CPM seeks to guard ethics in genomics

Pictures of US President George Bush making faces and in postures similar to chimpanzees in a new genetic study may have amused the Marxists, but they suspect the “hype” in genetic technology and its promise to be another marketing drive of MNCs.

Fearing that India could become ground for clinical trials, the CPM wants a regulatory framework to address risks and ethics in human genomics.

After the Indo-US nuclear deal, WTO and a range of economic issues, research on genetics, its impact on the future of the human species and India has now come under the CPM scanner.

Differentiating between reading genetic code and being able to modify it, the party has apprehended that genetic testing would be driven in a direction that fitted into a eugenic framework, which became illegitimate after Hitler’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of “inferior” races.

These concerns have been expressed in the recent issue of the CPM’s organ People’s Democracy. The article ‘The Brave New World of Genetics’ calls for an urgent need for an informal debate on the pros and cons of techniques that biotech firms are seeking to market.

“We need to separate the good from the bad so that good science can proceed and bad science, like bad money, does not drive out the good from circulation,” it said.

Worried that in India the risks were more, it said the country “could become the happy hunting ground of dangerous clinical trials for this new technology with its people being offered as guinea pigs.”

It said though the world of genetically designed future was still some distance away, the threat of its arrival through selective abortion and consequent reducing heterogeneity of the gene pool remained.

“The heart of this is the belief that all human characterists are genetically determined— from disease to obesity. If we press the right buttons and take out these genes, the human population would be better off: this is the new eugenics program,” it said.

The article said with large parts of the scientific community getting co-opted into the new genetic wisdom and with billions of dollars in profits from their patents, the scientific community cannot be the sole arbiter of such decisions.