CRISPR

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Inspiring Easter feature idea sent aloft by (what are the odds?) producers at MSNBC

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Inspiring Easter feature idea sent aloft by (what are the odds?) producers at MSNBC

Most media consumers will think of MSNBC as a heavy-breathing, politically and socially liberal cable television news operation — 24/7/365. Nor, so far as The Guy knows, has it shown much interest in religion coverage.

So it was quite the eyebrow-raiser when the March 11 edition of "Morning Joe" aired a relatively long and serious discussion of a theme that journalists may want to grab if they're looking for a promising Easter feature idea.

Adding to the surprises, MSNBC located and featured two intelligent evangelical Protestant leaders of the sort who all too rarely get air time on cable news networks, whether liberal or conservative.

One of this era's most successful pastors, the Rev. Timothy Keller of New York City, appeared to chat about his newly released book "Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter" (Viking). Joining him was journalist-attorney David French of TheDispatch.com, booked this time not as a #NeverTrump scribe but to undergird Keller's case for why modern people can believe in Jesus Christ's literal resurrection and what this means for them.

Adding to the drama, Keller mulled his simultaneous publication of one of those must-read articles, a very personal account for The Atlantic about writing an objective book on life and death during a year when he was coping with his own fatal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.

As Keller confesses, it's one thing for a pastor to try to help parishioners face terminal illness and quite another for the pastor himself to face the same. In Keller's case, it took months for questions to give way to an even sweeter appreciation of life and of faith.


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Beyond lingo, journalists must keep current on the frontiers of sexuality and reproduction

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Modern sexuality poses continual challenges for writers as they navigate changing sensitivities on verbiage. One example broke into the news last week when Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was chastised for assuring a U.S. Senate hearing that she "would never discriminate on the basis of sexual preference."

Hawaii Democrat Mazie Hirono accused Barrett of uttering an "offensive" word. Barrett responded that she never meant to offend and "if I did I greatly apologize." Immediately, Merriam-Webster, a standard arbiter of proper word usage, announced that "preference" is now labeled "offensive" because it suggests "a person can choose who they are sexually or romantically attracted to."

When the all-consuming U.S. political campaign has ended (thankfully!), the media need not only to ponder such evolving word choices, but to keep current on the frontiers of human sexuality and reproduction in science, ethics and politics, such as the following potential story themes. All of these issues raise moral issues that will cause discussions, debates and even conflict in various religious traditions.

Fertility equality — The New York Times has surveyed at length this new movement, a.k.a. "the right to a baby." This is an extension off of "marriage equality," that is, legalized same-sex marriage. Exponents now contend that the ability to have children and create a family should no longer be determined by "sexuality, gender, or biology."

Same-sex couples or singles who cannot conceive offspring biologically are said to suffer "social infertility." Instead of adopting children, they may hire surrogate mothers or employ in-vitro fertilization and newer reproductive technologies to have children who perpetuate their own genetic heritage. This movement works for the end of legal limitations and for public funding, since these processes can be expensive and are not normally covered by medical insurance.

Advocates include Men Having Babies, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Fertility Within Reach and Affordable Families. For global contexting, see "The Pink Line: Journeys across the World's Queer Frontiers" by Mark Gevisser.

There's interesting hostility from some feminists, including Gloria Steinem and Deborah Glick, the first lesbian in the New York State legislature. They oppose legalization and liken the purchase of surrogate births to slavery as patriarchal exploitation of women that lowers their status.


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New 'playing God' technique to produce 'designer babies' may launch in a few months

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New 'playing God' technique to produce 'designer babies' may launch in a few months

One good reason to buy a costly ($189 a year) subscription to The Economist, Britain’s international weekly, is regular coverage of science developments like American newsweeklies used to provide.

Journalists should be alert to a significant scientific scoop in the Nov. 9 edition. Sometime in 2020, the Genomic Prediction Company of North Brunswick, New Jersey — GenomicPrediction.com — plans to fertilize donor eggs with mixed sperm from two gay fathers in California. This couple will then pick embryos to be implanted in a surrogate mother on the basis of purported lower health risks identified through SNP tests (single-nucleotide polymorphism or “snip”).

If successful, such experiments could launch a relatively smooth new path for “playing God” to create human “designer babies.” Not long ago this sort of thing was the stuff of sci-fi novels by H.G. Wells or Aldous Huxley. Now the human species itself enters the public furor over animal and vegetable GMOs and “Frankenfood.”

Writers pursuing this should start with The Economist’s three-pager (behind pay wall), which details the biological complexities of SNP that The Guy must bypass here. There’s also this accompanying editorial. Genomic Prediction’s Web site has further explanation, and you’ll want to keep in contact with the company for the news pegs (973–529-4223 or contact@genomicprediction.com).

Of course, environment and behavior also affect health outcomes. Proposed disease prevention would provide what seems to be a benign start for the Snip Era, but we can likely expect eventual efforts to pick embryos for implantation on the basis of, say, height or intelligence, as humanity veers toward the breeding of a super-race. Applications will inevitably be tilted toward affluent parents, posing a moral quandary.

Also, The Economist reports, eventual efforts to maximize scores that enhance brainpower and such could “increase the risk of genetic disorders” through spillover into a DNA malady known as pleiotropy. SNP has already been tried for animal husbandry with other species of mammals. Since 2008, it has proven to boost milk yields in dairy cows. But, The Economist says, these experimental cows “have become less fertile and have weaker immune systems. … Genetic tinkering may sometimes improve things. But by no means always.” Humanity beware!


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Yet more forecasting on what to expect in religion news and trends during 2019

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Those who read GetReligion on Dec. 20 (thereby postponing their holiday chores) may recall The Religion Guy’s list of the big three religion news themes for the new year:

(1) Ongoing debate over using the CRISPR technique to create human “designer babies” and manipulate genes that will be passed along to future generations. (The Guy – uniquely -- also proclaimed this the #1 religion story of 2018.)

(2) How Catholic leaders cope with multiplying cases of priests molesting minors, both at Pope Francis’ February summit and afterward. And don’t neglect those Protestant sexual abuse scandals.

(3) Reverberations from the United Methodist Church’s special February General Conference that decides whether and how to either hold together or to split over same-sex issues.

On the same theme, Religion News Service posted a longish item New Year’s Eve headlined “What’s coming for religion in 2019? Here’s what the experts predict.” This was a collection of brief articles commissioned from a multi-faith lineup. It turned out to be one of those ideas that seemed better in the story conference than in the resulting copy.

Understandably, no panelist expected an end to the persistent Catholic scandals.

Otherwise, the pieces predicted things like this:


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Surprise -- The crucial religion story of 2018 is the specter of 'designer babies'

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Newsroom story conferences are impossibly clogged with items in the Donald Trump Era.

This month everybody is sifting through everything in order to figure out the Top Ten events of 2018. The Religion Guy proposes that, without question, first place belongs not to political or economic eruptions but scientists’ onrushing effort to “play God” and re-engineer the human species through genetics.

With all the fear-mongering about animal or vegetable GMOs and “Frankenfood,” how shall we now cope with the similar and serious specter of creating human “designer babies” with desired traits?

Alas, the Guy has seen precious little media input from organized religion and urges reporters to bring those viewpoints to the center of this developing public debate.

The news: He Jiankui, a U.S.-trained biological researcher in China, says he has successfully altered the genes of newly born twins, with a third such birth expected soon. The claim has not been verified through the normal academic reporting process, much to the distress of fellow researchers, Chinese officialdom and the university and hospital where He works.

However, his background makes the claim plausible. There were important advances in such work during 2017. If He’s claim falls through, scientific success elsewhere, with the moral quandaries that result, appears inevitable. If it can be done, some scientists somewhere will do it, and self-regulation by science or government restrictions will be difficult to achieve.

The headline on a New York Times dispatch out of Beijing put matters bluntly: “In China, Sacrificing Ethics for Scientific Glory.” There were immediate hostile reactions from scientists. For one, Francis Collins, head of America’s National Institutes of Health (and a devout evangelical), spoke of “epic scientific misadventures” that will sully valid work on genetic diseases by provoking “outrage, fear, and disgust.”

CRISPR sounds like some newfangled kitchen gadget hawked as a Christmas gift on late-night TV. (“But wait!!”). However, it’s the acronym for a new tool for editing genes, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, using the “CRISPR-associated protein 9” enzyme abbreviated as “Cas9.” Importantly, scientists say this method suddenly makes gene manipulation easy and quite precise.

It’s hard enough for mere journalists to fully comprehend this process, much less explain it to our audiences, but the biological basics and moral implications are crystal clear.


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Genetics, ethics, race and playing God: StatNews profiles an intriguing researcher

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Every so often, an article appears that is written with such grace and taste from an unexpected source. I’d never heard of StatNews.com, a year-old web site covering medicine, health care and life sciences started by John Henry, the billionaire owner of The Boston Globe.

Recently, it produced a piece about a Harvard genetics professor, who seems to be an agnostic, reaching out to the religious community to explain the latest research about the human genome. It could only have been done by someone who knows the genetics field but who could also grasp the theological objections by people not so familiar with it.

We are talking about big, big questions here.

RANDALLSTOWN, Md. -- Is the human genome sacred? Does editing it violate the idea that we’re made in God’s image or, perhaps worse, allow us to “play God”?
It’s hard to imagine weightier questions. And so to address them, Ting Wu is starting small.
Last month, the geneticist was here in a conference room outside Baltimore, its pale green walls lined with mirrors, asking pastors from area black churches to consider helping her.
Wu’s research focuses on the nitty-gritty of the genome; her lab at Harvard Medical School studies the positioning and behavior of chromosomes. But she’s also interested in improving the public’s understanding of genetics. She has gone to classrooms and briefed congressional aides. She has advised the team behind “Grey’s Anatomy.”
At a time of unprecedented access to genetic tests and plummeting costs for genetic sequencing, Wu believes people should know what scientific advances mean for them. The challenge is empowering communities that are skeptical of science because they have been underserved or even mistreated in the past.

The writer cuts to the chase, explaining that the issue is genome editing.


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