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Biotechnology as seen by Quakers: moral vision, ethical assessment and action

Susan Holtz

Publication date: 30/06/2011

Biotechnology brings up differing perspectives on science, cosmology, and on life itself and the human role in Creation (or the world, depending on one’s theology). These are important discussions for members of a faith community, but do we need to seek unity concerning them?

One of Quakerism’s characteristics is an avoidance of creedal rigidity in favour of openness to inquiry and lived experience. The resulting diversity is a source of spiritual nourishment that most Friends cherish. This is especially the case for the large philosophical and theological questions that biotechnology raises. And while some Friends may feel that certain issues have such significant implications that these become the heart of the matter for them, the wellspring for practical concern needn’t be the same for everyone. There is still room for consensus about specific issues and action to address them.

Three basic questions emerge on this issue:

What spiritual groundings does biotechnology, in its many applications, touch on, and do Friends need to be in agreement about these matters?
How should Friends go about assessing biotechnology’s ethical and moral implications?
If moved to take action, what could Friends do about biotechnology’s direction and management?

This 2011 fact sheet has been prepared by the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy (CIELAP) for Quaker Institute for the Future (QIF) has been developed to help Quakers and others in faith traditions to reflect and act on concerns about biotechnology.

Resource type: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)

Citizen StakeholdersLegislation & Regulation

Democratising biotechnology?: Deliberation, participation and social regulation in a neo-liberal world

Peter Newell

Publication date: 23/04/2010

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There is now significant policy and academic interest in the governance of science and technology for sustainable development. In recent years this has come to include a growing emphasis on issues of public understanding of science and innovative processes of deliberative and inclusive policy-making around controversial technologies such as nuclear power and agricultural biotechnology. Concern with such issues coincides with rising levels of interest in deliberative democracy and its relationship to the structures and processes of global governance. This article connects these two areas through a critical examination of ‘global’ deliberations about agricultural biotechnology and its risks and benefits.

It draws on an extensive survey concerned with the diverse ways in which a range of governments are interpreting and implementing their commitments under the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety regarding public participation and consultation in order to assess the potential to create forms of deliberation through these means. The article explores both the limitations
of public deliberation within global governance institutions as well as of projects whose aim is to impose participation from above through international law by advocating model
approaches and policy ‘tool kits’ that are insensitive to vast differences between countries in terms of capacity, resources and political culture.

Resource type: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)

Citizen StakeholdersPlant & Animal Breeding

The three main monotheistic religions and gm food technology: an overview of perspectives

Omobowale EB et al

Publication date: 22/08/2009

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Public acceptance of genetically modified crops is partly rooted in religious views. However, the views of different religions and their potential influence on consumers’ decisions have not been systematically examined and summarized in a brief overview. We review the positions of the Judaism, Islam and Christianity – the three major monotheistic religions to which more than 55% of humanity adheres to – on the controversies aroused by GM technology.

The article establishes that there is no overarching consensus within the three religions. Overall, however, it appears that mainstream theology in all three religions increasingly tends towards acceptance of GM technology per se, on performing GM research, and on consumption of GM foods. These more liberal approaches, however, are predicated on there being rigorous scientific, ethical and regulatory scrutiny of research and development of such products, and that these products are properly labeled.

We conclude that there are several other interests competing with the influence exerted on consumers by religion. These include the media, environmental activists, scientists and the food industry, all of which function as sources of information and shapers of perception for consumers.

Resource type: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)

Legislation & RegulationScience & Technology

Governing innovation: the social contract and the democratic imagination

Sheila Jasanoff

Publication date: 31/05/2009

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Innovation occurs in a world of inequality which it may ameliorate or exacerbate. The best hope for steering innovation toward positive ends is that it should respond to people’s self-determined needs and aspirations, provided that certain background conditions of information and deliberation are met. In short: good innovation demands good democracy; and, especially in times of change, good democracy demands an expansive, energetic, constitutive role for law.

Regrettably, global innovations in science and technology over the last few decades have not kept pace with innovations in our imagination of democracy itself. Three tried and true systems of governance brought to bear on innovation – the market, regulation, and ethics – are all associated with models of democratic participation, but each is flawed in its techniques of representation: representing the range of public views; representing all affected parties; representing people at times when they can influence innovation; and, not least, representing the very nature of the actors who need to be represented.

In wrestling with these difficulties, makers of science and technology policy have propagated two strikingly different images of the human subject. One, tacitly built into the market and regulatory frameworks, is of citizens as capable of knowing and rationally processing information. The other, born out of frustration with public resistance to new technologies, is of ignorant and helpless publics, held back from reason not only by lack of information but by systematic cognitive biases. To some degree, the removal of value debates to ethics committees rests on and reinforces this reductionist view of popular incompetence.

For citizens in the emerging global order, this state of affairs calls for reclaiming the turf of democracy by reasserting who should be served by innovation and for what purposes. I have suggested that the resources of the law can be mobilized from the bottom up, to support constitutional imaginations that are at once more human and more humane than those that emerge from the alliance of science and technology with the state. Contracts, even virtual ones like the contract between science and society, need law to enforce them. Innovative publics around the world may look to the law to reinsert themselves into a social contract from which they have been strangely excluded.

Resource type: article: Web Page

Science & TechnologySustainability

Ethical evaluation of new technologies: genetically modified organisms and plants

MJ Peterson and Ronald Sandler

Publication date: 01/08/2008

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One of the major lessons of the 20th century is a warning that explicit ethical evaluation of the implications of a new technology with significant potential to cause widespread social or physical harm should precede its widespread use. The leading example, not least because of the dire circumstances that prompted even worried experts to urge its development, is nuclear technology. However, several other industrial technologies had sufficient environmental or other consequences to increase demands that new technologies receive ethical as well as technical and economic scrutiny before they enter widespread use.

Genetic modification (GM) technology has inspired considerable concern since its initial development in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Genetic modification is based on the ability to produce recombinant DNA (rDNA) by “splicing” genes that trigger emergence of some desired trait (such as ability to produce particular nutrient or increased resistance to a particular disease) present in the DNA of one organism into the DNA of another to produce a new DNA sequence that will yield a plant or organism of the latter type that also has the desired trait. Since its introduction genetic modification has been touted as a major – even revolutionary – advance over earlier forms of creating new plant varieties through hybridization because it allows much more specific selection of traits. It is also seen as revolutionary because it is a “deeper” technology: hybridization works at the level of whole organisms; GM operates at the more basic level of individual genes.

Like the other forms of “biotechnology” – tissue culturing, cloning, adding synthetic ingredients or inputs to the cultivation, husbandry, or processing of feeds and foods, GM technology inspires all the main forms of ethical concern that arise with new ways of handling physical objects: about impacts on the natural environment, about impacts on human health and physical well-being, about distributional consequences, about processes of decision-making regarding whether and if so when to use the technology.

Philosophers, ethicists, and others have expressed four types of objections to GM technology. Objections of the first type are what ethicists call “intrinsic objections” and involve claims that developing and using some technology is inherently wrong regardless of the results of doing so. The others are “extrinsic objections” involving claims that the technology (or action) is not inherently wrong but can be wrong if it causes or contributes to morally unacceptable situations or outcomes.

Resource type: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)

Citizen StakeholdersLegislation & RegulationScience & Technology

Taking European knowledge society seriously

Felt U, Wynne B et al

Publication date: 06/07/2007

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This report is the product of an expert working group acting under mandate from the European Commission Directorate General for Research (DG RTD), including contributions from specialists in science and technology studies, policy analysis, sociology, philosophy and law, as well as participants from civil society organizations.

The report looks at the causes and implications of widely-recognised European public unease with science and science-based technologies. It asks how we might at the same time further EU commitments to enhance democratic civil society in Europe, as well as address urgent challenges for science and technology policy, for science and governance, including those of climate and sustainability. Individual chapters deal with innovation policy, the regulation of risk institutionalised approaches to ethics, and modes of learning in complex environments, as well as efforts to engage European publics in the governance of science.

A final conceptual chapter draws these themes together by analysing the role of overarching ‘imaginaries’ in shaping practices and perspectives in all these areas. In conclusion, the report advances a number of salient messages for policy makers and sixteen specific recommendations for policy improvement. In sum, the authors call for new forms of experiment in both governance and science, moving beyond conventional linear understandings and engaging afresh with the rich diversity of European public life. Only in this way, the authors argue, will European policy take ‘knowledge society’ seriously -and fulfil its abundant promise.

Link takes you to an online document with the option to download.

Resource type: Web page URL

Plant & Animal Breeding

Options for future discussions on genetically modified and cloned animals

Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology and Michigan State University

Publication date: 09/03/2007

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ublic discussions about cloned or genetically engineered food animals have largely focused on questions about the regulatory authorities that may govern such animals. Of importance
to many observers, however, are ethical issues which cannot be addressed fully at scientific conferences or during regulatory discussions. In its 2005 poll, Pew Initiative on Food and
Biotechnology (PIFB) found that 53% of Americans strongly favored including ethical and moral considerations in making regulatory decisions about cloned or GM animals.

At PIFB’s workshop in January 2005, “Exploring the Moral and Ethical Aspects of Genetically Engineered and Cloned Animals” many participants indicated a need for additional discussions about ethics and animal biotechnology, but no institution in the U.S. appeared ready to address all the issues involved. For this reason, PIFB partnered with Michigan State University on two meetings: a one-day symposium, “Animal Biotechnology: Considering Ethical Issues,” which provided an overview of the general ethical issues involved with food animal biotechnology; and a two-day workshop among experts who came together to discuss institutional options for addressing, in the future, the moral and ethical issues relating to genetically engineered or cloned animals. Attendees included representatives from the food, agricultural, and biotechnology industries, public interest groups, and academics in ethics, biology, and law.

This document summarizes in brief the options discussed at the workshop.

Resource type: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)

Legislation & RegulationPlant & Animal Breeding

Engineering animals: ethical issues and deliberative institutions

Sheila Jasanoff and Stefan Sperling

Publication date: 07/03/2007

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Many public discussions about cloned and genetically engineered (GE) food animals have focused on questions of the regulatory authorities that may govern such animals, but few have considered the impacts of ethical or moral concerns. While ethical issues can be equally as or even more important than safety and regulatory issues to many people, there is currently no established venue where these issues can be fully addressed.

Representatives from federal agencies, biotech companies, food companies, consumer groups, animal welfare organizations, agricultural groups, non-U.S. regulatory agencies and universities gathered in October 2006 to consider what options are available for continuing discussions regarding the moral and ethical aspects of genetically engineering and cloning food animals and how those discussions might shape the future development and commercialization of such animals.

This report is the synthesis of that meeting.

Resource type: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)

Plant & Animal Breeding

Organic agriculture requires process rather than product evaluation of novel breeding techniques

E.T. Lammerts Van Bueren. et al

Publication date: 09/02/2007

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In organic agriculture the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is banned.

Recently, two novel breeding techniques have been developed, i.e., cisgenesis and reverse breeding, both of which are based on gene technology but should raise less moral concerns from the public. Whether the products of these breeding processes are classified as GMOs depends on the interpretation of the relevant EU regulations.

In cisgenic plants, the genes introduced through genetic modification are from a crossable donor plant so that the source of the genes is considered to be of the same nature. In reverse breeding, the recombinant genes, essential to the breeding process, are no longer present in the product resulting from the entire breeding process, and thus the product as such is not transgenic. Should varieties obtained through cisgenesis or reverse breeding be allowed in organic agriculture?

The answer to this question depends on whether the product or the process of breeding is taken into account. Assessment based on the product implies a choice of an ethical approach that only considers the extrinsic consequences of human action by making a risk-benefit analysis. It neglects so-called intrinsic, ethical arguments related to the applied technology (the process] itself. The organic movement uses the intrinsic argument of ‘unnaturalness’ against genetic engineering. We therefore conclude that products of cisgenesis and reverse breeding should be subject to the current GMO-regulations in organic agriculture and should thus be banned from organic agriculture.

Resource type: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)

Citizen StakeholdersScience & Technology

Are scientists right and non-scientists wrong? Reflections on discussions of GM

Jan Deckers

Publication date: 30/09/2005

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The aim of this article is to further our understanding of the “GM is unnatural” view, and of the critical response to it.

While many people have been reported to hold the view that GM is unnatural, many policy-makers and their advisors have suggested that the view must be ignored or rejected, and that there are scientific reasons for doing so. Three “typical” examples of ways in which the “GM is unnatural” view has been treated by UK policy-makers and their advisors are explored. These are the Government’s position (DEFRA Report), the account of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, and the position of Nigel Halford, a scientist with an advisory role to the Government. I show that their accounts fail to mount a convincing critique. Then, I draw on an empirical research project held during 2003–2004 at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north east of England.

Scientists met with non-scientists in a range of facilitated one-to-one conversations (“exchanges”) on various environmental issues, one of which was on GM. Our findings show that some scientists who rejected the “GM is unnatural” view struggled to do so consistently. Their struggle is interpreted in terms of a conflict between a so-called “scientific” worldview, and a different worldview that underlies the concerns of those who held the “GM is unnatural” view. This worldview is explored further by an examination of their concerns. What distinguishes this worldview from the “scientific” worldview is that the instrumentalization of the nonhuman world is questioned to a larger extent.

I conclude that, because the underlying concerns of those who held the “GM is unnatural” view were not with GM as such, yet with a worldview that was considered to be problematic, and of which many GM applications were held to be expressions, policy-makers and their advisors should reflect on the critical worldview of those who claim that GM is unnatural if they want to engage seriously with their concerns.

Main link goes to the pay per view abstract. The author’s .pdf version can be found here.

Resource type: Web page URL