Gary Comstock, Bioethics

Traditional Breeding | Ethical Concerns | More Comments from Gary Comstock | Fish Gene in Strawberry | Gene Therapy to Boost Intelligence |

Transcript for Clip 1 -- Traditional Breeding

Biotechnology is in many ways simply an extension of traditional breeding methods. We have to say right up front that there's one obvious way in which it's not simply an extension of traditional breeding methods. The problem is, obviously, that traditional breeding can't take genes from humans and put them into pigs, and current techniques do allow us to isolate the gene for human growth hormone and insert it into hogs. That's not possible through traditional breeding. It's not possible in traditional breeding to take a gene from a fish and insert it into a tomato. So there is a new power here that is quite different. But that said, traditional breeding methods have always tried to conduct experiments where a whole range of new kinds of plants or proteins or animals are produced and then you select the one that fits your purposes best. And in that sense biotechnology is simply a continuation of selective breeding.

Transcript for Clip 2 -- Ethical concerns:

I [would] like to distinguish two types of ethical objections to agricultural biotechnology: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic objections are objections that the technology is wrong in and of itself. [Genetic engineering is] playing God or it's unnatural. It's tinkering with species boundaries. Intrinsic objections to agricultural biotech say whatever the benefits might be, no matter how great they might be in the end we shouldn't be doing this. Extrinsic objections are of a different sort. They focus on the consequences and they're sort of cost/benefit objections which are of the sort that there may be some good benefits. We may be able to feed hungry people. Farmers may be safer because they don't have to spray chemicals on these new crops. And those are clearly benefits. But the risks, the potential harms, are so great that we shouldn't proceed with the technologies.

More comments from Gary Comstock...

Q: Why do people freak out when you've got a fish gene in a strawberry?

A: I think here's where the intrinsic objections have some traction that is they have some validity. I think we probably should worry a little bit about crossing species boundaries for the following reason. It has taken nature hundreds of thousands of years to speciate, to sort of form humans and ducks and proteins and different species of plants. There is a kind of balance and harmony in our ecosystem that has come as a result. Humans are tremendously inquisitive and adaptable and powerful individuals and we have dramatically reshaped the ecosystem that we've come to live in and agriculture has been the primary reshaper of nature. If you think about how Iowa looked even 200 years ago and how it looks now it's completely different. Our impact on nature has not always been positive. We've lost numbers of species as a result of our colonizing their space and taking over their ecosystem. We've had some real problems with groundwater pollution and we're pumping dry the Ogalala Aquifer, that huge body of water under Nebraska. If you think about again Iowa, when my great great grandparents started farming there were on average 6 feet of topsoil, 6 feet of topsoil in Iowa. Now after plow agriculture plowing it up for just 150 years we've lost half of that topsoil so now there's on average 3 feet of topsoil. So the concern about crossing species is a broader concern about the human role in nature. We're not a very humble group, we don't want to go slow, we don't want to think about long-range effects. Now we have the ozone problem and greenhouse warming of the globe, an effect that's quite well established, and its becoming more and more established that we're the reason for it, so I think there's good reason to worry about taking human genes and putting them into hogs, taking flounder genes from fish and putting them into tomatoes and so on because we don't know really what's going to happen as a result of this in the longterm. That said, how do you find out what the potential effects are? Well you just have to test, you have to go slow, when you find a potentially troubling result you stop and don't do that again, and I think that in general describes how this research proceeds.

Q: If you could find a gene therapy to boost intelligence, you could "fix" mental retardation. But then that technology exists and you could also boost the intelligence of a normal person, how do you prevent the misuse of the technologies?

A: This introduces a range of ethical issues having to do with the virtues, what sort of people do we want to become? In genetic modification in humans there are two kinds of things we can do. We can fix or rectify abnormalities so if a fetus has some genetic abnormality like a trisomy condition that leads to Downs syndrome and mental retardation, so if we were to develop technology that could fix a condition that I think every human would say I'd rather be of normal intelligence than have impaired intelligence, that's one thing. There we're exhibiting a virtue which is the virtue of charity and love and compassion and concern for others. There are a different set of character issues or virtues involved in genetic enhancement, that is taking a typically an absolutely normal human and trying to make them taller or increase their intelligence. When it comes to enhancement, the question to ask is what sort of virtues are we displaying when we say oh well this person's not tall enough I'd like my kid to be six inches taller so they can really whoop up on the basketball court. So for me the issue there isn't really who are we harming, but it's one of who are we becoming, what sort of people are we such that only the tallest and the brightest people are ones that we will accept. There I think we should take a deep breath and say why don't we accept as normal, children with spina bifida or children who aren't otherwise normal, or of normal height. What really are our attitudes about these people and do we want to encourage or even allow technology of enhancement. That's a different issue than technologies of rectification.

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 Posted March 6, 2001