Designer Baby or Sensible Precaution?

My wife edits a section of a commercial website devoted to medical information about breast cancer. She is more than casually interested in the subject, since she just celebrated her five-year anniversary of being free from the disease after undergoing a mastectomy and chemotherapy in 2002. My mother died of the same malady in 1980, so it is safe to say I'm as familiar with it as anybody can be who hasn't had it personally.

Two families in Great Britain have also had more than their share of experiences with breast cancer, having lost ancestors to the disease over three generations. So they decided to do something about it. Both couples found a physician named Serhal who has developed a way to test a fertilized embryo at the eight-cell stage for a defective BRCA1 gene, which if present increases the risk of eventually developing breast cancer to about a fifty-fifty chance. If Dr. Serhal receives governmental approval for his plan, and it looks like he will, the couples want to proceed with in-vitro fertilization using only embryos which do not have the defective BRCA1 gene. The embryos with the defective genes will be disposed of. In this way, the couples can "annihilate the gene from the family tree," as Dr. Serhal puts it.

Where is engineering in this situation? Everywhere: in the instruments and equipment Dr. Serhal uses to do the tests, in the procedures for in-vitro fertilization (IVF), and, most importantly, in the selection of embryos. In applying the sciences of genetics and embryology to a commercial end (it is unlikely that Dr. Serhal is working for free), he is doing engineering, broadly defined. And the subject being engineered is a human being, or rather, several human beings, many of whom do not survive the process. Remember, harboring a defective BRCA1 gene does not guarantee you'll have breast cancer; it just increases the risk. Many people with that gene live long lives and die of something else altogether. So we can be pretty sure that some of the embryos that get thrown away would have developed if implanted into healthy human beings living normal lives, whatever that means these days.

Now I'm going to go off in a direction that you may not follow, but I have come to believe it is the most direct way to express what I see to be the basic problem here. A few hundred years ago, back before much was known about embryology, the development of a baby in the womb was mostly a matter of speculation. People talked metaphorically about clay gradually being molded, and for all they knew, there was some amorphous protoplasm to begin with which only gradually became the individual who made his or her first public appearance nine months after conception. But now, with everything we know about DNA, genetics, and the fabulously intricate machinery that comes together to produce a mathematically distinct individual after the process of conception is finished (which can take just a few minutes), the empirical scientific evidence supports the idea of humans as substantial beings more strongly than ever.

Substantial say what? "Substantial beings." I'm using the word "substance" in a technical philosophical sense that goes back ultimately to Aristotle. To explain it in detail would take far more room than I have, but briefly, a substantial being is one which has a wholeness or completeness or integrity. A substantial being is more than the sum of its parts. For example, you can look at a dog in a number of ways: an assembly of atoms, a combination of bones, muscles, internal organs, hair, teeth, etc., even a set of behaviors that can be predicted (more or less, depending on how well you trained your dog). But when you say, "Heel, Fido!" you don't mean, "Heel, you assembly of atoms that just happens to be moving in front of me on the sidewalk." You mean a single being—your dog—continuous in time and localized in space, a real entity that has life (another philosophical term) and will some day die.

This concept of people as substantial beings is not popular these days. Few of us think of ourselves as substantial beings in fact, never mind the terminology. We think of ourselves as just collections of needs, or inclinations, or desires, or bits of knowledge and skills. Nevertheless, substantial beings are what we are—we've just forgotten the name for it.

What has this got to do with the case of the selected defective-BRCA1-free embryos in Britain? An embryo is what the substantial being called human looks like when it's a few days old. You, I, every human on the planet was once an embryo. And one day mortality will catch up with us and we'll die of something. No exceptions so far. The couples who are trying to eliminate the defective gene from their family tree are probably motivated by some generous motives and some fears. The generous motive is to give birth to a baby that won't have an increased risk of dying of breast cancer. The fear is of seeing their child die of the same disease that killed so many other relatives. So they decided to "eliminate" the children who might die of it and bear only those who probably—but not certainly—won't.

There is an old and unpopular name for this sort of thing: eugenics. In the first half of the twentieth century, followers of Francis Galton (Charles Darwin's cousin, both biologically and intellectually) promoted the idea that we should take steps to improve the human gene pool, both individually (by marrying into "good stock" for example) and collectively (by allowing governments to sterilize those "unfit" to bear children). There are boodles of problems with these ideas, but that did not stop them from spreading in both the U. S. and Europe, and in particular Nazi Germany, where Hitler took aggressive means to eliminate "undesirables" such as mental defectives, homosexuals, the Romani (gypsies), and most famously, the Jews.

Hitler, more than anyone else, gave eugenics a bad name, although it took until 1969 for the journal Eugenics Quarterly to rename itself Social Biology. But the desire is still there, and since 1950 the tremendous advances in genetics and molecular biology have put powerful technology at the disposal of those who would use it for the same kinds of purposes that the old eugenicists had.

The British couples are not doing anything like advocating the genocide of a race. But, enabled by Dr. Serhal, they are doing the same kind of thing as Hitler did, only on a much smaller scale. On a personal level, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with desiring to produce offspring who are healthy, happy, intelligent, and possessed of other good qualities. But the end does not always justify the means. Now that you're prepped on vocabulary, I can make my point: destruction of human substantial beings is a wrong means of achieving this goal.

Sources: The article describing Dr. Serhal and his plans originally ran in The Times of London, and can be found at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21624095-30417,00.html. Wikipedia's article on eugenics has an abundance of historical and current information in its fairly balanced treatment.