Posted on 09/20/2012 11:12:07 AM PDT by lbryce
A fertility treatment which eliminates hereditary disease by engineering babies to carry healthy DNA from a third biological parent could be legalised next year. Members of the public are being asked whether families with a genetic risk of incurable conditions like muscular dystrophy should be allowed to use the DNA of a third party to create healthy children.
Although the resulting babies would inherit a small fraction of their DNA from the donor and not their mother or father, the procedure would spare all future generations from a host of rare and debilitating conditions.
The technique is currently forbidden as a treatment, but a public consultation launched today will help inform a decision by Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, on whether the clinical benefits outweigh any ethical concerns.
Experts accept the technique, which involves genetically modifying a human egg or embryo, enters "unchartered territory" and raises serious ethical questions.
As well as the moral implications of engineering embryos, there are questions over how the procedure would impact on a child's sense of identity and whether they should be allowed to contact the donor later in life.
Should Mr Hunt decide to give the treatment the green light the technique could be written into law as early as next year, making Britain the first country in the world to allow human trials.
Lisa Jardine, chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which is conducting the consultation, said the issue was of "enormous public interest", and not just to affected families.
She said: "We find ourselves in unchartered territory, balancing the desire to help families have healthy children with the possible impact on the children themselves and wider society".
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
As well as the moral implications of engineering embryos, there are questions over how the procedure would impact on a child's sense of identity and whether they should be allowed to contact the donor later in life. ==========================================================================================================================================================
This is only the morally-dubious, ethically-challenged stuff they tell you about. I am sure there are procedures in the "experimental" file that are downright "Frankenstein-ian" in what they'd love to try, have tried, won't ever talk about it for obvious reasons.
Who’s going to accept responsibility when kids start popping out with three heads?
This is where this type of hybridization will head. A room full of the failures, and one proto-type that survives. They always couch these things as helping to stop disease; but, there is a downside on the way to perfecting the technique. We will not be allowed to see the downside; but, it will be there.
Note to those who would play God. You’re NOT.
Among many other things this is likely to lead to: “gay” couples can combine their DNA with that of an “egg donor”*, and a “surrogate mother”* to produce a hybrid with “two daddies”.
Beyond that, the mind boggles.
* The egg donor and surrogate mother may, or may not be the same person.
Your analogy to Alien:Resurrection with a secret room filled with malformed human-alien hybrid embryos, misshapen heads, body parts kept in formaldehyde, with an actual living clone of Ripley is a perfect depiction of the sort of freakish scenario you might expect from those who claim they “only” seek to “help” man from his imperfections.
They can make it legal, but they can never make it right.
It started with Louise Brown and hope for infertile couples. God only knows where it will end, with how many sets of genes and how many people to call Mom and Dad. Always whether we can, never whether we should. Advanced science is dangerous in an immoral society.
What is the freaking point? My beautiful gorgeous 13 m daughter doesn’t have any of my genes and I don’t care. She’s from an adopted embryo. No controversial science and she was given her chance at life instead of sacrificed by the family who donated her. These people afraid of diseases should use donated embryos. They still can carry the baby, nurse, everything. So the baby looks different - it can be wonderful!!!!
The lawyers will be all over it.
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Just because science CAN do something, doesn't mean it SHOULD. Any human field of endeavor eventually creates evil, if God and His natural laws are thrown aside.
> Who’s going to accept responsibility when kids start popping out with three heads?
OMG, a three-headed Obama!
(OMG = Obama Must Go)
There are a lot of things that are legal and not right.
The bigger the dichotomy, the bigger the mess we end up in.
Permissible Medical Experiments
The great weight of the evidence before us is to the effect that certain types of medical experiments on human beings, when kept within reasonably well-defined bounds, conform to the ethics of the medical profession generally. The protagonists of the practice of human experimentation justify their views on the basis that such experiments yield results for the good of society that are unprocurable by other methods or means of study. All agree, however, that certain basic principles must be observed in order to satisfy moral, ethical and legal concepts:
1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.
The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.
2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.
3. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.
4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
5. No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.
6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.
9. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.
10. During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probably cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.
Of the ten principles which have been enumerated our judicial concern, of course, is with those requirements which are purely legal in nature — or which at least are so clearly related to matters legal that they assist us in determining criminal culpability and punishment. To go beyond that point would lead us into a field that would be beyond our sphere of competence. However, the point need not be labored. We find from the evidence that in the medical experiments which have been proved, these ten principles were much more frequently honored in their breach than in their observance. Many of the concentration camp inmates who were the victims of these atrocities were citizens of countries other than the German Reich. They were non-German nationals, including Jews and "asocial persons", both prisoners of war and civilians, who had been imprisoned and forced to submit to these tortures and barbarities without so much as a semblance of trial. In every single instance appearing in the record, subjects were used who did not consent to the experiments; indeed, as to some of the experiments, it is not even contended by the defendants that the subjects occupied the status of volunteers. In no case was the experimental subject at liberty of his own free choice to withdraw from any experiment. In many cases experiments were performed by unqualified persons; were conducted at random for no adequate scientific reason, and under revolting physical conditions. All of the experiments were conducted with unnecessary suffering and injury and but very little, if any, precautions were taken to protect or safeguard the human subjects from the possibilities of injury, disability, or death. In every one of the experiments the subjects experienced extreme pain or torture, and in most of them they suffered permanent injury, mutilation, or death, either as a direct result of the experiments or because of lack of adequate follow-up care.
Obviously all of these experiments involving brutalities, tortures, disabling injury, and death were performed in complete disregard of international conventions, the laws and customs of war, the general principles of criminal law as derived from the criminal laws of all civilized nations, and Control Council Law No. 10. Manifestly human experiments under such conditions are contrary to "the principles of the law of nations as they result from the usages established among civilized peoples, from the laws of humanity, and from the dictates of public conscience."
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