PMB woman awarded PHD
Representing the African voice in academic research
PROGRESSIVE research exploring how law and science could work together to address legal implications around reproductive rights has earned a UKZN student her PHD.
Sheetal Soni from Pietermaritzburg spent years conducting research on her PHD study, “Spare-part Sisters and Bred-to-order Brothers: an Ethical and Legal Analysis of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis for the Purposes of Sex Selection and Tissue Typing”.
She said her journey took unexpected turns as technology advancements concerning gene editing were being debated and developed.
Soni said she enjoyed the experience and felt lost for some time after submitting her thesis for examination as it had become part of her daily life.
“A PHD is a worthwhile qualification to have, because it doesn’t only demonstrate expertise in a topic, but it is also a lesson to yourself as to what you are capable of,” she said.
“I had to balance working full-time, writing my thesis and raising a young family.
“In the end, I was not willing to compromise on any of these aspects of my life and would often wake up and work on the thesis through the night hours.”
Soni said her interest was always in medical law, which considers the rights of patients receiving health care, particularly medicine and surgery concerned with childbirth and midwifery, as well as duties and responsibilities of health-care providers.
“My research started to focus on specialised medical law.
“I began to research the legal implications and law around reproductive rights such as having children using assisted reproductive methods as in vitro fertilisation, gamete donation, and surrogacy.
“There are often ethical issues associated with advancing medical and biological research and as a bioethicist, I considered the ethical issues associated with these technologies,” she said.
“At first glance, my research seems excessively provocative but it considers simple questions, can it be ethically and legally justifiable to use this technology to create tissue-compatible donors and should people have the legal right to choose the sex of their children?”
She said her thesis examined whether the testing methods of early stage embryos could be used in those using in vitro fertilisation to determine tissue types for possible donation or to select the embryos on the basis of gender.
She said it also proposed an ethical regulatory framework.
Soniy said she was constantly looking for ways to benefit society through her research and that she was hopeful it would make an impact in the country.
“The examiners of my thesis considered my research to be an important contribution to the field of knowledge concerning biomedicine and genetic testing,” she said.
“In April, I was honoured to be invited to write a segment in an international journal that focuses solely on research in Crispr gene editing, from the perspective of what this new technology means for me and South Africa.
“Historically, African nations have been largely absent from these international conversations and I try to represent the voice of Africa as much as I can so that we are more involved going forward,” Soni said.