Keeping up with science

UNESCO Courier, Oct, 1998 by Timothy Caulfield

"Science, itself, cannot supply us with an ethic. It can show us how to achieve a given end, and it may show us that some ends cannot be achieved. But among ends that can be achieved our choice must be decided by other than purely scientific considerations."

Bertrand Russell, 1950

Bertrand Russell's caution on the ethic of science is more pertinent today than ever before. But we still seem far from developing an effective human rights framework to guide the choices we, as a world community, make about the use of emerging technologies. The sheer momentum of science, spurred on by the commercial entities funding research, continues to dominate our decisions. Can human rights instruments give us the direction we need? Perhaps not.

The response of legislators to the ongoing "genetic revolution" illustrates the shortcomings of current regulatory approaches. The Human Genome Project, an international effort to sequence and map all the human genes, is probably the most scrutinized scientific endeavour in history. Most of the participating nations have set aside part of their science budgets to address the ethical, legal and social issues involved. Yet this analysis has resulted in only a few formal genetic policies with any real legal teeth.

Domestic law has always struggled to keep pace with the advance of technology. The problems are amplified in the arena of international human rights law with its plurality of cultures, beliefs and values. Only the most basic principles are likely to survive the polarized debates. As exemplified by the UNESCO Declaration on the Protection of the Human Genome, the substance of many of the final documents seems to hinge on the interpretation of amorphous terms like "human dignity".

There are also more specific reasons why it is difficult to create effective human rights "rules" including: the daunting task of writing scientifically meaningful regulations and the fact that the social norms which compel the implementation of safeguards evolve almost as quickly as the technology (consider in vitro fertilization).

The regulatory issues raised by Dolly, the first cloned mammal, highlight these challenges. For example, a number of the pre-Dolly laws prohibiting human cloning, such as Great Britain's, addressed embryo splitting technology. As a result, a rigid application of such provisions would miss the nuclear transfer technique used to create Dolly.

More importantly, Dolly highlights the need for meticulous policy analysis. Unfortunately, an ill-informed polemic seems to drive far too much of the "biopolicy" dialogue. One could argue that both the eugenic laws of the early twentieth century and the recent commentary on human cloning are based on an inaccurate view of genetic determinism. That is an ironic conclusion, since state-imposed eugenic policies obviously offend human dignity while cloning regulations explicitly seek to protect it. Nevertheless, if one scrutinizes the proposals to ban human cloning it is difficult to find a satisfactory critique of this paradox. A worrisome trend given that a deterministic ethos is arguably more threatening to human dignity than an undeveloped cloning technology.

But let us consider a possibly more troubling controversy. Many have argued that the marriage between commerce and human genetics will usher in an era of laissez faire eugenics in which the social definitions of disease, disability and normalcy are dictated by market forces.

How can traditional human rights instruments address such a concern? It may be impossible. First, the commercialization of genetics is part of a growing, multi-billion dollar industry viewed by many governments as a vital part of the economy.

Second, because the notion of autonomy remains a fundamental human right, any policy seen as curtailing the ability to choose will meet resistance. Furthermore, in many Western countries individual freedom is indistinguishable from a perceived right to be an unrestrained consumer. In health care, autonomy has metamorphosed from a fight to determine what is done to your body into a right of access. State imposed eugenic policies are relatively easy to condemn, but how do you get at the aggregate effect of consumer decisions?

Finally, the subtle attitudinal changes associated with the genetic revolution are the result of social forces, not state policies. As such they may easily pass unnoticed.

Though I am not a "Luddite," some form of social control is needed. However, many concerns associated with the genetic revolution may be beyond the reach of human rights instruments. The genetech industry will be propelled forward by social forces imbedded in the fabric of Western culture. It seems certain that the cumulative pressure of these forces will prove too much for the most sharply crafted declaration.