Who is My Neighbor? No to Destructive Embryonic Gene Modification
“Who is my neighbor?” is the question which produced the famous answer of the parable of the Good Samaritan from the lips of Christ. Christ asks us to be vigilant to the signs of the times, aware of the situations around us, and ready to assist our neighbor in need. Recently the BBC proudly announced that scientists in the UK have been given the green light to genetically modify human embryos. How should we receive this news? Is it good news or news we should be cautious about? I would like to show why gene editing and destructive embryo experimentation is not something laudable. Rather it should be roundly denounced as an attack on the dignity of the human embryo. We have no right to experiment on and destroy embryos, and in support of this I will draw on the recent writings of that great defender of the poor and defenseless, Pope Francis himself, as well as share some thoughts and writings of our most recent pontiffs, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Saint John Paul II. First let us outline the basic elements of embryonic gene editing. The system used is called CRISPR/Cas9 (for acronym fans, CRISPR stands for “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats” and Cas for “CRISPR-associated” genes). It is like a biological “find and replace” tool that can function as “molecular scissors” to pinpoint, cut, modify, insert, or delete parts of the human genome. The initial goal would be to gain a better understanding of the genes involved in embryo growth, with the modified embryos not being implanted but ultimately destroyed. The embryos used for experimentation are “spare” or “leftover” from the technique of IVF (in vitro fertilization). The IVF procedure has its own intrinsic ills such as the massive destruction of human embryos as well as treating the child like a manufacturing product. In his most recent encyclical, Laudato si’, Pope Francis expressed various concerns for the welfare of the human embryo. In section 136 the pontiff writes “There is a tendency to justify transgressing all boundaries when experimentation is carried out on living human embryos. We forget that the inalienable worth of a human being transcends his or her degree of development” (Francis 2015, n. 136). This point is being overlooked by the scientists and researchers and all those who approved this unjust experimentation on human embryos. Pope Francis is strongly supported by previous papal writings. Quoting from the The Linacre Quarterly 83 (3) 2016, 239–241