Just because we can …

Source: Living City

New bioethical dilemmas arise with 3D printers — will we end up counterfeiting creation?

One day a cartoon posted on Facebook attracted my attention: two relaxed parents sitting on different couches with a 3D printer on the floor of their living room, from which a baby was coming out. It was called “the future of baby-making.”

Sure, it portrayed some futuristic exaggeration, yet there was something prophetic about it. Just a few weeks before, I had received an email from a former bioethics student with a link to a video where Dr. Anthony Atala, from Harvard University, demonstrated how he was able to produce a kidney through a 3D printer.

In May it was announced that kidneys were now being reproduced by printers, and scientists were speaking of doing the same for hearts and, one day, even brains! All this is happening before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has even adopted an official policy on “bioprinting” body parts.

I was exhilarated in reading this news, since I am very aware of the many people who die every day because of the scarcity of organ donations. However, I could not hide the subtle fear that permeated my thoughts: what else would come? Would we know when to use this new technology to save lives? Would we know where to draw the line, or would we really push it to printing “brains?”

From a bioethical viewpoint, one of the greatest challenges we are facing is that an ethical conversation has rarely accompanied a discovery or development of innovative technology. This has given people the sense that whatever is possible to do is also morally acceptable — since we can, we should!

Over the last 40 to 50 years, scientific technologies have helped the medical community to improve the human condition. During the same time, “bioethics” has appeared as a science, even though the question of what is morally acceptable in the medical field goes back to Greek philosophers and ancient Chinese practitioners.

Being an interdisciplinary science, bioethics needs the input of many other disciplines to answer the questions that arise from new choices we are asked to make. What is ethically right in this particular case, in these particular circumstances, for this particular person with his or her beliefs? But the basic question facing new research or new paths should eventually be:

“Are we doing this because we are able to and we want to push the limits, or because it is helping and advancing the human condition and human dignity?”

We know that as human beings we have many choices. Some of them have been judged to be inconsistent with human behaviour and therefore declared unacceptable for us to continue. Indeed we had to develop a justice system for those among us who do not subscribe to these universal norms.

In bioethics, however, very few people have dared to move the conversation regarding acceptable limits of experimentation forward, largely out of fear that the answers to these questions may limit scientific progress. Yet we have seen in the course of history that when transcendental values and religious principles are discarded, it is the human person that suffers the most.

I propose to my students that, in the bioethics debate, we should first of all recognize that our mind, body and spirit form a unit — a masterpiece of creation called a human being. Keeping these three dimensions of the human person in mind when dealing with new discoveries is the most fundamental starting point for any conversation. Are we helping the whole person to develop? Are we accepting the fragility and finite aspect of our human condition while using all of our intellectual capacities to discover how we can help to alleviate suffering and even prevent it?

The human person, furthermore, should never be looked at as a single individual: he or she has been created in a community and is part of a network of relationships with other human beings, with nature, and, for those who hold transcendent views, with the creator. These relationships need to be kept in mind when making ethical choices.

Whenever we undertake a journey, it is essential to know our destination — even if we may not know the road to take us there — and to have a GPS or a compass to guide us along the way.

Are we the mere product of some biological combination of DNA, or do we have an infinite transcendental imprint that makes us unique and irreplaceable? We do not dare mess with a Picasso original, so why should we take that liberty with any one of us?

If we believe in this uniqueness of every human being who was, is and will be, then we will have quite a powerful GPS to guide our choices. We will be able to decide together how to recognize when our efforts at restoration and maintenance overstep into counterfeiting the creator’s work.       

Maria Luce Ronconi teaches bioethics at Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York.