SCIENCE: Ethics and Accountability of Scientists

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Kerstin Marx

UNITED NATIONS, May 11 1999 (IPS) - Recent developments in the life sciences, including cloning and genetically-modified organisms, made it imperative that ethical concerns be at the core of research in the 21st century, according to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

“Undirected scientific research” can no longer benefit society. Today’s development of science and technology is “radically changing the way scientific questions are being posed”, says Georges Kutukdjian, Director of UNESCO’s Division of the Ethics of Science and Technology.

“There is no real change in the nature of science itself”, he points out.

UNESCO and the International Council for Science (ICSU) will hold a World Conference on Science in Budapest in June, bringing together more than 2,000 scientists, inter-governmental and , non- governmental organizations and other representatives of civil society.

This first global conference on science in 20 years planned to adopt a ‘World Declaration on Science and the Use of Scientific Knowledge’ and a framework for action, intended to provide scientist and politicians with new ground rules for common thinking and joint action.

According to UNESCO, new developments in the life sciences – including cloning and genetically modified organisms – had provoked great public concern.

This stemmed from the birth of “Dolly” the sheep in April 1996 in Scotland – a living being produced by cloning a single mammary cell. The world-wide attention that followed raised urgent questions on the consequences of research in the life sciences sector.

Ethical issues, such as the potential misuse of genetic information, the question of who owns genes and genetic code and the acceptability of cloning human beings for reproductive or other purposes “need serious reflection,” UNESCO said.

The question of whether the birth of Dolly opened the way to cloning a human being remained a highly debated issue.

Earlier, in 1993, UNESCO’s 55-member International Bioethics Convention (IBC) drafted a ‘Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights’ that explicitly outlawed human cloning for reproductive purposes as “contrary to human dignity.”

The Declaration, the first in the field of genetics within the United Nations system, was adopted unanimously by UNESCO Member states in November 1997 and subsequently by the UN General Assembly in December 1998.

“Human dignity, inherent to each individual, excludes all practices which tend toward the ‘reification’ of an individual or his or her ‘instrumentalization’,” said Noelle Lenoir, former IBC President.

“In other words, a human being is a subject, not an object for science.”

While the declaration represented only the moral commitment of UN members, several countries prohibited human reproductive cloning through national legislation.

Argentinia, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States now have laws, or are drafting laws, which ban the process. At least nine other nations have set up committees that have made similar recommendations, UNESCO reported.

But experts, such as Nobel-laureate Werner Arber, President of the ICSU, argue that regarding the life sciences, “the general public sees a power rising over which it has no control.”

“We scientists,” he says, “perhaps have not always discussed with the public the problems that science sometimes brings.”

To the ICSU, which represents the scientific community world- wide, as well as to large parts of the public, the core of such problems was the fact that the gap between the scientifically possible and the ethically unacceptable was closing rapidly.

By 2002 or 2003, researchers will have completed their map of the human genome – 15 years after they started – UNESCO says.

This means that man will have identified and located the 80,000 to 100,000 genes on the 23 pairs of chromosomes which are found in every cell of the human body, containing the genetic heritage in the form of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) molecules.

Describing each gene’s function would be the next step, UNESCO predicts, opening the way for doctors to replace patients’ “defective” cells with cells in which the target is healthy.

While in this process, known as ‘gene therapy’, the modified genes are not passed on to a patient’s children, they are whithin the so-called ‘germline therapy’.

In germline therapy, the genes in both a couple’s eggs and sperm (germ cells) are altered and “the resulting child could become free of a hereditary illness carried by one or both of the parents,” according to UNESCO.

Widely practiced on laboratory mice, this kind of ‘tinkering’ with human germ cells is outlawed in most countries.

However, as was the case for in-vitro fertilisation, “will it only be a matter of time before germline therapy is accepted for humans?” UNESCO wonders, conceding that the initial taboo might turn into common practice.

According to UNESCO Secretary-General Federico Mayor, “it is now up to science and scientists to show themselves ready to respond to society’s needs and to calls for more accountability.

“The behaviour of the scientific community in general is positive…but it is the task of ethics to draw the line between what is possible and what is acceptable. This can be done neither by science nor by technology.”