March 12, 2014, 12:13 a.m.
A new technique looks set to soon allow consenting parents to have a child who will not suffer from a serious disability.
Parents in the UK look set to become the first in the world to use a radical IVF technique that some critics have condemned as eugenic engineering. If approved by parliament, so called "three person IVF" could be available on the National Health Service as early as next year.
Supporters hail the technique as a cure for the debilitating and incurable diseases caused by defective genetic material in a part of the mother's egg cell called the mitochondria. It involves implanting the nucleus of a woman's egg into another woman's egg cell which has healthy mitochondria and has had its nucleus removed. The process can take place before or after the egg is fertilised using a man's sperm.
Although the genetic contribution of the egg donor is very small (1 per cent) and won't be detectable in the child's appearance and psychological characteristics, the transfer of genetic material affects the genetic constitution of the egg and the embryo. This means that changes will not only affect the child but also the child's descendants, and there has been criticism of the risk of introducing bad traits through the generations though there have been government assurances that the process will be closely monitored in the UK.
One of the distinctions that ought to play a crucial role in this debate is between genetic engineering that aims to remove a serious disability and engineering designed to make people more intelligent, better looking, stronger or more assertive. And it is the latter that has raised the spectre of eugenics.
Eugenics, of course, is reviled because of the policies adopted by a number of states in the first part of the 20th century, most famously the Nazis, to build a more productive and healthy population by eliminating from the gene pool those regarded it regarded as unfit. And the debate over the ethical implications of mitochondrial transfer is very much alive.
In the Council of Europe, 34 member politicians declared that the creation of babies from the DNA of three parents was a form of eugenics "incompatible with human dignity and international law". They claimed it contravened a European Union human rights convention that forbids genetic interventions that affect the human germ-line by altering the genome of descendants.
The thinking behind this prohibition is that tampering of this kind is not only dangerous, but makes humans into a product of engineering. Even if intentions are good, the use of such techniques undermines the reasons we have for respecting human individuals. Humans are supposed to be valuable in themselves. Products are merely means to ends.
The bad history of eugenics is a good reason why a state should not be allowed to use genetic technology for its purposes. But the practice of mitochondrial transfer and the motivation behind it have nothing to do with eugenics as it was once practiced. It would allow consenting parents to have a child who will not suffer from a serious disability.
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