Opening the Doors for Designer Babies? A Tension between the Geneticists and the Convention on Biomedicine
Abstrakt
In November 2018, the world was surprised by the alleged birth of the first genetically edited children which reportedly took place in China. The experiment was widely condemned by the scientific establishment, the media, and also the Chinese government.
According to the Concluding Statement by the Organizing Committee of the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, germline editing clinical trials are impermissible today because of the contemporary limited knowledge on the matter, but a responsible translational pathway toward such trials needs to be defined. A similar approach is widespread among the scientific community.
However, Article 13 of the Convention on Biomedicine as well as several ethical documents prohibit any intervention which would aim to modify the genome of any descendants. The paper explores the outlined tension between the scientific establishment and international law on the basis of major ethical problems related to the topic, most importantly the concerns regarding the safety of germline modifi cation.
It concludes with the proposal of a general direction of the assessment of the ethical permissibility of this kind of gene editing.