Bioethics on Health and Novel Human Genetic Technologies - A Detailed Conversation with Françoise Baylis
Finding Genius Podcast
Richard Jacobs
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 June 2021
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What are the ethical limits of human genetic engineering? While there may never be a firm answer to this question, it is critically important to contemplate possible limitations. Listen in to learn:
- The differences between genetic selection and genetic design.
- The technologies that fall on either side of the divide between selection and design.
- How biases shape our perception of which traits are desirable and which traits are not.
Françoise Baylis, University Research Professor and author of Altered Inheritance, joins the podcast to discuss the bioethics of human genetic engineering. The focus is on heritable human genome editing where it is anticipated that genetic modifications will be passed on to future generations.
This prospect raises a number of challenging ethical questions likely to become increasingly important over time.
Visit https://francoisebaylis.ca for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius Podcast, now part of the Finding Genius |
| 0:09.2 | Foundation. |
| 0:10.7 | My guest today is Francois Bayless, she's a university research professor, part of the |
| 0:15.0 | Dow House Medical School, and we're going to talk about the ethics, the bioethics of, |
| 0:21.0 | you know, genetic engineering and various other topics, so that's what is thanks for coming. |
| 0:25.6 | Well, thank you for having me on the show. |
| 0:28.5 | Yeah, well, if you would tell me about your work and a bit about your background, how |
| 0:32.0 | you started your work. |
| 0:34.0 | So I'm a philosopher by training, and that means I have a particular interest in questions |
| 0:41.2 | to which we don't have ready answers. |
| 0:43.3 | So I'm interested in questions where there's discussion, debate, and a desire to kind |
| 0:50.2 | of move forward, but recognizing that we're not necessarily ever going to get to authoritative |
| 0:56.1 | answers, and so you really have to bring the quality of rational thought and argument |
| 1:02.8 | to a particular problem, and the problem that we're interested in today that seems to |
| 1:08.2 | be of interest to both the scientific community and society writ large is whether or not |
| 1:14.3 | we should proceed with making heritable changes to humans. |
| 1:19.2 | In other words, making changes right now to human embryos, to human gametes, with the |
| 1:24.9 | idea that the children born would have altered genes, and any children they would have would |
| 1:31.1 | also have those genetic modifications. |
| 1:35.1 | Yeah, as you're saying this, I think, I don't know if it's going to include everything, |
| 1:38.8 | but I think there's three types of ways to look at how would I put it? |
| 1:45.6 | I guess evolution, one is a lot of people say it's random and mindless, and then some |
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