CYIL vol. 10 (2019)

MARTIN ŠOLC CYIL 10 ȍ2019Ȏ basically a form of the slippery slope argument which is sometimes considered a logical fallacy, 92 it cannot be entirely rejected. From the general experience with other cases of new and widely medialized progress in life sciences, 93 this scenario seems plausible. However, even if occasional creation of designer babies was inevitable, a relevant impact on society would be expectable in countries which would legalise the practice. It can be expected – and under all circumstances it is highly recommendable – that a broad and long public debate would precede such a legislative change. The most dangerous would most likely prove countries with ambiguous or missing regulation of the matter. Nevertheless, there would probably not be a lot of jurisdictions capable to enact and effectively enforce regulation of germline modification for health purposes which would at the same time completely ignore the problem of designer babies. Countries which would lack the regulation of designer babies would have probably also ignored the debate on genetic modification in general. The fact that such countries will exist does not mean that other jurisdictions and international bodies would have to resign on rational regulation of the matter. 4.3 Safety Concerns Let’s suppose that we understand genetic modification as such as permissible and that the majority of people agree that potential benefits of germline modification outweigh the risk of the creation of designer babies. The long-term consequences and possible side-effects of human genetic modification are not yet known. In the case of germline modification, the unintended effects might be manifested after many generations. The discussion on safety must be informed by biological and medical knowledge. It is, though, ultimately an ethical and legal question to establish the level of safety which will be considered sufficient to carry out reproductive germline modification. For the discussion on safety, we propose a simple premise: the ethics of germlinemodification should be based on the general ethics of medical research. Given the relatively high uncertainty about the long-term effects of germline modification, the human subjects of such research should have at least the same level of protection as subjects of “regular” medical research 94 . The international community started to be interested in the safety of research subjects after the horrors of World War 2 and the Nazi experiments on prisoners. From the practical point of view, perhaps even more important was the revelation of highly unethical experiments on patients in several U.S. hospitals in the 1960s. In a famous article published by the physician Henry K. Beecher in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1966, there were described eighteen contemporary studies carried out without the patient’s consent, including the implantation of living cancer cells into patients’ bodies 95 . Along with the infamous Tuskegee 92 See Encyclopaedia Britannica. Slippery slope argument. accessed 1 June 2019. 93 We can mention the example of many scientifically doubtful commercial stem cell therapies. See ŠOLC, Martin. Právo, etika a kmenové buňky. [Law, Ethics, and Stem Cells.] Wolters Kluwer, Praha 2018, pp. 47-53. 94 Generally, medical research can be divided into the pharmaceutical research including clinical trials of medicinal products, the evaluation of medical devices, and the evaluation of new methods, not yet established in the medical practice. See ŠUSTEK, Petr. Medicínský výzkum. [Medical Research.] In ŠUSTEK, Petr, HOLČAPEK, Tomáš (eds.). Zdravotnické právo. [Health Law.] Wolters Kluwer: Praha 2016, p. 688. 95 BEECHER, Henry K. Ethics and Clinical Research. The New England Journal of Medicine. (1966, Vol. 274, No. 24), pp. 1354–1360. Also available at accessed 1 June 2019.

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