Designer Genes Saturday 2:30 PM EST 4 December 2021
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Supernatural and other circumventions of the natural process of conception have been an abundant wellspring for magical, mythological, and religious narratives. It was held that the widowed queen of an Egyptian pharaoh could pull his posthumous sperm into her womb to create a child. The Olympian god Zeus could procreate in all sorts of ways, including swooping down as a shower of gold into a young womb. His daughter Athena sprang full-born from his head; his son Dionysus from his thigh. And it was the wind of the Holy Ghost that inseminated a certain young virgin.
Inevitably, technologies entered the process of conception and pregnancy bringing with them a growing set of choices regarding gender and other attributes of offspring. The wish for greater certainty and enhanced selectivity have now entered many phases and aspects of generation. Sperm, eggs, and genes may be shared, selected, bought and sold. Polygenic screening of gene variants in embryos mandates additional consciousness, choices, and unavoidable ethical puzzles.
The experts in this roundtable will engage the issues arising from 21st century options of sequencing and profiling once imagined as the realms of the gods and the mandates of Nature.
Register here to join Zoom webinar as an audience member. This roundtable will also be streamed live and can be watched on Youtube (youtube.com/helixcenter) or on our website (helixcenter.org/videos)
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The Participants
Nathaniel Comfort is Professor of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. His interests lie in the histories of genetics, eugenics, genomics, and biomedicine, as well as bioethics. He is the author of The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock’s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Harvard, 2001) and The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale, 2012), and editor of and contributor to The Panda’s Black Box: Opening Up the Intelligent Design Controversy. In 2015-2016 he was the Blumberg Professor of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress/NASA. He has written for The Atlantic, The Nation, Nature, Science, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere, and has appeared on PBS and National Public Radio. He is working on a biography of the biologist James D. Watson.
Henry Greely is the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law; Professor, by courtesy, of Genetics; and Director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University. He specializes in ethical, legal, and social issues arising from the biosciences. He is a founder and a past President of the International Neuroethics Society; chairs the California Advisory Committee on Human Stem Cell Research; chairs the Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues Committee of the Earth BioGenome Project; and serves on the NIH BRAIN Initiative’s Multi-Council Working Group while co-chairing the Initiative’s Neuroethics Work Group. He is the author of The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction (Harv. Univ. Press 2016) and CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans (MIT Press 2021).Professor Greely graduated from Stanford in 1974 and Yale Law School in 1977. He served as a law clerk for Judge John Minor Wisdom on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Justice Potter Stewart of the United States Supreme Court. After working during the Carter Administration in the Departments of Defense and Energy, he entered private law practice in Los Angeles in 1981. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1985.
Robert Klitzman, M.D., is a professor of psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Joseph Mailman School of Public Health, and the Director of the online and in-person Bioethics Masters and Certificate Programs at Columbia University. He has written over 150 scientific journal articles, nine books, and numerous chapters on critical issues in bioethics regarding genetics, neuroscience, psychiatry doctor-patient relationships and other areas. His books include The Ethics Police?: The Struggle to Make Human Research Safe, Am I My Genes? Confronting Fate and Family Secrets in the Age of Genetic Testing, Designing Babies: How Technology is Changing How We Have Children, When Doctors Become Patients, A Year-Long Night: Tales of a Medical Internship, In a House of Dreams and Glass: Becoming a Psychiatrist, Being Positive: The Lives of Men and Women With HIV, The Trembling Mountain: A Personal Account of Kuru, Cannibals and Mad Cow Disease, and Mortal Secrets: Truth and Lies in the Age of AIDS. Klitzman has received numerous awards for his work, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, the Aaron Diamond Foundation, the Hastings Center and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is a member of the Empire State Stem Cell Commission, and the Ethics Working Group of the HIV Prevention Trials Network, and served on the U.S. Department of Defense’s Research Ethics Advisory Panel. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a regular contributor to the New York Times and CNN.
Vardit Ravitsky is Full Professor at the Bioethics Program, School of Public Health, University of Montreal and Senior Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is President of the International Association of Bioethics and Director of Ethics and Health at the Center for Research on Ethics. She is a 2020 Trudeau Foundation Fellow and Chair of the Foundation’s COVID-19 Impact Committee, as well as Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and of the Hastings Center. She is member of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Advisory Board for the Institute of Genetics. She is also member of the National Human Genome Research Institute’s (NHGRI) Genomics & Society Working Group. Her research focuses on the ethics of genomics and reproduction and is funded by Canada’s leading funding agencies. She published over 170 articles and commentaries on bioethical issues. Ravitsky’s research covers a variety of topics such as: public funding of In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF); the use of surplus frozen embryos; posthumous reproduction; pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD); gamete donation; epigenetics; prenatal testing, in particular the ethical, social and legal aspects of Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT); germline and somatic gene editing; and mitochondrial replacement. She holds a BA from the Sorbonne University in Paris, an MA from the University of New Mexico in the US, and a PhD from Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Previously, she was faculty at the Department of Medical Ethics, School of Medicine, at the University of Pennsylvania.
