(The manager of BioArt Fertility Clinics lab prepares thawed blastocysts during an in-vitro fertilisation process in Johannesburg, on February 22, 2022. (Photo by LUCA SOLA / AFP) (Photo by LUCA SOLA/AFP via Getty Images)
I was once at a conference on gene-editing and was urging the need to keep some legal prohibitions in place. In response one participant said that rather than a red light for stop we should have an amber light to proceed slowly. However, a third participant disagreed even with that. “When I see an amber light”, she said, “I always speed up!”
This desire to “speed up” is behind the latest push to change the law on embryo experimentation and fertility treatment in the United Kingdom. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) is arguing that the law needs to remove any limits that might slow us down in the future. They are asking if people agree with their proposals to “future proof” the law.
It is certainly true that things are moving quickly and what was once science fiction is becoming science fact. In 1932 Aldous Huxley predicted a world where babies were not conceived naturally but were engineered, cloned and grown in bottles. The first big step towards that future happened in 1978 with the birth of the first child conceived in a laboratory, not in a test tube (as sometimes said) but in a petri dish. In vitro fertilisation has led to the birth of many happy children but at the unseen cost of hundreds of thousands of unborn human beings who have been discarded, destroyed or experimented upon. Many embryonic infants have even been abandoned in a frozen limbo, without hope of the warmth of their mother’s womb, in suspended animation until their eventual destruction. This has been a great technical leap forward but a great moral step backwards.
The next big technical step was the birth of a child after genetic screening in 1990. Since then we have seen the first cloned seep (‘Dolly’), the first cloned human embryo, and, five years ago, in China, the first gene-edited baby.
In the face of rapid change we need not to rush ahead regardless but to stop and think. Not everything that can be done should be done. Technology is not the product of impersonal forces but is the work of human hands and human minds. This is something we are discovering in the face of climate change as we painfully relinquish the internal combustion engine and the coal-fired power station. We do not have to accept destructive technologies. We can learn to do things in other ways.
Before we go along with the proposals of the HFEA we might ask what happened to all the cures that were promised last time the law was changed. Twenty years ago we were told that if scientists were allowed to clone human embryos then all manner of diseases would be cured, from cancer to Alzheimer’s disease. Fifteen years ago the same claims were made for admixed human-nonhuman embryos. Embryonic stem cells were described as a “Holy Grail” of modern medicine. The laws were duly passed but no one was cured. Ethical adult stem cells are healing people but no cures have come from cells taken from cloned human embryos. The promises were all hype, as some scientists acknowledged even at the time. We were sold a pig in a poke.
Now, rather than repeat these empty promises, the HFEA is proposing that still more radical actions are approved, at least in principle, without even having to pretend that there is any evidence of future benefit. What is called “secondary legislation” effectively gives a blank cheque to future politicians that they can fill in later without the scrutiny and debate that accompanies a new law.
The HFEA is proposing that the government removes the 14 day limit on embryo experimentation and lifts the ban on germline genetic engineering without even giving us a reason. It is simply that if there is a possibility that there might be a reason to remove these limits in the future then we may as well remove them now. This “future proofing” avoids the need for evidence and relies on a kind of blind faith, and faith not in God nor faith in science, but faith in future politicians to act wisely. It is like the satirical definition of faith given by Ambrose Bierce: “Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel”.
The consultation is open until the end of this week (14 April). There are details about the consultation on theAnscombe Bioethics Centre website. Anyone can respond. It is important that as many people as possible reply to say that they do not want to give the government, and the HFEA, a blank cheque. The limits in the current laws must be maintained. We do not need yet more unethical experimentation.
(David Albert Jones is the Director of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, Oxford, Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, and Professor in the School of Education, Theology and Leadership at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.)
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