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Gene Engineers Promote Eugenics & Designer Babies
The New Eugenics: The Case Against Genetically Modified Humans

By Marcy Darnovsky

At the cusp of dot-com frenzy and the biotech century, a
group of influential scientists and pundits has begun
zealously promoting a new bio-engineered utopia. In the
world of their visionary fervor, parents will strive to
afford the latest genetic "improvements" for their children.
According to the advocates of this human future (or, as some
term it, "post-human" future), the exercise of consumer
preferences for offspring options will be the prelude to a
grand achievement: the technological control of human
evolution.

My first close encounter with this techno-eugenic enthusiasm
was in a 1997 book written for an unconverted lay audience
by Princeton geneticist Lee M. Silver. In Remaking Eden:
Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World

(New York: Avon Books), Silver spins out scenarios of a
future in which affluent parents are as likely to arrange
genetic enhancements for their children as to send them to
private school.

Silver confidently predicts that upscale baby-making will
soon take place in fertility clinics, where prospective
parents will undergo an IVF procedure to create an embryo,
then select the physical, cognitive, and behavioral traits
they desire for their child-to-be. Technicians will insert
the genes said to produce those traits into the embryo, and
implant the embryo in the mother's womb. Nine months later,
a designer baby will be born. After a few centuries of these
practices, Silver believes, humanity will bifurcate into
genetic ubermenschen and untermenschen--and not long
thereafter into different species. Here is Silver's
prediction for the year 2350:

"The GenRich--who account for 10 percent of the American
population--all carry synthetic genes. Genes that were
created in the laboratory....The GenRich are a modern-day
hereditary class of genetic aristocrats....All aspects of
the economy, the media, the entertainment industry, and the
knowledge industry are controlled by members of the GenRich
class."

How do the other 90 percent live? Silver is quite blunt on
this point as well: "Naturals work as low-paid service
providers or as laborers."

That rich and poor already live in biologically disparate
worlds can be argued on the basis of any number of
statistical measures: life expectancy, infant mortality,
access to health care. Of course, medical resources and
social priorities could be assigned to narrowing those gaps.
But if Silver and his cohort of designer-baby advocates have
their way, precious medical talent and funds will be devoted
instead to a technically dubious project whose success will
be measured by the extent to which it can inscribe
inequality onto the human genome. Silver pushes his vision
still further:

"[A]s time passes,...the GenRich class and the Natural class
will become the GenRich humans and the Natural
humans--entirely separate species with no ability to
cross-breed, and with as much romantic interest in each
other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee."

Silver understands that such scenarios are disconcerting. He
counsels realism. In other words, he celebrates the free
reign of the market and perpetuates the myth that private
choices have no public consequences:

"Anyone who accepts the right of affluent parents to provide
their children with an expensive private school education
cannot use `unfairness' as a reason for rejecting the use of
reprogenetic technologies....There is no doubt about
it...whether we like it or not, the global marketplace will
reign supreme."

When I first read Silver's book, I imagined that these sorts
of bizarre prognostications must be the musings of a lab
researcher indulging in mad-scientist mode. I soon learned
differently. They are not ravings from the margins of modern
science, but emanations from its prestigious and respected
core. Silver vividly and accurately represents a technical
and political agenda for the human future that is shared by
a disturbing number of Nobel laureate scientists, biotech
entrepreneurs, social theorists, bioethicists, and
journalists.

Since the late 1990s, this loose alliance has been publicly
and energetically promoting the genetic technology known as
"human germline engineering"-- modifying the genes passed to
our children by manipulating embryos at their earliest
stages of development. Such genetic modifications would be
replicated in all subsequent generations, providing
supporters with the basis to claim that "we" are on the
brink of "seizing control of human evolution." Frank about
their commitments to control and "enhancement," advocates of
human germline engineering claim that the voluntary parental
participation they foresee refutes any characterization of
their project as "eugenic." With public conferences, popular
books, scholarly articles, websites, and mainstream media
appearances, they are waging an all-out campaign to win
public acceptance of their techno-eugenic vision.

The promoters of a designer-baby future believe that the new
human genetic and reproductive technologies are both
inevitable and a boon to humanity. They exuberantly describe
near-term genetic manipulations--within a generation--that
may increase resistance to diseases, "optimize" height and
weight, and boost intelligence. Further off, but within the
lifetimes of today's children, they foresee the ability to
adjust personality, design new body forms, extend life
expectancy, and endow hyper-intelligence. Some even predict
splicing traits from other species into children: In late
1999, for example, an ABC Nightline special on human cloning
speculated that genetic engineers would learn to design
children with "night vision from an owl" and "supersensitive
hearing cloned from a dog."

How plausible are such scenarios? Because human beings are
far more than the product of genes--because DNA is one of
many factors in human development--the feats of genetic
manipulation eventually accomplished will almost certainly
turn out to be much more modest than what the designer-baby
advocates predict. But we cannot dismiss the possibility
that scientists will achieve enough mastery over the human
genome to wreak enormous damage--biologically

and politically.

Promoting a future of genetically engineered inequality
legitimizes the vast existing injustices that are socially
arranged and enforced. Marketing the ability to specify our
children's appearance and abilities encourages a grotesque
consumerist mentality toward children and all human life.
Fostering the notion that only a "perfect baby" is worthy of
life threatens our solidarity with and support for people
with disabilities, and perpetuates standards of perfection
set by a market system that caters to political, economic,
and cultural elites. Channeling hopes for human betterment
into preoccupation with genetic fixes shrinks our already
withered commitments to improving social conditions and
enriching cultural and community life.

Germline engineering is now common in laboratory animals,
though it remains at best an imprecise technology, requiring
hundreds of attempts before a viable engineered animal is
produced. Human germline manipulation has not been
attempted: The only kind of human genetic procedures
currently practiced involve efforts to "fix" or substitute
for the genes of somatic (body) cells in people with health
problems that in some way reflect the functions of genes.

In about five hundred "gene therapy" clinical trials since
the early 1990s, doctors have tried to introduce genetic
modifications to patients' lungs, nerves, muscles, and other
tissues. These efforts have been largely unsuccessful. In
late 1999, their safety was also called starkly into
question by the death of an 18-year-old enrolled in a
clinical trial, and by ensuing revelations of almost 700
other "serious adverse effects" that researchers and doctors
had somehow failed to report to the proper regulatory
authorities. Some observers have commented that gene therapy
would more accurately be called "genetic experiments on
human subjects."

Many people are reluctant to oppose human germline
engineering because they believe that "genetics" will
deliver medical cures or treatments. But there is no reason
that we cannot forgo germline engineering and still support
other genetic technologies that do in fact hold promising
medical potential. In fact, the medical justifications for
human germline engineering are strained, while its ethical
and political risks are profound.

Fortunately, the distinction between human germline
engineering and other genetic technologies (including
somatic genetic engineering) is a reasonably clear technical
demarcation. In many countries, this demarcation is being
drawn as law. Legislation that would ban human germline
engineering and reproductive cloning is making its way
through the Canadian parliament. Germany's Embryo Protection
Act of 1990 makes human cloning and germline engineering
criminal acts, and the Japanese legislature is considering
establishing prison terms for human cloning. A number of
other European countries forbid cloning and germline
engineering indirectly by outlawing non-therapeutic research
on human embryos. Twenty-two European countries have signed
a Council of Europe bioethics convention that includes
similar restrictions. In the United States, however, neither
federal law nor policy forbids human germline engineering or
cloning, though federal funds cannot be used for any kinds
of human cloning experiments.

In order to bring the new human genetic technologies under
social governance, strong political pressure and a broad
social movement will be necessary. Though no such movement
currently exists, efforts to alert and engage a variety of
constituencies are getting underway.

The movement that this work aims to catalyze will need to
draw in a wide range of constituencies, and encompass a
variety of motivations. Some participants will base their
opposition to a techno-eugenic future on their commitments
to equality and justice, and to human improvement through
social change rather than technical fix. Others will be
moved by the threats to human dignity and human rights, and
the horror of treating children as custom-made commodities,
that germline engineering and cloning entail. Still others
will find their primary inspiration in the precautionary
principle, or their wariness of techno-scientific hubris and
a reductionist world view, or their objections to corporate
ownership of life at the molecular level, or their
skepticism about the drastic technological manipulation of
the natural world.

It will be far easier to prevent a techno-eugenic future if
we act before human germline manipulation develops further,
either as technology or ideology. This is a crucial
juncture: a window that the campaign for human germline
engineering is trying to slam shut. Your participation is
urgently needed.

#######



(This article is appearing as a Different Takes issue paper
from the Hampshire College Population and Development
Program. A longer version is forthcoming as "The Case
Against Designer Babies: The Politics of Genetic
Enhancement," in Brian Tokar, ed. Redesigning Life? The
Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering, Zed Books.)

RESOURCES

The Exploratory Initiative on the New Human Genetic
Technologies (466 Green Street, San Francisco, CA 94133,
USA, phone: 415-434-1403) is working to oppose genetic
technologies especially human germline engineering and
reproductive cloning, that foster eugenic ideologies and
objectify and commodify human life. To subscribe to its free
on-line newsletter, or for other inquiries about becoming
involved, please e-mail Marcy Darnovsky at <teel@adax.com>.

Books opposing techno-eugenics

Andrews, Lori. The Clone Age: Adventures in the New World of
Reproductive Technology. New York: Henry Holt, 1999.
Appleyard, Bryan. Brave New Worlds: Staying Human in the
Genetic Future. New York: Viking, 1998. Hubbard, Ruth and
Elijah Wald. Exploding the Gene Myth. Boston: Beacon Press,
1997. Kimbrell, Andrew. The Human Body Shop: The Engineering
and Marketing of Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
Rifkin, Jeremy. The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and
Remaking the World. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam,
1998.

Books supporting techno-eugenics:

Pence, Gregory E. Who's Afraid of Human Cloning? Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Silver, Lee. Remaking Eden:
Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World. New York: Avon,
1997.

Web sites opposing techno-eugenics:

Council for Responsible Genetics <http://www.gene-watch.org>
Campaign Against Human Genetic Engineering
<http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~cahge> Genetic
Engineering and its Dangers
<http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/gedanger.htm>

Web sites supporting techno-eugenics:

UCLA Program on Medicine, Technology and Society (Gregory
Stock, director)
<http://research.mednet.ucla.edu/pmts/germline> Extropy
Institute <http://www.extropy.org>

Marcy Darnovsky works with the Exploratory Initiative on
the New Human Genetic Technologies, and teaches courses in
the politics of science, technology, and the environment in
the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State
University, California.

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