Boethius, adviser to Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, weighs in on the ethics of gene editing in human embryos
“No news is good news.”
An oft repeated old saying, but when examined contains a pleasantly profound kernel: its unstated assumption is that “good” is the norm, and “bad” is the exception. Bad is newsworthy, good is commonplace. Grossly extrapolating on this, we could suppose this to mean that people might be inherently good as well. The bible claims, after all, that we’re made in the image of God. This was probably a good deal for us, though when I look in the mirror I fear God got the wrong end of the bargain. As Woody Allen wrote in Love and Death:
Boris: “You think I was made in God’s image? Take a look at me. You think He wears glasses?”
Sonja: “Not with those frames.
Of course one might suppose that using God’s image was aiming a bit too high for us, maybe an intelligent version of the panda would have been a less acrimonious and bellicose species to have dominion over this planet. Or maybe sentience was a bad idea all together for us. However, the story in Genesis concludes with the declaration, “ And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” So there’s that. Furthermore, several studies have suggested that people are intuitively cooperative, and that even infants prefer people who help others. Thus, even the cold light of science suggests that people are, basically, OK.
Nonetheless, despite this and the engineering adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, we can’t help but want to improve on ourselves. Again peaking into Genesis, self-improvement was the first temptation to humanity; the snake told Eve that if she and Adam ate the forbidden fruit “… you will be like God.”
That’s a hard proposition to pass on.
Bettering ourselves has long been limited to clean living, regular exercise, and an abstention from hard spirits. Now the possibility of a more direct approach is at hand.
A regulatory arm of the UK’s Department of Health has given the go-ahead for the use of a tool of molecular biology known as CRISPR to modify human embryos. This isn’t the beginning of a clone army bred for servility and stamina, the research can only follow the embryos for seven days, and the embryos can’t be implanted in a mother. The goal is to edit only a few genes in order to better understand better the genetic going-on’s in the first few days of life. That being said, an unstated but certainly present goal is to evaluate the safety and efficacy of CRISPR technology for future editing of human embryos.
This decision is somewhat at odds with a decision by the US health department to not fund this type of research, but this is not a declaration by the UK that human genetic manipulation is their next growth industry. Indeed, the decision by the regulatory group was largely on procedural grounds, according to the existing rules the researchers only had to establish that they had a valid research question and a fair chance of getting good results. A separate ethics approval is yet to be obtained, and is necessary for this research to begin. Plus, Jurrasic Park continues to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of genetic modification, so full scale overhaul of our society based around clones is still a few years away.
Still, it’s a provocative step and introduces two weighty questions for which this decision offers partial answers: is it OK to genetically modify humans, and who gets to decide that? Their answers are ‘yes’ and ‘we do’.
But those are exceedingly hard topics, so let’s look at a third issue that’s implicit here, the ethics of the use of human embryos for research. This type of research is done already in lots of labs, so the UK isn’t broaching terra incognito in this decision. However it is approaching the issue from a new direction, so it’s worth looking at again. Somewhat as a by-product of in vitro fertilization, which often produces an excess of viable embryos, there are a lot of human embryos on which research can potentially be performed. As the typical mother doesn’t want octuplets, and therefore doesn’t want all the embryos produced during her IVF process to be implanted in her, these extra embryos are destroyed or used for research. In the US, government funding of projects involving human embryos were halted for several years, but in 2009 many of the restrictions were lifted. When this type of research is allowed, there is generally a cutoff of 14 days after conception in which research is allowed on embryos. After that time the embryo begins to develop a nervous system, and this event is seen to possibly define when an embryo becomes more than just a bundle of cells, and when it become a potential person. In the current decision about this specific research project, a date of 7 days was specified.
The ethical rationale for at what stage in embryonic development is permissible hearkens back to the works of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.
This scientific rationale hearkens all the way back to Aristotle, who identified stages in embryology. Thomas Aquinas in his Quaestiones Disputatae: De potentia said, citing Aristotle, that as the human embryo develops its initial vegetative soul is replaced by a sensitive soul, which is turn is replaced by the anima rationalis, the rational soul. Of course the Catholic Church has long moved past Aristotle in its understanding of embryology, yet the debate over the moral status of an embryo still continues. When, in an embryo’s creation and growth, does its moral status rise to the level that it becomes a person, with all the rights and burdens thereof? Sticking with our Thomas, he states in the Summa that persons are that who “are not only made to act, … but which can act of themselves.”
His meaning is, of course, that people are defined as rational beings. We think, we have free will. Unfortunately that counts me out until after 10AM on most days. Adding on to this definition of personhood, he cited Boethius, a circa 500AD Roman philosopher who served under Theodoric the Great, a king of the Ostrogoths; Thomas said that people are social beings, “Therefore this word ‘person’ signifies relation.”
A completely unrelated aside, we may talk of excessive ego in our modern politicians, yet few these days append superlatives like ‘The Great’ to their names. Whether this style became superfluous after the advent of last names, and thus Theodoric Smith wouldn’t need a supernumerary designation to distinguish himself from Theodoric Brown, or because of increasing timorousness in our leaders is not clear. However, given that Boethius’s full name was Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, we didn’t lack names of sufficient length at Theodoric’s time.
Some argue that the life of an embryo has value to God, some that its life has a value to the embryo itself. Alternatively, it could be argued that an embryo has no more rights than any other bundle of cells in a person.
These arguments of Thomas could suggest that personhood arises late in the embryonic process, or possibly even not until sometime after birth (or after 10AM, for me). Yet in other arguments he affirms that though an early embryo may not qualify as a person, this doesn’t mean it doesn’t have worth. The religious view would be that the life of an embryo has value to God. A humanistic rewording would be that its life has a value to the embryo itself. On the contrary side, viewing the development of the embryo as a progression towards personhood, it could be argued that at an early stage the embryo has no more rights than any other bundle of cells in a person.
So is this research ethical, or a good idea? Is it reasonable to edit the genetic code of human embryos for research? If life is essentially good, is it best to just work with what we have? Or should we answer that these methods are part of our biological world, and therefore we’re not fundamentally changing the nature of creation, no matter what human DNA we alter? Certainly the scientific and medical benefits, albeit far downstream of this initial research project, are likely to save many lives and create a great good for society.
I don’t know the answer, nor does it really matter what I think. But it it worthy to note that these questions, which are central to the definition of the nature of humanity, are being answered in committees. I’ve been on committees. You’ve probably been on committees. We know what committees can be like. These particular committees addressing these questions might be creating good answers. Or possibly they are not. More likely, there is no one answer to these questions. What matters is that we acknowledge the existence of the question, and do not just consume the answers we are given.
