome, Turner Syndrome, Klinefelter’s syndrome, fragile X syndrome, Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease Alzheimer’s, Diabetes and the list of genetically dependent conditions which could one day be eliminated through genetic engineering goes on. I ask you, would it be ethical to prohibit the science of genetic engineering from finding a way to lesson or eradicate altogether the suffering of these infirmities? To date, genetic engineering, through the technology of Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP’s), has successfully provided a capability to read the billions of nucleotide sequences which make up the human genome; including the 30,000 or so which are expressed in form and metabolic function. Genentech, a leader in bimolecular engineering has developed and is producing Human Growth Hormone (HGH), synthetic insulin, new bio-oncological drugs to fight cancer, immunosuppressant hormones to aid in organ transplant therapy and others to combat Acquired Immune Deficiency (AIDS) disease. HGH has meant a new lease on life to victims of Turners Syndrome, Prader-Willi syndrome, and other pituitary gland dysfunction which results in shortness of stature. Need I go on, expounding upon what has already been accomplished to the betterment of all humanity through genetic engineering?
Where are the Frankensteins, the antagonists of bioengineering try to scare us with? Where are the mutagens produced through genetic engineering which threaten the extinction of the human species? The fact is, such are the concoctions of science fiction and pseudoscience, not the product of scientific fact. Such assertions, are but the ravings of a lunatic fringe of hysterical ideologues who pose much greater threat to the existence of our species than anything that ever came out of a test tube. If you want to talk about ethics in genetic terms, then talk about the genocide which has and is practiced to this day by radical elements of ideological belief.
The debate over genetic engineering is bound to continue for a while, and the prohibitions against stem cell research which offers hope to so many of the afflicted will continue to be denied by a small majority of the presumably ethically superior. That there is some boundary of ethical proportion which should not be breeched is an obvious assumption. But how and where we draw that line, should not be the result of adherence to the belief of any faction of faithful ideology, instead, a consensus of opinion based on the best intellectual minds we as a species can apply to the problem.
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