Transcript Ethics And What Could Go Wrong

Ethics And What Can
Go Wrong
-Arvind Krishnaswamy
-Vinit Nagda
Discovering Self
 Idea of farming humans.
 Enthusiasm v/s Repulsion.
 Are experiments carried on humans
ethical?
Notion of Self
 Who are we ?
 Must be careful in defining self.
 Self Centered Approach.
What Exactly is Ethics
 Influenced by religious traditions earlier.
 Notions of human nature and human self.
 Principles of right and wrong.
 Moral Behavior.
 Past v/s Present.
 How often should we redefine Ethics ?
What is Human
 Difficult to define.
 Is embryo human ?
 Is a single cell human ?
 What then is human?
Patenting Genes
 How do we define laws.
 Can everything be patentable?
 Can genes be patentable?
 Issues in gene patenting.
Patenting Genomes
 Should genomes be patented?
 Process v/s Product.
– Oncomouse.
– Humanzee.
 Issues in genome patenting.
Need for pragmatic approaches
 More flexible, empirical and pragmatic
 Have better applicability
 Are not absolute and can be refined.
– E.g., The utilitarian approach
The Utilitarian approach
 Utilitarianism by David Hume, Jeremy
Bentham and Jphn Stuart Mill.
 Central idea of approach  aim of an
action should be the greatest good for the
greatest number.
 Mathematical (optimization) problem:
– Define the happiness function and optimize it
for each important decision each time.
Utilitarian approach (cont’d)
 Need decision and game theory for
uncertain enviroments.
 However, applying these theories is
– Computationally intensive
– Difficult to decide on all the parameters
 Still works better!
– Progress in small incremental steps (slowly
adapt to change while still preserving human
nature).
Issues concerning Human Cloning
 Legal issues like
– Who controls cloning?
• Not definitely Saddam/ Bin Laden!
– Whom to clone?
• supermodels for everyone!
– Restrictions on cloning
– How to interact with your clone?
• Clone and raise your parents? Bizarre!
Its ‘hmm…’ time
 Too early to provide definitive answers to
these questions and their likes.
 Right time to contemplate on them.
 Need a short-term, revisable suspension of
human cloning  better assess issues.
No Hurry
 Will take a lot of time and debate before
we see laws authorizing cloning.
 Status: ‘still under further consideration’.
 Even after we resolve these issues and it is
legal to clone  very few cloned
individual initially.
Potential applications of cloning
 Partial Immortality
 Organ Farming
 Reproduction
 Studying effects of nature Vs nurture
Partial Immortality
 Store cloned cells from young children to ‘bring
them back to life’ if they die young.
 Will help parents partially overcome the grief.
 No effect on population.
 Well-informed parents can shield the cloned child
from psychological effects till maturity is
attained.
Other applications
 Not much drive for other applications
– Organ farming needs more technical advances
– Reproduction:
• Other established techniques to help infertile
couples :
–
–
–
–
adoption
IVF
surrogate motherhood
possible technique to simulate sexual reproduction in
vitro.
Summary
 No revolutionary need / medical
applications for cloning and hence no
urgency.
 Focus is now on other contemporary issues
on precloning like  Stem cells and Gene
modifications.
References

Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry
–

The presidents council on bioethics
Stem cells – a primer
–
http://www.nih.gov/news/stemcell/primer.htm

“The shattered cell: End of Natural evolution” book – Pierre Baldi

Primer on Ethics and Human cloning
–

http://www.actionbioscience.org/biotech/mcgee.html
Bioethics resources on the web:
–
http://www.nih.gov/sigs/bioethics/