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LEGAL THINKING ABOUT OUR EDITED SELF Manifesto”, an influential proclamation written in 1939.° Eugenics, experiencing a revival before the war, covered almost all areas of life, including psychiatry, child education, reproduction, sterilization and selective murder of people under the name of euthanasia. Selective murder and interventions committed in the name of eugenics cast dark shadows over genetics and still urge caution. However, the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA by James Watson, Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin in 1953 brought new momentum to the development of genetics. Embryo research was eased by the birth of Louise Brown in 1978°, the first human to have been born after conception by in vitro fertilization and embryo implantation. The first in vitro interventions were followed by, the Human Genome Project’ and the first cloned mammal, Dolly the Sheep’, was born in 1996, although her birth was officially announced only in 1997. Cloning made biotechnology’s achievements tangible and, as a result, 1997 became the golden age of setting standards for bioethics. The Oviedo Convention’, UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights”, was adopted. The movie Gattaca", which foresaw a caste system of society based on genetic traits, was also released that year. From then on, news stories on genetics have been published on an almost daily basis and ranged from the announcement of the first draft of the human genome to the en masse emergence of biobanks. Naturally, there have always been periods of setbacks, failures, and ethical fiascos. After Jesse Gelsinger, a young participant in the first gene transfer trial, died in 1999,” at least for a decade gene therapy had become a black label. Researchers 5 Leonard Darwin, The Geneticist’s Manifesto, The Eugenics Review 31 (1940), 229-230, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2962351/pdf/eugenrev00238-0033. pdf. Louise Brown, on 40 years of IVF: ‘I was the world’s first IVF baby, and this is my story’, Independent (25 July 2018), https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/ ivf-baby-louise-brown-story-test-tube-world-first-40th-anniversary-a8455956.html. 7 Beginning on October 1, 1990 and completed in April 2003, the HGP gave the possibility for the first time, to read nature’s complete genetic blueprint for building a human being. The birth of Dolly was important because she was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. Her birth proved that specialized cells could be used to create an exact copy of the animal they came from. Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine: Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine ETS No.164 UNESCO: Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, http://www. unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/bioethics/human-genome-andhuman-rights. Gattaca is an American dystopian science fiction film written and directed by Andrew Niccol. 12 Meir Rinde, The Death of Jesse Gelsinger, 20 Years Later, Distillations (4 June 2019), https:// www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/the-death-of-jesse-gelsinger-20-years-later. + 347 +
