Repronews #50: Is human gene editing moral?
Congress' IVF Scorecard; WSJ on family polices in Hungary & Norway; fertility down in Australia, Wallonia, Brussels; global genomics landscape; longevity; Nick Agar on transhumanism; Dawkins quotes
Welcome to the latest issue of Repronews! Highlights from this week’s edition:
Repro/genetics
IVF Scorecard rates congressmen’s support for fertility care
Samuel McKee on how to make gene editing ethical for human health and space exploration
Population Policies & Trends
The Wall Street Journal reports on the relative failure of generous pronatalist policies in Hungary and Norway
Australia’s fertility rate hits “rock bottom” of 1.5
Births in Wallonia and Brussels fall to lowers in 10 years
Genetic Studies
Wellcome’s genomics landscaping report outlines different countries’ level of genomic maturity and the uptake of diverse human genetic data
Study finds that, in mice, genes are more important than lifestyle to longevity.
Further Learning
Podcast: Nicholas Agar on the dilemmas of transhumanism
Top quotes from Richard Dawkins
Repro/genetics
Grading congressmen on IVF: Scorecard for 118th Congress (ASRM)
The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) has released a Scorecard grading U.S. senators and representatives on their support for IVF.
According to the Scorecard, Democrats have overwhelmingly supported pro-IVF legislation, while Republicans have been generally opposed.
The Scorecard also assesses different proposed Senate and House bills for their impact on IVF.
“How to make gene editing ethical” (IAI News)
Samuel McKee—a researcher in philosophy of science at Manchester Metropolitan University, board member of the Mars Society UK, and ambassador for the Genetics Society UK—argues that it is time to put gene editing technology to use.
Doing so could have revolutionary consequences for personalized medicine, well-being, and even space exploration.
McKee says that the terrible history of eugenics risks the ethical pendulum swinging towards morally questionable genetic inaction.
Historical eugenics drew great interest from polymaths, philosophers and statisticians long before politicians used it as a rallying cry. Anglicans such as William Inge, and Catholics such as Patrick Joseph Hayes endorsed it for what they saw as humanitarian reasons. Winston Churchill believed positive eugenics could reduce crime. Ronald Fisher, one of the most important figures of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis was enthusiastic in his endorsement of eugenics as a practical science.
Support for eugenics was eroded seemingly overnight as the horrors of the holocaust and other practices of the Nazis became known.
In the early 21st century, we find ourselves in a new genetic landscape where public knowledge and biotechnological capabilities are often miles apart.
After the Human Genome Project, the genomics arms race saw genetic sequencing costs plummet and technology advance at an extraordinary scale.
CRISPR-Cas9 has made gene editing cheap, accessible and accurate.
McKee disagrees that gene editing (especially when individual autonomous choice is involved) is a form of eugenics. Gene editing could become an ethical imperative if it can alleviate pain and relieve suffering.
Human space exploration will require gene editing for our species to be adapted to the extraordinarily different and hostile conditions of life off Earth.
“Nature’s toolbox is full of amazing opportunities, from tardigrades that can live in the vacuum of space, to microorganisms that thrive in high-radiation environments, to extremophiles that exist in places no other life can tolerate. Now we have molecular scissors that can borrow from their genomes to help our own, or those of the plants we need.”
The genetic ideology now is one of personalized medicine, not racism, with global health and minimizing suffering at the heart of the discussion. That discussion itself is now more open, thanks to various bioethical fora.
Breakthroughs with CRISPR will be made. That makes it important to ensure that “those breaking the boundaries and assessing the landscape are the people with the best knowledge, working collaboratively across borders, with peer-reviewed and ethically guided results. Moving forwards together will lessen the opportunities for rogues. Gene editing cannot be put back into the box. Let’s ensure we move forward as safely and transparently as possible for the good of all humankind.”
More on repro/genetics:
“More women are charged with pregnancy-related crimes since Roe’s end, study finds” (AP)
“Italy makes it illegal to seek surrogacy abroad” (EurActiv)
Population Policies & Trends
“Worldwide efforts to reverse the baby shortage are falling flat” (Wall Street Journal)
The Wall Street Journal reports on the relative failure of pronatalist polices, focusing on the diverging but similarly generous policies of Hungary and Norway.
Even if having children came with more than $150,000 in cheap loans, a subsidized minivan, and a lifetime exemption from income taxes, it is unclear whether this would increase birth rates.
Such benefits—along with cheap childcare, extra vacation, and free fertility treatments—have been granted to parents in different parts of Europe, a region at the forefront of the worldwide baby shortage.
Demographers suggest the reluctance to have children is a fundamental cultural shift rather than a purely financial one.
Europe’s population shrank during the pandemic and is forecast to fall by about 40 million by 2050, according to United Nations statistics.
Birthrates have been falling across the developed world since the 1960s. The decline hit Europe harder and faster than demographers expected—foreshadowing of the sudden drop in U.S. fertility in recent years.
Reversing fertility decline has become a national priority among governments across the world, including in China and Russia, where President Vladimir Putin declared 2024 “the year of the family.”
In the U.S., both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have pledged to reform family policies. Harris wants to offer a $6,000 baby bonus. Trump has floated free IVF and tax deductions for parents.
Despite childrearing incentives in different countries, falling fertility has persisted among nearly all age groups, incomes, and education levels.
Two European countries devote more resources to families than almost any other nations: Hungary and Norway. Despite their programs, their fertility rates are 1.5 and 1.4 children for every woman, respectively.
Hungary and Norway each spend more than 3% of GDP on promoting families—more than the amount spent on their militaries, according to the OECD.
Hungary says in recent years its has dedicated over 5% of GDP to families. The U.S. spends around 1% of GDP on family support through child tax credits and programs aimed at low-income Americans.
Pronatalism is a key plank of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s populist agenda.
Hungary’s biennial Budapest Demographic Summit has become a fixture for conservative politicians and thinkers. Former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance have praised Orbán’s family policies.
The benefits for child-rearing in Hungary are mostly reserved for married, heterosexual, middle-class couples. Divorced couples lose subsidized interest rates and in some cases have to pay back support. Hungary’s population, now less than 10 million, has been shrinking since the 1980s.
“Because there are so few of us, there’s always this fear that we are disappearing,” said Zsuzsanna Szelényi, program director at the CEU Democracy Institute.
Hungary’s fertility rate collapsed by 2010 to 1.25 children. Orbán, a father of five, came back to power that year and expanded the family support system over the next decade. Hungary’s fertility rate rose to 1.6 by 2021. Then progress stalled.
Families committed to having three or more children can get more than $150,000 in subsidized loans. Other benefits include a lifetime exemption from personal taxes for mothers with four or more children, and up to seven extra annual vacation days for both parents. Under another now expired program, nearly 30,000 families used a subsidy to buy a minivan.
Anna Nagy, a 35-year-old former lawyer with a son, finds the government’s pronatalist rhetoric frustrating. “It’s not our duty as Hungarian women to keep the nation alive,” she said.
The Hungarian government has been criticized for excluding groups such as the minority Roma population and poorer Hungarians. Bank accounts, credit histories, and a steady employment history are required for many of the incentives.
Tünde Fűrész, head of a public demographic research institute, disagreed that the policies are exclusionary and said the loans were used more heavily in economically depressed areas.
Norway has been incentivizing children for decades with generous parental leave and subsidized child care. New parents in Norway can share nearly a year of fully paid leave or around 14 months at 80% pay.
More than three months are reserved for fathers to encourage more equal caregiving. Mothers can take at least an hour at work to breast-feed or pump.
The government’s goal has been to make it easier for women to balance careers and children, said Trude Lappegard, a professor at the University of Oslo.
Norway doesn’t restrict benefits for unmarried parents or same-sex couples.
Its fertility rate of 1.4 children has steadily fallen from nearly 2 in 2009.
“It is difficult to say why the population is having fewer children,” said Kjersti Toppe, the Norwegian Minister of Children and Families.
The government has increased monthly payments for parents and has formed a committee to investigate the baby bust and ways to reverse it.
Gina Ekholt, 39, said the government’s policies have helped offset much of the costs of having a child and allowed her to maintain her career. She had her daughter at age 34 after a round of state-subsidized IVF that cost about $1,600 (about an order of magnitude cheaper than the usual cost of IVF).
“Australia’s birth rate hits rock bottom with severe consequences for economic future” (ABC)
Australia’s fertility rate hit an all-time low of 1.5 in 2023, down from 1.86 in 1993.
The birth rate for girls aged 15-19 has fallen by more than two thirds over that periods, with also a large decline in women aged 20-24.
According to experts, younger Australians are concerned about their economic security, influencing their family planning decisions.
"If you look at the international data and you look at countries who have slipped below [a fertility rate of] 1.5—places like Italy, South Korea, Japan—and in those countries you do start to have this demographic time bomb starting to go off,” said Terry Rawnsley, an economist at KPMG.
“1.5 is a place we want to start having some real firm conversations about how we try to turn this number around,” he added. “Because I don’t think we want to be pushing much below this in the longer term.”
Australian National University demographer Liz Allen said to Australia’s state and federal governments need to action to raise the birth rate. She said: “Change the language, have leadership that really signals positivity for the future, but at the heart of it, four main areas: housing affordability, economic security, and that really comes down to job security, gender equality, and climate change.”
“Still fewer births in Wallonia and Brussels” (Le Spécialiste)
Brussels and Wallonia—the French-speaking regions of Belgium—have recorded the lowest number of births in 10 years.
Between 2021 and 2023, Brussels births fell 9.1% and Walloon births 6.8%.
More on population policies and trends:
“Fewer babies are being born around the world, and not only in the places you’d expect” (Globe & Mail)
Genetic Studies
Data and diversity in genomics: Landscaping report (Wellcome)
This landscaping report outlines the state of diversity in global genomics. It examines the representativeness of human genomic datasets, finding significant variation across countries, and identifies opportunities for funders.
Genomics projects and datasets worldwide are heavily skewed towards populations with European ancestry. Information linked to socio-demographic status is usually missing.
Improving diversity will benefit global health and scientific progress.
Wellcome, the organization who developed the report, has a history of funding genomics and genome-related research. This includes large-scale investments in the Human Genome Project and the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
The report details the current state of human genomic datasets globally. It defines three genomic diversity archetypes for different geographical regions:
High maturity (e.g. United States, European Union): large database size, focusing on chronic disease etiology research and precision medicine
Medium maturity (e.g. Japan, Taiwan): medium database size, focusing on regional understanding of genetic factors for disease etiology
Low maturity (e.g. Brazil, Uganda): low database size, focusing on expanding databases to understand chronic disease etiology
The report found that:
Data on region, age, gender and ethnicity is commonly collected.
Data on education, occupation, income and housing status is not commonly collected.
Data aggregation is limited in many underserved regions. Africa and Latin America have few regional consortia, which could impact use of data into local health systems and policies.
Genomics in low maturity regions (Latin America, Africa, South Asia) face challenges such as logistics, lack of trust, low national prioritization, project funding, brain drain, and analytical challenges.
Global consortia collect data from primary studies worldwide. These aim to work with pharmaceutical companies to improve drug discovery, create standards and policies to make genomic data more consistent and usable worldwide, and educate and train organizations, initiatives, and researchers.
Diversity efforts include fine-tuning technologies based on localities, global events and upskilling, funding for project sustainability, reestablishing trust between regions.
Wellcome is also establishing a African Bioinformatics Institute (ABI) to advance African genomics, co-financed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
“Dietary restriction or good genes: new study tries to unpick which has a greater impact on lifespan” (The Conversation)
People who research aging like to joke: the best thing you can do to increase your lifespan is to pick good parents.
It has long been recognized that longer-lived people tend to have longer-lived parents and grandparents, suggesting genetic influence.
Your lifestyle, especially diet and exercise, also significantly influences your health into older age and how long you live.
A recent study in Nature investigates the relative influence of exercise and diet on aging in genetically diverse mice.
The study found genetics plays a larger role in lifespan than any of the dietary restriction interventions. Long-lived types of mice were still longer lived despite dietary changes. While shorter-lived mice did show improvements as a result of dietary restrictions, they didn’t catch up to their longer-lived peers.
Caloric restriction models increased lifespans across all the types of mice, with the 40% restriction group having improved average and maximum lifespans compared with the 20% group, and the 20% group showing improved compared with the control group. But the effects of genetics were larger.
More on genetic studies:
“‘Race science’ group say they accessed sensitive UK health data” (Guardian)
Further Learning
Podcast with Nicholas Agar: “The moral dilemmas of transhumanism” (Aporia)
Nicholas Agar is a professor of ethics at the University of Waikato (New Zealand) and the author of Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement.
He discusses human enhancement, transhumanism, personal identity, technology, dysgenics, and the future of humanity.
“Top 12 Richard Dawkins quotes” (Steve Stewart-Williams)
“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.”
“Whatever view one takes on the question of determinism, the insertion of the word ‘genetic’ is not going to make any difference. If you are a full-blooded determinist you will believe that all your actions are predetermined by physical causes in the past, and you may or may not also believe that you therefore cannot be held responsible for your sexual infidelities. But, be that as it may, what difference can it possibly make whether some of those physical causes are genetic? Why are genetic determinants thought to be any more ineluctable, or blame-absolving, than ‘environmental’ ones?”
“I find that my kind of paradigm examples are things like beaver dams and birds’ nests, where I’m trying to shake people into realizing that you could have a ‘gene for’ a certain shape of birds’ nest, just as surely as you could have a certain shape of beak. You could selectively breed for nest shape.”
“When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.”
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.”
More on human nature, evolution, and biotech:
Evolution
“Did Neanderthals wear clothes?” (MSN)
“Dogs are entering a new wave of domestication”: Explores how the role of dogs has been radically changing over the past century, going from primarily valued for work (hunting, guarding) to pets (The Atlantic)
“The racialization of killer whales: An application of gene-culture coevolutionary theory” (Perspectives on Science)
Regulatory
“What happens when health officials spread misinformation?” (GLP)
Disclaimer: We cannot fact-check the linked-to stories and studies, nor do the views expressed necessarily reflect our own.