Toward Meaningful Distinctions Between Treatment, Prevention, and Enhancement in Human Genome Editing
Saturday, October 14, 2023
7:30 AM – 8:45 AM ET
Location: Dover C (Third Floor)
A series of major recent international reports on the ethics and governance of human genome editing (HGE) recommend that HGE be used for prevention as well as treatment of disease, presumably to widen the benefits of this new technology. Prevention, however, often involves strengthening a healthy person’s ability to resist future disease, which seems to open the door for HGE to be used for enhancement – a use which these same reports discourage. The difficulty of drawing clear, operationalized definitions of treatment, prevention, and enhancement has become a common observation by bioethicists, and is acknowledged in these reports. Through analyses of interviews with over 90 scientists and policy experts working in HGE research and governance, we will explore how those working to advance HGE interventions endeavor to distinguish between the different potential uses of genome editing. We will also discuss interviewees’ reflections and reasoning on the ethical permissibility of HGE for prevention and enhancement. We will conclude by describing how the lack of conceptual clarity regarding these distinctions leads to a rhetorical wall, curtailing scientist’s conversation about enhancement on ambiguous moral grounds. Without clearer ways of framing these distinctions for operational purposes, the scientific community risks continued confusion and hyperbole that might inhibit the development of important forms of preventive genome editing.
Michael Flatt, PhD – Sociology – Cuyahoga Community College; Margaret Waltz – Center for Bioethics – UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine; Eric Juengst – Center for Bioethics – UNC School of Medicine, Chapel Hill