Ethics And What Can Go Wrong -Arvind Krishnaswamy -Vinit Nagda

Discovering Self  Idea of farming humans.  Enthusiasm v/s Repulsion.  Are experiments carried on humans ethical?

Notion of Self  Who are we ?  Must be careful in defining self.  Self Centered Approach.

What Exactly is Ethics  Influenced by religious traditions earlier.  Notions of human nature and human self.  Principles of right and wrong.  Moral Behavior.  Past v/s Present.  How often should we redefine Ethics ?

What is Human  Difficult to define.  Is embryo human ?  Is a single cell human ?  What then is human?

Patenting Genes  How do we define laws.  Can everything be patentable?  Can genes be patentable?  Issues in gene patenting.

Patenting Genomes  Should genomes be patented?  Process v/s Product. – Oncomouse. – Humanzee.  Issues in genome patenting.

Need for pragmatic approaches  More flexible, empirical and pragmatic  Have better applicability  Are not absolute and can be refined. – E.g., The utilitarian approach

The Utilitarian approach  Utilitarianism by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham and Jphn Stuart Mill.  Central idea of approach  aim of an action should be the greatest good for the greatest number.  Mathematical (optimization) problem: – Define the happiness function and optimize it for each important decision each time.

Utilitarian approach (cont’d)  Need decision and game theory for uncertain enviroments.  However, applying these theories is – Computationally intensive – Difficult to decide on all the parameters  Still works better! – Progress in small incremental steps (slowly adapt to change while still preserving human nature).

Issues concerning Human Cloning  Legal issues like – Who controls cloning? Not definitely Saddam/ Bin Laden! – Whom to clone? supermodels for everyone! – Restrictions on cloning – How to interact with your clone? Clone and raise your parents? Bizarre!

Its ‘hmm…’ time  Too early to provide definitive answers to these questions and their likes.  Right time to contemplate on them.  Need a short-term, revisable suspension of human cloning  better assess issues.

No Hurry  Will take a lot of time and debate before we see laws authorizing cloning.  Status: ‘still under further consideration’.  Even after we resolve these issues and it is legal to clone  very few cloned individual initially.

Potential applications of cloning  Partial Immortality  Organ Farming  Reproduction  Studying effects of nature Vs nurture

Partial Immortality  Store cloned cells from young children to ‘bring them back to life’ if they die young.  Will help parents partially overcome the grief.  No effect on population.  Well-informed parents can shield the cloned child from psychological effects till maturity is attained.

Other applications  Not much drive for other applications – Organ farming needs more technical advances – Reproduction: Other established techniques to help infertile couples : – adoption – IVF – surrogate motherhood – possible technique to simulate sexual reproduction in vitro.

Summary  No revolutionary need / medical applications for cloning and hence no urgency.  Focus is now on other contemporary issues on precloning like  Stem cells and Gene modifications.

References  Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry – The presidents council on bioethics  Stem cells – a primer –  “The shattered cell: End of Natural evolution” book – Pierre Baldi  Primer on Ethics and Human cloning –  Bioethics resources on the web: –