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Is CRISPR an Ethical Game Changer?

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Abstract

By many accounts, CRISPR gene-editing technology is revolutionizing biotechnology. It has been hailed as a scientific game changer and is being adopted at a break-neck pace. This hasty adoption has left little time for ethical reflection, and so this paper aims to begin filling that gap by exploring whether CRISPR is as much an ethical game changer as it is a biological one. By focusing on the application of CRISPR to non-human animals, I argue that CRISPR has and will continue to result in significant shifts in the ethical debate landscape. For instance, the fact that many CRISPR edits are non-transgenic has important implications for the ethical debate, particularly the popular objection to genetic engineering that it objectionably involves “crossing species boundaries,” as well as the regulatory debate in the United States, where currently only transgenic organisms are officially genetically modified organisms. I also explore various impacts CRISPR may have on animal welfare, suggesting that although the improved precision of CRISPR suggests fewer unintended welfare problems in comparison to past techniques, the greater versatility means that more animals than ever will be engineered. Finally, I end my discussion of animal welfare issues by exploring the possibility of using CRISPR to directly improve animal welfare, for instance through introducing disease resistance.

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Notes

  1. Some might suggest that humans have been “genetically engineering” animals for thousands of years by way of selective breeding. Without intending to take a stand on the general debate, I am using “genetic engineering techniques” to refer just to those techniques that specifically, directly, and knowingly target the genome of plants and animals.

  2. This attention is best exemplified by Robert and Baylis’s article and its many commentaries in the American Journal of Bioethics.

  3. Public justification, in its less philosophical form, also seems to be important to many of the most vocal CRISPR researchers, including Jennifer Doudna. These researchers are deeply interested in the public being involved in policy debates over the regulation framework for CRISPR and gene-editing. See, e.g., Doudna (2015).

  4. Strictly speaking, the USDA and FDA are only required to examine transgenic organisms, but they may elect to examine non-transgenic organisms. However, this tends not to occur.

  5. The distinction between what I am calling mentalistic aspects and species-typical behavior aspects of welfare is also sometimes discussed as a distinction between “experiential” and “functional” welfare. Commonly, in that taxonomy, physical health is distinguished from welfare entirely.

  6. Technically, the double-muscled pigs discussed by Cyranoski were created using TALENs, not CRISPR. However, expanding that type of edit to other animals, or other labs, will likely be cheaper and easier with CRISPR. This is especially true because the edit is quite simple, requiring a simple cut of the myostatin gene that inhibits the growth of muscle cells. While TALENs is still more precise for “knock-ins” (the addition of genes), CRISPR is largely on a par in terms of precision for “knock-outs” like this. See (Carroll and Charo 2015) for discussion of CRISPR and double-muscled animals.

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Acknowledgements

This paper greatly benefited from the feedback of two anonymous referees as well as the editors of this special issue. Additionally, some of the arguments here were first presented to the Functional Genomics Initiative at Washington State University and I’d like to thank those in attendance for the helpful discussion. Finally, I’d like to thank Tatiana Gracyk for reviewing previous versions of this paper and helpful discussions of the ideas.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, OH, 44115, USA

    Marcus Schultz-Bergin

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Schultz-Bergin, M. Is CRISPR an Ethical Game Changer?. J Agric Environ Ethics 31, 219–238 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-018-9721-z

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