Human Gene Patents and Human Dignity

Genetics will increasingly enable health professionals to identify, treat, and prevent the 4,000 or more genetic diseases and disorders that our species is heir to. Genetics will become central to diagnosis and treatment, especially in testing for predispositions and in therapies. By 2025, there will likely be thousands of diagnostic procedures and treatments for genetic conditions.

Genetic diagnostics can detect specific diseases, such as Down’s syndrome, and behavioral predispositions, such as depression. Treatments include gene-based pharmaceuticals, such as those using antisense DNA to block the body’s process of transmitting genetic instructions for a disease process. In future preventive therapies, harmful genes will be removed, turned off, or blocked. In some cases, healthy replacement genes will be directly inserted into fetuses or will be administered to people via injection, inhalation, retro viruses, or pills. These therapies will alter traits and prevent diseases.

Although genetics will be the greatest driver of advances in human health in the twenty-first century, it will not be a panacea for all human health problems. Health is a complex of interacting systems. The benefits of genetics will also be weighted more heavily to future generations, because prevention will be such an important component. Genetic therapies will ameliorate conditions in middle-aged and older people, but those conditions will not even exist in future generations. For example, psoriasis may be brought under control for many via gene therapy; if an effective prenatal diagnosis can be developed, then no future child would ever need be born with the condition.

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"Natural" Rights

Within the long history of rights discourse, rights have also been essentialized as “natural” rights. Natural rights have historically been used in both conservative and radical defenses of what is perceived as given in the human condition. The right to procreate has been conceived as a natural right, and, by extension, technological reproduction has been recently promoted as the means to fulfill one’s natural right to procreate. Thus the male-dominant tradition of property rights converges with a version of natural rights proclaiming a natural right to procreate, a natural right to a child, a natural right to use any means necessary to procreate, and thereby a natural right to use any person necessary to procreate.

When procreation is defined as a natural right, it is viewed as deriving from a natural instinct, comparable to eating and sleeping. Attempts to institutionalize procreation as a natural right divest the person procreating of moral responsibility, so that anything a man or woman does to reproduce is treated as an instinctive response beyond the control of human will and human relations.