This past August several news outlets reported a scientific breakthrough regarding human genetic manipulation. 

 

Researchers at Oregon’s Health and Science University claimed to have success in removing a harmful gene from a person’s genetic makeup through a technique abbreviated as “CRISPR” (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). It’s been compared to a type of “scissors” at the molecular level enabling scientists to select specific genes for removal. Those genes are then replaced with normal functioning ones. 

 

As the technology progresses, many in the scientific community hope it will have the potential to make possible genetic alteration previously unimaginable. The experiments are still at an early stage, yet the initial successes were greeted with great exuberance. 

 

One thing that sets these experiments apart from other techniques attempting to correct genetic problems, is that these alterations would be passed on to future offspring. This is one reason they garnered such attention. 

 

Genetic manipulation of this sort has been done for some time in animal models, but these current experiments were the first successful ones reported in the U.S. to have been done with humans. 

 

Not surprisingly, as soon as they were made public, there was tremendous debate over the ethics involved. However, nearly all the debate was future orientated: what it might mean for developing further techniques, or the potential Pandora’s box of genetic manipulation that might be opened. 

 

If humans could control which genes were not only expressed, but passed on to future generations, would we stop at eliminating unhealthy genes? Or would we use the same techniques to ensure that only certain, desirable traits would be passed on? And who would have the power to decide these things? 

 

All of these are very pertinent ethical questions to ask for sure. And there is no doubt that we should even now be having those kinds of ethical discussions. 

 

In fact, these, and similar bioethical questions, are ones that the Vatican wrote about several years ago in the 2008 document, Dignitas Personae (The Dignity of a Person). 

 

In that document it makes it clear that interventions aimed at altering the genetic makeup of future generations cannot be approved of — at least currently with our limited knowledge and the techniques available — even with good intentions. 

 

With this, the Vatican document raises a basic ethical question that was essentially ignored by nearly all the reporting done about this breakthrough. Namely, what are the ethics involved in actually doing these experiments in the first place? 

 

No one would question the intention of eliminating harmful genetic diseases. But as is always the case, ethics must always look beyond intention or even outcome. The questions must also involve how those good intentions are put into action. 

 

“What” is being done can never be overlooked because of “why” it is being done.

 

For example, the experiments in question were conducted by creating a human embryo with the sole intent of destroying him or her after the experiment was finished. Human beings were brought into existence with the sole purpose of conducting an experiment on them. 

 

And yet, few voices seemed to offer an objection to this fact, instead focusing on the potential good or harm the future may hold. 

 

But as Christians we cannot overlook the serious moral problem that the experiments themselves represent. Real harm was done to real human beings. It is a textbook case of the worst kinds of objectification and exploitation imaginable. 

 

Creating human beings intending only to conduct experiments on them and then destroy them is an extremely grave sin which can never be condoned. The fact that this seemingly went unquestioned as an ethical issue is perhaps even more troubling than some of the future questions that so many wanted to focus on instead. 

 

While those future issues may well arise one day, they only will if current ones, like the creation and destruction of human embryos for experiments, go ignored and unchallenged.