Will CRISPR Germline Engineering Close the Door to an Open Future?

• Published in: Science and engineering ethics Vol. 25; no. 5; pp. 1409 - 1423
• Main Authors: Mintz, Rachel L., Loike, John D., Fischbach, Ruth L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.10.2019; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Agency theory; Autonomy; Bioethics; Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering; Children; Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats; CRISPR; Decision making; Decision Making - ethics; Education; Embryonic Development; Embryos; Engineering; Ethical Theory; Ethicists; Ethics; Feinberg; Female; Genetic Engineering - ethics; Genetic Engineering - legislation & jurisprudence; Genetic Engineering - trends; Germ Cells; History, 20th Century; Humans; Male; Medicine/Public Health; Original Paper; Parents; Personal Autonomy; Personhood; Philosophy; Philosophy of Science; CRISPR; Paternalism; Germline engineering; Human dignity; Autonomy; Joel Feinberg; Open future; Human embryo
• ISSN: 1353-3452; 1471-5546
• DOI: 10.1007/s11948-018-0069-6

The bioethical principle of autonomy is problematic regarding the future of the embryo who lacks the ability to self-advocate but will develop this defining human capacity in time. Recent experiments explore the use of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/Cas9 for germline engineering in the embryo, which alters future generations. The embryo’s inability to express an autonomous decision is an obvious bioethical challenge of germline engineering. The philosopher Joel Feinberg acknowledged that autonomy is developing in children. He advocated that to reserve this future autonomy, parents should be guided to make ethical decisions that provide children with open futures. Here, Feinberg’s 1980 open future theory is extended to the human embryo in the context of CRISPR germline engineering. Although the embryo does not possess the autonomous decision-making capacity at the time of germline engineering, the parental decision to permanently change the unique genetic fabric of the embryo and subsequent generations disregards future autonomy. Therefore, germline engineering in many instances is objectionable considering Feinberg’s open future theory .