Worried when science plays God? It’s only natural

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/26/science-plays-god-three-parent-babies-sceptics

Version 0 of 1.

It was always going to be a controversial technique. Sure, conceiving babies this way could alleviate suffering, but as a Tory peer warned in the Lords debate, “without safeguards and serious study of safeguards, the new technique could imperil the dignity of the human race, threaten the welfare of children, and destroy the sanctity of family life”. Because it involved the destruction of embryos, the Catholic church inevitably opposed it. Some scientists warned of the dangers of producing “abnormal babies”, there were comparisons with the thalidomide catastrophe and suggestions that the progeny would be infertile. Wasn’t it a slippery slope from here to a “Frankenstein future” of designer babies?

I’m not talking about mitochondrial replacement and so-called three-person babies, which Britain became the first country in the world to support this week, but about the early days of IVF in the 1970s and 80s, when governments dithered about how to deal with this new reproductive technology. Today, with more than 5 million people having been conceived by IVF, the term “test tube baby” seems archaic if not a little perverse (not least because test tubes were never involved). Assisted conception in the UK didn’t bring about the breakup of the traditional family and the birth of babies with deformities but the formation of the HFEA in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990, providing a clear regulatory framework for research involving embryos.

Related: Britain's House of Lords approves conception of three-person babies

It would be unscientific to argue that because things turned out fine on that occasion, they will inevitably do so for mitochondrial replacement. No one can be wholly certain what the biological consequences of this technique will be, which is why the HFEA will grant licenses to use it only on the carefully worded condition that they are deemed “not unsafe”. But the parallels in the tone of the debate then and now are a reminder of what deep-rooted fears technological intervention in procreation can awaken.

Scientists supportive of such innovations often complain that the opponents are motivated by ignorance and prejudice. They are right to conclude that public engagement is important, but they shouldn’t suppose that explaining the science will banish all these misgivings. They resurface every time there is a significant advance in reproductive technology: with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, with the ICSI variant of IVF, and so on. They will undoubtedly do so again.

In all these cases, much of the opposition came from people with a strong religious faith. As one of the versions of mitochondrial replacement involves the destruction of embryos, it was bound to fall foul of Catholic doctrine. But the Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England adduced other reasons for hesitation, emphasising that it was worried about the safety and ethical aspects of the technique. For instance, the Bishop of Swindon and the church’s national adviser for medical ethics warned of “unknown interactions between the DNA in the mitochondria and the DNA in the nucleus [that] might potentially cause abnormality or be found to influence significant personal qualities or characteristics”. Safety is of course paramount in the decision, but the scientific assessments have naturally given it a great deal of attention already.

Lord Deben, who led opposition to the bill in the Lords, denied his Catholicism had anything to do with it. “I hope no one will say that I am putting this case for any reason other than the one that I put forward,” he said. We can take it on trust that this is what he believes, while finding it surprising that the clear and compelling responses to some of his concerns offered by scientific peers such as Matt Ridley and Robert Winston left him unmoved.

Yet there are secular voices opposing the technology too, in particular campaigners against genetic manipulations in general, such as Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society. She responded to the ongoing deliberations of the US Food and Drug Administration over mitochondrial transfer not only by flagging up alleged safety issues, but also insisting that we consider babies conceived this way to be “genetically modified”, and warning of “mission creep” and “high-tech eugenics”. “How far will we go in our efforts to engineer humans?”, she asked in the New York Times.

When applied to mitochondrial transfer, ‘three-parent babies' shows how strongly personhood is now equated with genetics

Parallels between the objections from religious and secular quarters suggest that there is a deeper and largely unarticulated sense of unease here. Bioethicist Leon Kass, who led the George W Bush administration’s Council on Bioethics when in 2001 it blocked public funding of most American stem cell research, has argued that instinctive disquiet about some advances in assisted conception and human biotechnology is rather healthy: “the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it”, an idea he calls the wisdom of repugnance. “Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder,” he says. I strongly suspect that, beneath many of the arguments about the safety and legality of mitochondrial replacement lies an instinctive repugnance that is beyond reason’s power to articulate.

Like many of our subconscious fears, such feelings of repugnance are revealed in the stories we tell. Disquiet at the artificial intervention in procreation goes back a long way: to the tales of Prometheus, of the medieval homunculus and golem, and then to Goethe’s Faust and Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, ETA Hoffmann’s automaton Olympia, the Hatcheries of Brave New World, modern stories of clones and Ex Machina’s Ava. On the surface these stories seem to interrogate humankind’s hubris in trying to do God’s work; so often they turn out on closer inspection to explore more intimate questions of, say, parenthood and identity. They do the universal job of myth, creating an “other” not as a cautionary warning but in order more safely to examine ourselves.

So, for instance, when we are warned that a man raising a daughter cloned from his wife’s cells would be irresistibly attracted to her, we are really hearing anxieties about our own incestuous fantasies. Only in Hollywood does Frankenstein’s monster turn bad because he is tainted from the outset by his origins; for Shelley, it is a failure of parenting.

I don’t think it is reading too much into the “three-parent baby” label to see it as a reflection of the same anxieties. Many children already have three effective parents, or more – through step-parents, same-sex relationships, adoption and so forth. When applied to mitochondrial transfer, this term shows how strongly personhood has become equated with genetics, and indicates to geneticists that they have some work to do to move the public on from the strictly deterministic rhetoric around genetics.

We can feel justifiably proud that the UK has been the first country to grapple with the issues raised by this new technology. The UK is not alone in declining to prohibit the technique, but it stands out in having made that decision actively. It is also right that that decision canvassed a wide range of opinions. Some scientists have questioned why religious leaders should be granted any special status in pronouncing on ethical questions like this. But the most thoughtful of them often turn out to have a subtle and humane moral sensibility of the kind that a questing faith can require. There is a well-developed strand of philosophical thought on the moral authority of nature, and theology is a part of it. But on questions like this, we should examine our own responses as honestly as we can.