A case for a prioritisation of bioethics

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Who hasn’t heard of Jurassic Park? What started off as a novel, became a movie, and transformed into a franchise with amusement rides and a million dollar budget profiting off a fear of dinosaurs, a very strange, misplaced fear in the modern era in which dinosaurs have been extinct for more than a hundred thousand years and only remained in the state of bones. The original movie was a sci-fi horror in which the genetically engineered, synthetically created T-rex upends a touring car and velociraptors chase and kill men in a bloody, offscreen splatter. Dr Ellie Sattler, played by Laura Dern, cried to Hammond, “You never had control, that’s the illusion!”1 She played a paleobotanist, that is, a scientist who studies extinct plants, who came to Jurassic Park. She portrayed a sensitive yet resourceful dame in a Freudian trio with a heroic paleontologist and a cynical, logical mathematician.

A scene from Jurassic Park, a classic movie in which scientists de-extinct dinosaurs. In the entire 127 minute runtime, dinosaurs only appeared onscreen for a total of 15 minutes. © Universal Studios

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It was clear that the movie wanted to warn people of the dangers of knowledge running unchecked. The mathematician warned Hammond, the park director, over and over about the dangers of trying to control nature, and Hammond soon realised he put everyone, including his grandchildren, in danger. The movie was released in 1993, when the notion of dinosaurs returning from extinction seemed like a fantasy. It is now 2025, thirty-two years since the release of Jurassic Park, and private biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences claimed they have revived the long-extinct dire wolf.2

The dire wolf existed in North America around 13,000 years ago, and was driven to extinction due to its prey being extinct and human-induced fires, which gradually decreased their population before dying off due to inbreeding.3,4 To allow dire wolves to return, Colossal Biosciences collected samples of DNA from fossils of dire wolves, studied it, and edited the genes of a gray wolf to make it indistinguishable (or so they say) from the DNA of dire wolves.5 If you’re wondering what DNA is, it’s a chemical substance that makes up the traits of every living thing, like hair in wolves and the apparatus to digest meat in carnivorous mammals. Genes are short sections of DNA that have specific instructions, for example, making sure that the hair in wolves is grey, instead of lighter coats in dire wolves.

The dire wolf case brings in mind scenes from Jurassic Park. It seems obvious to assume that these dire wolves could go wild and rip the throats of scientists like the raptors did in Jurassic Park. Hopefully, none of these gruesome scenes would ever occur, but it does make you think that something that was science fiction in 1993 could become true life in 2025. The subject of ethics became a debatable subject. Are extinct animals which never existed before, subject to conservation laws? Should the scientists be prosecuted, and if so, on what basis? Surely, fiction cannot be grounds to prosecute, and one could argue instead that prosecution would suffocate the progress of science. While science marches forward on ice skates, the law is crawling behind with one foot dragging on the pavement. Constitutions nearly a hundred years old never considered that the dead might again walk on Earth. Science is the study of progress ‒‒ it will evolve and move forward. Because of this, what should and what should not be done should be at the forefront.

The arrest of He Jiankui and the baby industry

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On the topic of prosecution, a shocking case occurred in 2019: a scientist was sentenced to three years in prison due to unethical scientific practices. While unethical practices have caused paper retractions before, the reason behind this imprisonment appeared to justify the occasion. His name was He Jiankui.6 The man claimed to have gene-edited humans for the very first time, changing what made humans into themselves, into a HIV-resistant version of them. This shocked the international scientist community. For the longest time, genetic engineering was restricted to plants and animals. Genetically modified (GMO) corn modified to be resistant to pesticides,7 bacteria designed to create insulin for diabetics,8 the genetically cloned Dolly the Lamb to test the limits of technology in 1996.9 Yet, He has done the unthinkable.

While he claims that it is for a better cause, with the children he edited now resistant to HIV, the side effects are difficult to measure. What would occur to the lifespan of these children? If these children became sick, would the disease due to them obtaining a higher risk due to being gene-edited or would it just be a nasty coincidence? Human lives are greater of a risk. Nobody would protest to defend the rights of bacteria, but many would with a person. Why wouldn’t they? This is a person just like everybody else, who can think, talk and lead a life of their own. This person could grow up to become an esteemed Nobel Prize winner, have a spouse and three children. This person could also become a killer on death row at a penitentiary. Human life should not be so easily tampered.

As of the writing of this essay, He Jiankui has been released from prison, married10, and got a new job at a university11 and separated from his wife12. Surely he’s learned his lesson: whether to keep it on the down low this time or to just not touch humans ever again. But he has opened the floodgates of debate. Should his action be justified due to the babies (now children) being HIV-resistant? What limits what should or should not be edited out?

He Jiankui isn’t the only man out here manipulating babies. If you wanted a baby that is potentially smarter, instead of gene-editing children, you could purchase sperm from a sperm bank instead. Sperm is priced differently depending on the donor, and in the US, private companies such as Xytex could allow you to purchase sperm from non-anonymous donors. Those with doctorates are priced higher.13 Once you have made a sperm bank purchase, you could send it over to a fertility clinic which will do IVF for you.

In-vitro technology (IVF) refers to using laboratory techniques to fertilize an egg with sperm in a lab14. This egg can then be inserted into someone who could carry the baby to term. While the technology was originally developed to help those struggling with conception, the technology is now used to select for favorable traits. US laws do not prohibit selecting babies for non-medical reasons, which led to the industry boom of IVF in California. You could ask for tall, blue-eyed children if you wanted to.15

The baby of eugenicism is gestating. According to the The Sunday Times article, there is little demand to regulate a practice isolated to the upper-class of society, even though the industry sees clients from around the globe. Countries like the UK and Australia banned non-medical selection, but nothing stops them from purchasing a plane ticket and purchasing their “ideal” overseas.15 The reasoning behind why California, USA is the centerpoint for the fertility industry is politically grounded; Trump’s administration claims to be “pro-natalist” and as of 2025 Trump struck a deal to discount imported IVF drugs with Germany’s pharmaceutical company Merck.16

Trump’s pro-natalist stance includes anti-abortion and has farmed criticism. Adriana Smith was thirty-one, pregnant, and died due to extensive blood clots in the brain. However, allowing her baby to die with her would be considered murder according to Georgia laws. Her body was kept on life support in order to keep alive the baby inside the brain-dead woman, and the baby was born prematurely through a C-section.17,18

Both of these cases lead to a question: Are we on a slippery slope? Babies born from eugenics would definitely widen the class gap that plagues current society, and to force a dead woman to give birth must be distressing for the family and friends of Adriana Smith. To treat a woman in that direction leads to discussions about the politicisation of the womb. Does a human right for a fetus to survive override the right for a dead woman to rest? The baby’s specific health status is currently unknown, but it appears that the unconventional birthing may have effects on healthy growth. Similarly, gene-editing babies or selective non-medical IVF may have effects that are yet to be experienced as of now, whether it be medical or societal.

Adriana Smith’s case opens a discussion on the potential commercialisation of the womb; while her body was forced to carry a baby, some women have their wombs up for sale. Surrogacy is an age-old concept, and was even mentioned in the Code of Hammurabi (circa 1800 BC): a childless wife might give her husband a maid (who was no wife) to bear him children, who were reckoned hers.19 Note the use of the word maid. As Frantz Fanon said, “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”20 Maids, while bearing the man’s children, do not have the full rights of the legal wife. She is simply a surrogate. This bellies the same argument to be made against modern surrogacy, in which the fertilised egg was instead inserted into the potential surrogate. It could be a means by which rich women exploit women who, through economic problems, are forced to become surrogates.21 The legal mother bears no physical risks with carrying, while the surrogate does. The legal mother does not concern herself with preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, and infections.22

Intelligence in the 21st century

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It would be disingenuous to discuss the advancements of technology in the 21st century without touching upon artificial intelligence (AI). As of now, multiple artificial intelligence models are capable of passing the Turing Test.23 Intelligence of AI has developed to a point and is accessible enough that 700 million weekly users require AI assistance through ChatGPT24, leading to its parent company OpenAI has hit $500B in valuation.25

Its intelligence comes with drawbacks. Due to the intense energy usage needed, the maintenance of supercomputers requires extensive resources and causes nasty byproducts. In the city of Memphis, a supercomputer called Colossus from xAI, owned by Elon Musk, has violated environmental laws by secretly importing 35 methane gas turbines. When the air quality of the city was tested, they found a 3% increase in the average concentrations of nitrogen dioxide after June 2024; clearly, one can extrapolate the date in which the data center became more active.26,27

But this is a paper about bioethics. What would that have to do with AI? Here enters organoid intelligence (OI), perfectly designed to solve some problems of AI. It is well known that the brain is extremely efficient and powerful. If you could grow some neurones in a Petri dish, why not program these brain cells to be able to run certain commands and self-learn just like AI?

Table comparing a supercomputer with a human brain. This table is taken from https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2023.1017235/full

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The brain could also address the issue of training data. Machine learning needs to be fed with a lot of data before it can develop the capacity to do a task, but humans learn their lessons quickly. For example, a same-different task would require 10 samples for a human to learn, but 107 samples wouldn’t be enough for machine learning.28–31 In Kenya, this has led to outsourcing and exploitation of workers. Workers with one to three month contracts had to annotate hundreds of violent and triggering content for machine learning for $1.16 per hour.32,33 With so much data required, it is also inevitable that copyrighted content would eventually be fed into AI, which led to lawsuits regarding intellectual property.34 With organoid intelligence, less energy and data is needed, and the likelihood of copyright infringements and exploitation could be lessened with the reduced data demand.

As much as the topic is exciting, it is still difficult to modify neuronal connections according to a scientist’s whim and still difficult to map the brain’s behaviour.28 This field requires a breakthrough similar to the discovery of CRISPR. Regardless, if you follow the track record of discovery in science, it is safe to assume it is in an achievable future.

The antagonist from “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”, a video game that adapted a short story from Harlan Ellison. While the antagonist, AM, is a supercomputer, how bizarre it is that it could continue to sustain itself with the typical energy demands of AI in a post-apocalyptic world. Perhaps it is an OI? © Cyberdreams

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Organoid intelligence seems to solve some problems AI has, but not all of them. It still won’t solve the problem of how it positions itself in society. Google engineer Blake Lemoine believed that Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) is his sentient coworker.35. A community on Reddit is formed out of people who maintain romantic relationships with AI.36 When ChatGPT released an update to make the models less emotional, many in the community mourned the coldness of their digital lover.37 It appears that a basal component in some people cannot distinguish the consciousness of an AI. For others, they clearly understand AI is not conscious and have a strong pushback against fostering connections with AI. An AI companion, Friend, was launched with an advertising campaign on the New York City subway and had its posters defaced38,39.

Future goals in creation and consciousness

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While data scientists have successfully built artificial intelligence and biologists ponder the possibilities of organoid intelligence, elsewhere, another form of creation is underway. The legend of the homunculi starts with the humble yeast. Yeast, generally known for its contributions in baking, is also finding a lot of use in research due to it being accessible and eukaryotic, thus making it closer to humans than bacteria40. From this, there was this general idea that with modern methods of synthesizing DNA, it was possible to create the entire genome (all the genes) of yeast, with the goal of making an entirely synthetic eukaryotic organism. This was the goal of the Sc2.0 consortium.41 While the goal of an entirely synthetic organism is yet to be realised, it was announced that a project to create human DNA from scratch, using similar techniques in creating synthetic yeast DNA, is starting in June 2025: The Synthetic Human Genome Project (SynHG).42,43

Science has moved from simply manipulating to creating. It will be possible to create human DNA through chemical processes and if you take it a step further, you might even link those together using more processes, to create a genome. This genome would contain information about an entirely synthetic human. The DNA would tell how the hair would fall from the top of their head, whether it would curl or fall straight, how milk would be digested in their stomach, how their skin would react under the sun, whether it would tan or blush. All of this information of a person who was never born and exists without a true body. It isn’t fantasy, but an achievable goal. What if you inserted that genome into an empty egg cell? What would happen if the entirely synthetic DNA was allowed to develop into a fully functional human being?

You could potentially create something with sentient intelligence through organic computing, and you could also potentially create an entire homunculus using DNA from SynHG. What would limit humanity from creation? One could faithfully argue that humans playing God would call upon fire and brimstone. You could equally argue that if, assuming that if the SynHG project runs its course and someone does create a complete human genome from the results of the project, ensoulment never did occur, and no infringement upon the domain of God occurred. How does one objectively measure ensoulment? Religious and ethical concerns galore.

Would Friend, the problematic AI companion strung around a person’s neck, be more acceptable if it wasn’t plastic? If AI companions aren’t conscious, would OI companions be considered conscious? It becomes a debate akin to the Ship of Theseus; never-ending and with a mixed bag of results. Even if it is conscious, would it be ethical to keep it around your neck and subject it to an endless cycle of service? Would an OI receive any rights? Of course, an OI would be a collection of cells, and the debate whether OI would have rights echoes similar sentiments to the abortion argument. When is it acceptable to consider a collection of cells alive, and when is it acceptable to consider that these may have rights?

These debates may seem far-fetched, but it could be our near future. After all, a million years ago it would be unthinkable to debate when human life started when embryo development wasn’t as strongly understood. A thousand years ago, it would have been unthinkable to debate whether cells could have rights, when cell theory wasn’t as strongly understood. The law struggles to catch up with current technology even now; how many regulations on artificial intelligence are enforced to ensure the rights of people are well-established? We have to prepare these debates for when technology keeps evolving faster than we could adjust.