A genetic arms race is now underway after the birth of the world’s first genetically modified CRISPR babies, Lulu and Nana, last year.

The experiment shocked both the world and the medical community when Chinese researcher, He Jiankui, announced it a day before the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing on 19 November 2018.

Using CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, He had disabled the CCR5 gene to mimic a naturally occurring gene deletion that appears to confer immunity against HIV. Although their father was HIV-positive, Lulu and Nana were born HIV-resistant.

In February, this year, new research revealed that the twins may have mental ‘superpowers‘, information which Jiankui had not previously communicated. The research revealed that deleting the CCR5 gene significantly improves cognition, learning and memory in mice and men.

“The answer is likely yes, it did affect their brains,” University of California at Los Angeles neurobiologist Alcino Silva told MIT Technology Review.

“My reaction [to the birth of CCR5-deactivated Lulu and Nana] was visceral repulsion and sadness. Those mutations will probably have an impact on cognitive function in the twins,” Silva, who published a paper about the beneficial effects of CCR5 deactivation in post-stroke recovery, continued.

Silva claimed that making genetically-modified babies “should not be done”, because the effect is unpredictable. The neurobiologist also pronounced that his research on CCR5 and cognition attracted people with links to Silicon Valley, hungry to create super-intelligent designer babies. He insisted that the genetic arms race is now underway.

Many other scientists have harshly criticised Jiankui’s work. Stanford bio-ethicist, Hank Greely, condemned the experiment and termed it, “criminally reckless”.

He Jiankui, however, claimed that he was “against using genome editing for enhancement”, but others have argued that there are other medical options to birthing healthy babies apart from gene editing.

Tina Rulli, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis, penned an article last month, published by the Center for Genetics and Society. Titled, ‘Using CRISPR to edit eggs, sperm or embryos does not save lives,’ the article argues that the claim for genetic manipulation to make healthy babies is “mistaken and misleading”.

For Rulli, it is ethically wrong to genetically manipulate a healthy human being into creation when adoption and re-implantation genetic diagnosis are available options. In re-implantation genetic diagnosis, the healthiest embryo out of many is chosen for implantation.

Many countries have put in place regulations to prevent scientists from partaking in genetically modifying humans. In Jiankui’s native China, draft regulations were written earlier in the year to restrict the use of gene editing in humans. Under these new regulations, those who manipulate genes in adults or embryos are responsible for any adverse effects.

Gene editing is underdeveloped and not very controllable. In June 2019, a new study reported that Lulu and Nana may face a higher risk of premature death, because of the experiment.

“This is a cautionary tale,” said Rasmus Nielsen, a Professor of Integrative Biology, who led the study at the University of California, Berkeley.

“We know it has many different effects. The question is: Is it overall beneficial or detrimental to have this mutation? That was not known,” Nielsen continued.

Indeed, the ethical apprehensions over genetic manipulation are similar to those of abortion in many cases. Rulli, for example, argues that:

“A clinician first creates an embryo with genetic defects, and then “rescues” it using CRISPR. Calling this a cure or a therapy is a nonstandard use of those concepts, one that warrants a distinction from standard cures that save lives and prevent otherwise probable harms.”

Simplistically, Rulli argues, do not create a baby if it is unwanted in its unmodified genetic state. Yet, despite government regulations and the risk of adverse effects, the lure of designer babies with biological advantages for thriving in an ultra-competitive world is a siren call for those who can afford it.

Historically, creating babies whose appearance upholds societal, political and genetic standards of superiority is a human ideal that reached mass popularity in Nazi Germany, when Aryan women were encouraged to breed to create more Aryan soldiers.

“From the face speaks the soul of the race”, Alfred Vogel wrote in his 1938 text, Inheritance and Racial Hygiene, where he compared photographs of Jewish and German children to prove the racial superiority of Aryan children. Based on the pseudoscience of phrenology, the Nazis upheld the ideal of full genetic whiteness as the racial ideal.

Today, the idea of full racial whiteness as superior is continued among ultra-right-wing Western leaders like Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump. This idea of racial superiority finds a battleground in abortion, where abortions rights are being repealed in the USA in order to increase the number of ‘pure’ white babies being born in multiracial America – an idea taken from the policy books of Nazi Germany, where abortions were illegal for Aryan women. Indeed, the Congenitally Defective Births law, passed six months after the Nazis came into power, would set up a Big Brother system that would decide, using individuals’ genetic history, who would be allowed to give birth, to prevent the birth of ‘undesirable’, hence inferior, Aryan children.

Like abortion, the future of genetic manipulation will only become a battleground for our deeply-historical and deeply-wounded understanding of race, as each race potentially uses this science to create super-babies to prove its racial superiority.

Since, globally, on average, wealth and resource distribution is still largely dependent upon race, genetic editing would only increase racial wealth inequality. The battle for eugenics will simply continue with genetic editing.

L'articolo Genome Editing Will Worsen Racial Division in the Future proviene da InsideOver.

The world leaders, civil society organizations and private sector representatives gathered in Nairobi for a three-day global summit on International Conference on Population and Development, (ICPD25) to deliberate on immediate action to ending maternal deaths, accelerate access to modern contraception, reproductive health services, stop violence against women and girls by 2030.

“In 1994 at the ICPD, we imagined a world where one day, no woman would die giving birth, where no woman would be at risk of unintended pregnancy, and no girl would be denied her right to make a safe and healthy transition through adolescence and adulthood,” Said Denmark’s Special Envoy for ICPD25 Ambassador Ib Petersen.

The ICPD goals are anchored on women’s empowerment and gender equality, a catalyst towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Therefore, the Summit brought together diverse group of people including top government officials, thought-leaders, technical experts, religious leaders, activists and community organizers, young people, business leaders, indigenous peoples, international financial institutions, people with disabilities, academics and many others committed to sexual and reproductive health and rights.

The meeting focused on universal health coverage to improve access to sexual and reproductive health, measures to end gender-based violence and harmful practices, and the right to sexual and reproductive health care and finally the power in demographic diversity to drive economic growth and sustainable development.

“We have come a long way since the ICPD in living up to our global commitment to make sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights a reality for all,” Says Arthur Erken, Director of Communications and Strategic Partnerships at UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency.

Financing ICPD programmes of action was among the issues discussed. The new research done by researchers from UNFPA and the Johns Hopkins University, in collaboration with Victoria University, the University of Washington and Avenir Health. And it’s findings was released during the conference shows that only $42 billion in development assistance is expected to be spent on advancing these goals. That means some $222 billion in investments is required over the next decade.

“The Nairobi Summit represents a renewed, re-energized vision and community working together to act and deliver. Together, we will make the next ten years a decade of action and results for women and girls, keeping their rights and choices at the centre of everything we do,” said UNFPA Executive Director Dr Natalia Kanem.

The findings further shows the detailed costing per each programme objectives with over 95 per cent of maternal mortality in 120 countries will cost $115.5 billion for paying medical staff, drugs and obstetric supplies in key maternal health interventions.

While $68.5 billion will finance the unmet family needs like ensuring reliable contraceptives and efforts to strengthen national health systems. Ending child marriage will take $35 billion, gender-based violence in 132 priority countries will have a share of $42 billion and finally ending female genital mutilation will require $2.4 billion

“Closing the substantial gap with investment of urgently needed resources will ultimately improve health among women and their families and that vision is what should motivate us looking forward after the Nairobi Summit,” said Victoria Chou, a researcher with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The Summit, co-convened by the governments of Kenya and Denmark with UNFPA, where 9,500 delegates from more than 170 countries took part. The United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency unveiled critical new data about the cost of achieving these goals. It mobilized more than 1,200 commitments from around the world, including billions of dollars in pledges from public and private sector partners

“The Nairobi Summit on ICPD25 was a massive success,” said Director-General of the Kenya National Council for Population and Development Dr Josephine Kibaru-Mbae. “But it was only a start. We leave Nairobi with a clear roadmap of actions we must all take to advance the ICPD agenda and transform the world for women and girls.”

L'articolo Transforming the World for Women’s Reproductive Rights proviene da InsideOver.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The second paragraph of the United States Declaration of Independence laid out the reasoning for forming a new government. In the eyes of the colonists, the British government had impeded up on these sacred rights and attempts to petition the British Parliament and King had failed, thereby justifying the US Revolutionary War. In the nearly 250 years that have followed, these unalienable rights – including but not limited to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – have evolved to include freedom for African Americans, the right to vote for women and minorities, and LGBTQ freedoms. The history of the US can be viewed a never-ending struggle to secure these rights. When looking back on historical issues such as segregation, some of them may seem patently obvious to us now, but at the time, these were very real and often bloody affairs.

Now, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has taken it upon himself to create a commission to examine the role of human rights in government. The Commission on Unalienable Rights, announced Monday, will be spearheaded by Mary Ann Glendon, professor at Harvard Law School. Other notable members of the panel include Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, president of Zaytuna College, F. Cartwright Weiland, attorney, Christopher Olaf Tollefesen, philosopher, and Jacqueline Rivers, Harvard lecturer. Many of the members of the 12-person commission have backgrounds as religious scholars in Christianity and Islam.

When considering Pompeo’s statements about the goals of the commission, you’l find a clear sense. Glendon served as an ambassador for the Vatican on a number of occasions and praised Pope John Paul II’s opposition to abortion and contraception. She refused an honor from the University of Notre Dame in 2009 because President Barack Obama gave the commencement address. Her refusal was a protest of his actions on abortion and women’s reproductive rights.

Yusuf, Cartwright, and Tollefsen have all spoken out against issues related to women’s rights, even including stem-cell research. The entire panel actually seems in agreement on the issue of abortion, at least when considering their previous statements on the subject.

“A moral foreign policy should be grounded in this conception of human rights,” Pompeo wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. “Yet after the Cold War ended, many human-rights advocates turned their energy to new categories of rights. These rights often sound noble and just… they blur the distinction between unalienable rights and ad hoc rights.”

That was only the beginning of Pompeo’s rumination on the state of human rights, both in the US and abroad. A compelling argument could be made that those sentences alone translate to an intention to repeal rights. Pompeo’s task of rolling back protections which were earned over the course of decades, and even some of which are not solidified across all states, is the realization of US President Donald Trump’s grand plan of imprinting the federal government with religious-based moral rights. While Pompeo insisted that the panel is designed with the intention of examining principles rather than creating policy, the truth is that the Trump administration has pushed for language in UN resolutions that called for an end to reproductive and sexual protections. It made a strong effort during the Commission on the Status of Women meeting in March, although it failed.

Pompeo’s predecessor, Rex Tillerson, also had some choice words regarding human rights and US support for regimes that blatantly violate them.

“If we condition too heavily that others must adopt this value that we’ve come to over a long history of our own, it really creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national-security interests, our economic interests,” Tillerson said.

Reading between the lines, it’s clear that the administration would like to force anti-abortion measures on the international level while simultaneously preventing reproductive measures and contraception, such as that provided by Planned Parenthood. So long as that is clear, other rights really do not matter. In fact, if the US critiques nations such as the United Arab Emirates, Israel, or Saudi Arabia, they might become angry and not partake in business.

That did not stop Pompeo from selecting other regimes to criticize.

“Oppressive regimes like Iran and Cuba have taken advantage of this cacophonous call for ‘rights’, even pretending to be avatars of freedom,” Pompeo wrote.

Alarmingly, members of the newly-inaugurated commission have spoken favorably of countries who are known abusers of human rights. Russell Berman, a Stanford University professor of comparative literature and German studies, gushed with admiration for the Saudi Arabian government when comparing it to that of Iran. Even the Khashoggi issue was not a big deal for Berman, but rather something Trump’s opponents had cooked up to use as midterm elections issue.

Yusuf remarked on how the UAE is a “country committed to tolerance” and “one of the safest countries on earth”, which sounds wild, as even princesses are abused, abducted, or have to flee for their lives.

The commission immediately encountered opposition, both from human rights advocacy groups and Democrats in Congress. “President Trump’s personal affection for gross human rights violators has stained America’s moral fabric,” said Senator Bob Menendez, top ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. The Commission on Unalienable Rights would in fact only weaken protections.

Joanne Lin, National Director of Advocacy and Government Affairs for Amnesty International, criticized the use of a new commission instead of pre-existing institutions. “If this administration truly wanted to support people’s rights, it would use the global framework that’s already in place. Instead, it wants to undermine rights for individuals, as well as the responsibilities of governments,” Lin said.

The truth of the matter, as evidenced by past statements and actions of panel members, seems to be that the Trump administration is not so much concerned with human rights, at least in the sense that most people would think of them. It appears that the administration believes that unalienable rights do not include abortion or reproductive health services, and these matters can be forced across the global. However, regimes that systematically oppress their people are fine, apparently, because they allow the US government to carry out its policies abroad. Unless those regimes are Iran or Cuba, in which case they are total human rights abusers.

L'articolo Pompeo’s New Human Rights Commission proviene da InsideOver.