World Bioethics Day: Human Dignity and Human Rights

The first World Bioethics Day, sponsored by the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics, is taking place on October 19. This year’s theme of Human Dignity and Human Rights will be celebrated in 55 countries worldwide (see here for a list of participating countries and here for a list of planned events).

While most countries are hosting one or two World Bioethics Day events, India has planned a whopping 29. The only event scheduled in the United States is at Indiana University Northwest, which will include presentations on bioethics and human rights and a screening of “No Más Bebés,” a documentary about Mexican-American women who were coercively sterilized at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center in the 1960s and 1970s. (Filmmakers Virginia Espino and Renee Tajima-Peña joined CGS on the UC Berkeley campus in 2016 to screen the film as a part of the Being Human in a Biotech Age series. They were also interviewed for the CGS online series Talking Biopolitics by eugenics scholar and CGS advisory board member Alexandra Minna Stern, see here and on YouTube.)

Human dignity and human rights, in addition to being the theme of this first annual World Bioethics Day celebration, form the primary framework of most of the international and national legislation worldwide that prohibits inheritable genetic modification, also known as human germline modification. The most notable among these is the Council of Europe’s 1997 Convention on Biomedicine and Human Rights (see here for a global list of national legislation banning inheritable genetic modification).

It is surprising that human genetics has such a low profile among the list of World Bioethics Day events. 2015 and 2016 have seen unprecedented technological developments with troubling implications for human germline modification – such as the public policy controversies surrounding reproductive applications of gene editing and human experimentation with mitochondrial manipulation techniques (or “three-person IVF) in Mexico and the Ukraine.

Out of 88 events today, only one sponsored by the Bosnia and Herzegovina Unit features genomics as its main theme. Five others, two in Italy and one each in Slovenia, Macedonia, and India, will include individual presentations on the wider topic of human genetics. The Bosnia and Herzegovina event is Bioethics in the Era of Genomics and Personalized Medicine, an international conference that will take place in Sarajevo on October 28.

Previously on Biopolitical Times:

• 3-Person IVF Breaking News: Where Are the Advocates for the Public Interest?
• CRISPR Embryos at Karolinska: Controversies Demand Oversight
• The Case Against Public Investment in Reproductive Genetic Modification

Image via UNESCO