Feature: Bioethics forum explores hopes, anxieties of tomorrow's medicine

The sixth edition of the European Bioethics Forum, which finished Saturday in Strasbourg, was declared a success attracting a large audience keen to understand the promises and perils of tomorrow's medical sciences in the company of some 130 experts from different backgrounds.

"Bioethics concerns everyone, but we do not talk about it enough," said event director Nadia Aubin, a journalist and co-founder of the Forum, alongside French geneticist physician Jean-Louis Mandel and Professor Israel Nisand, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Strasbourg University teaching hospital.

Usually reserved for scientists and academics, bioethics is increasingly entering public debate in Europe as the population gains awareness of the social issues it implies. The provisional figures for the event were testament to this.

"This year we have already recorded 20,000 participants in just three days, while our first event attracted just 6,500," said Nadia Aubin.

"Bioethics, this somewhat superficial word, describes the technical and scientific advances that affect health and society, and are likely to change one or the other," she concluded.

"NBIC (nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive sciences), end of life - embodied by the transhumanist movement, genetics ... Whatever people's age, the public are asking a lot of questions about these topics," she added, especially since medical debate has sometimes been "tarnished", notably by scandals in the pharmaceutical industry.

While all kinds of fantasies are peddled around new technologies, some even proclaiming "immortality by 2045", "most of the researchers at our forums will explain that we still have a long way to go," Aubin said.

"Since 1953, with the discovery of DNA, we know that we are all fundamentally, irreducibly different from each other," said Professor Nisand in his opening lecture.

"The unprecedented development of biology as a science has allowed the technological control of our bodies, such that we could change our destiny. All this began in the 60s with the growing rejection of biological destiny," said Nisand.

Jean-Francois Mattei, a professor of pediatrics and medical genetics, and former French health minister, gave an extreme example of this rejection in the "transhumanist" movement, which believes in the infinite perfectibility of man, and envisages that aging would no longer be a necessary stage in the cycle of life.

"Ending death is the stated objective of some global companies like Google which created the company Callico dedicated to research on aging and related diseases," he explained.

"Health, as a whole, has become the spearhead of the giants of Silicon Valley," he continued.

"We are at the start of an unprecedented scientific revolution. We have made more progress in 50 years than in the previous 50 centuries," Professor Mattei enthused.

"New technologies undoubtedly have an impact on society, good and bad. But they are not in themselves dangerous; it is the uses they are put to. There is much talk about science and that is good, but this says nothing of conscience which is still the guardian of our humanity," said the former minister.

"A man repaired and improved is one thing; a man transformed is quite another," he said.

"The American Ray Kurzweil, the father of transhumanism, wants to merge man and machine by 2045. This means the emergence of a new species ... It is not transhumanism itself that is the problem, but that it can pave the way for post-humanism," he added.

The co-founder of the European Bioethics Forum, renowned geneticist Jean-Louis Mandel, professor of the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Strasbourg, also warned against the "sorcerer's apprentices wanting to base all their science on genetic prediction".

For diseases caused by a single defective gene, "no analysis can predict when it happens, or the gravity of the outcome, or whether the risk is 100 percent," he said.

Marie-Jo Thiel, founder of the European Center for Ethics Research based in Strasbourg, agreed with him.

"When we think we are programmed by our genes, a slightly higher percentage than the average makes anyone vulnerable. But the genome is not the sole key to pathology," she explained.

"While the gene is malleable, cultivating a deterministic approach from this paves the way for all sorts of fantasies. It also leads to a battery of medical tests with unsustainable costs for social security systems," she warned.

"Asking medical science to end suffering, to end aging, for no-one to die, is to ask the impossible," added Andre Comte-Sponville, a French philosopher.

"The World Health Organization defines health as a state of complete physical, moral and social well-being. According to such criteria, I have not been healthy for more than three days in my life," he joked. Endit