Managing Enhancement: Professional Ethical and Public Policy Issues

In their previous project, these investigators examined the ethical and legal issues raised by the prospect of using the products of human genome research for enhancement purposes. This work identified three critical challenges to the development of social poicy in this area. First, most interventions that can be used for enhancement are likely to be initially developed and approved for therapeutic use. However, once so approved, the current regulatory structure provides no adequate means of managing the 'off-label' use of such interventions for enhancement purposes by clinicians and their clients. Second, any enhancement interventions performed on pre-implantation embryos are likely to be undertaken in the largely unregulated context of clinical reproductive biology and infertility medicine. While the previous project has allowed the investigators to outline the considerations relevant to professional ethics in this area, it is still not clear how those standards would be best enforced. Finally, the availability of either pre-implantation or post-implantation genetic enhancement interventions will also depend on policies regarding access to these interventions outside the boundaries of the U.S. This new project will undertake a close-grained analysis of these three problems as they challenge the management of genetic enhancement technologies, and will develop specific policy recommendations for public policy makers that would allow the issues to be addressed within the framework of considerations set out in the previous project. The project's methods will be primarily analytic and discursive: they will be critiquing, constructing, and proposing policy positions on the basis of literature about the closest precedents for each of these problems by continuing the regimen of regular research meetings and collaborative writing that has propelled their work to date.