Biotech ethics: modern man and the pursuit of happiness.

Following are excerpts from a recent panel discussion at AEI on the new report of the President's Council on Bioethies, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness. The panelists were Council chairman and AEI fellow Leon Kass, M.D.; Gregg Easterbrook of the New Republic; Diana Schaub of Loyola College; and Peter Augustine Lawler of Berry College.

An expanded version of Schaub's and Lawler's remarks will be published in the Winter 2004 issue of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society (www.thenewatlantis.com).

Leon Kass:

The age of biotechnology has begun filled with hope and expectation. Advances in genetics, drug discovery, and regenerative medicine promise cures for dreaded diseases and relief from terrible suffering. Advances in neuroscience and psychopharmacology promise better treatments for the mentally ill. Techniques of assisted reproduction have already allowed more than a million infertile couples to have their own children. Without such advances--past, present, and future--many of us would lead diminished lives or not be here at all.

But our desires for a better life do not end with health, and the possibilities of biotechnology are not limited to therapy. Although most biomedical technologies have been developed for therapeutic purposes, once here, they are quickly available to serve many other ends, good ones and bad. In mischievous hands, they provide new possibilities for bioterrorism or for social control, possibilities we do not take up in this report. But for people with innocent hands, the powers that biotechnologies provide to alter the workings of body and mind are attractive not only for healing the sick and comforting the suffering, but for satisfying widespread human desires to look younger, perform better, feel happier, or become more perfect.

Some of our most popular dreams and nightmares, such as a world of genetically engineered designer babies with parents ordering up their children's characteristics, are, as the report takes some pains to indicate, scientifically unlikely. But other scenarios are more than plausible, and many desire satisfying uses of biotechnology are already here: embryo screening or sperm sorting to choose the sex of offspring; growth hormones to make children taller; Ritalin and similar drugs to control behavior or boost performance in the young; and Prozac or similar drugs to brighten moods or alter temperaments--not to speak of Botox, Viagra, or anabolic steroids.

Many of these technologies are used mostly for good medical reasons, but not always. And I should point out that the cosmetic uses of biotechnology are spiraling out of bounds even before some of these new powers are available. In 2002, Americans spent over $1 billion to treat baldness, about 10 times as much as what was spent worldwide seeking a cure for malaria. And in 2002, $7.7 billion was spent on 6.9 million cosmetic procedures in the United States, more than triple the number just five years earlier.