On Wednesday, Nov. 15, We Are Not Robots or Numbers (W.A.R.N) held an event featuring Joe Swenson, a visiting lecturer in the Philosophy department to talk about designer babies and procreative beneficence. Swenson was the first speaker for W.A.R.N.’s first event.
W.A.R.N. is a student organization that promotes awareness about how technology affects our society and the future, and they hold events like this one to build that awareness through conversation.
“We are trying to look and inform on all aspects of this topic,” W.A.R.N. President and Hamline senior Ella Ettlin said.
During the event, Swenson talked about Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) which cuts DNA and has been repurposed as a gene editing tool. This was first used in 2018 by He Jiankui, who genetically edited two twins to be resistant to HIV. Jiankui was criticized not only for the effects the gene editing would have on the girls later in life but also for the broader ethics of it.
Swenson mentioned having some kind of ethical framework when it comes to discussing and evaluating CRISPR or other technologies, looking to see if there is an ethical way to go about using the technology or not.
While talking about CRISPR, Swenson also talked about “designer babies” — a child born through a process of genetic intervention or manipulation like the twins from 2018. Swenson also discussed the difference between genetic therapy and genetic enhancement. Genetic therapy treats individuals with known disabilities, diseases or impairments while enhancement would give them disease resistance.
“My grandfather had a saying, just because you can, should you do it?” Swenson said.
W.A.R.N. chose Swenson to be their first speaker because of his background in applied ethics and more recently bio-ethics.
“We have been trying to have Joe [Swenson] come in for a while to speak to our group since ethics and technology really go hand in hand,” Ettlin said.
W.A.R.N.’s advisor, Dr. Suda Ishida, talked about how Swenson’s talk ties into the W.A.R.N. ’s goals. With digital technology rapidly advancing, W.A.R.N. plans to bring awareness to the technology we have at our hands and how it affects us and the companies who made it. Tying back to Swenson’s ethical framework, when it comes to the creation of these technologies companies sometimes focus more on the profits of the technology and not at how it impacts society and our future.
As the event came to a close, all those who attended were made aware of how these technologies would develop in the near future, which was one of the goals of the event.
“I really wanted to give listeners an idea of how close we are to this becoming a reality,” Ettlin said.
Along with the knowledge gained within the hour of the event, those who attended learned and had some good takeaways from what Joe presented.
“I really think that the biggest takeaway that I did not think about was how little ethical guidelines there are,” Ettlin said.