Researchers seek government support for “three-parent IVF” in the United Kingdom, for the purpose of bringing to clinical practice new techniques for avoiding inherited mitochondrial diseases. The author describes the development and processes of pronuclear transfer and maternal spindle transfer and offers an ethical evaluation of this cutting-edge science in light of the Church’s teaching in Dignitas personae. Promoting a eugenic mentality, both pronuclear transfer and maternal spindle transfer involve a radical manipulation of the human genome, inherited from three parents (...) and passed on to future generations. Pronuclear transfer and maternal spindle transfer are immoral, because they represent an offense to marriage and the marital act and involve the destruction of innocent human life. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.4 (Winter 2012): 589–596. (shrink)

Western society is steadily inundated by technology. Pope Benedict XVI has presented a positive but cautious analysis of biotechnological development. Within the context of man’s yearning for love and truth, Benedict explicates a vision of authentic human progress that recognizes that the telos of technical progress in biomedicine is the good of the human person. He criticizes the “consensus model” of bioethics, which is prevalent in our cultural technopoly, because it leaves science unfettered and emphasizes arbitrary consensus at the cost (...) of an ethical evaluation, which honors the dignity of the person and the rights of man. Benedict XVI proposes a bioethical model which is open to God, is consistent with natural law, and views the human person as its telos. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 11.4 (Winter 2011): 669–678. (shrink)