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Designer Babies, Version 1.0
Stickerboy writes: "A 30 year-old woman in Chicago gave birth to a pre-pregnancy genetically screened and selected baby 17 months ago, which is being reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association today. Doctors at the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago took 23 eggs from her, screened the eggs for a gene that causes an early form of Alzheimer's, and then fertilized and implanted the eggs back in her womb. Shades of the movie Gattaca - this is a good specific development, but the start of a very controversial trend. Read more about it in the Washington Post or read the abstract in JAMA."
Even that noble goal is a slippery slope to tread. What diseases do we screen for? Cancer? Diabetes? Sickle Cell? ADD? Psoriosis? Dandruff? Halitosis?
> Weaknesses are inherent in all forms of life. And
> in this case, the weakness is basically being
> forced out of the child. I don't think this is a
> good thing, and here is why...
How fair is that to the child? Is it not the parent's responsibility to give their offspring every positive chance in life they can get? The short of it is, there are innumerable diseases and afflictions that plague humanity that are passed through the genes. Most of them have no cures to date, and considering the money put into research these days, it's hard to remain optimistic that cures will ever be found.
What's so evil about weeding out these undesireable genes? It SUCKS to have to live with a hereditery disease, just try on my shoes sometimes because I gotta do it every damn day.
If my parents had had this opportunity, I would have encouraged them to take it. Because if I had never been born, I wouldn't be around to care if I didn't exist. I have no illusions about my importance to this world to try and claim that if I didn't exist, the world would be a worse place. And even if I weren't here typing this, some other child of my parents would be out there doing something, sans disease. Sounds win-win to me, because the kid I could have been was raised by the same two people and would probably end up with the same core values.
> If you want a child so badly, lady, go ADOPT ONE.
Course, I'll agree with you on this one. I don't see myself ever having a kid, cuz I don't wanna pass on my shit-for-genes to any descendents. If I ever get that parental urge, I'll probably adopt. Adoption, for as long as there are orphaned children, is the better solution. But that doesn't make "gene screening" evil by any means.
Okay, two immediate thoughts come to mind with relation to this.
/smart/ and /strong/ and /useful/. Not pretty.
First off, with the way that human mating works nowadays, there really isn't much evolutionary motivation. You date people who you find attractive for whatever damn fool reason you have rather than for the purpose of creating healthy offspring. I, for instance, tend to prefer dating women who find fat, bearded computer geeks attractive. That's not an evolutionarily sound move on my part, but that's not going to make me dump my lovely girlfriend. So this development makes it possible for Humans to actually take control of evolution and start breeding out diseases and infirmaties.
However, the problem that immediately comes to mind is something that dog breeders have found over the years. People started breeding for certain traits such as soft coat, ears that are floppy in exactly the right way, short tails, etc. While this makes for very pretty dogs, it leads to the problem that the average Dalmation, far from rescuing its brethren from Cruella DeVille, could just barely rescue itself from a small, wet paper sack. And that's only if it had 100 other dogs helping it. And the wet paper sack also had food in it that they wanted to get to. And maybe was perforated. Which is why sheepdog owners are, last I heard (which was, admittedly, years ago), fighting tooth and nail to keep their breed out of competition. They raise sheepdogs to be
The point I'm trying to make is that genetically manipulating which kids we have to screen for diseases is fine by me, but I'd hate to live in a future where people start screening their reproductive cells so that they only have pretty babies. They'll probably be able to play games with Dalmations on the same intellectual level.
--AC
I want to see genetic engineering just take off crazy and unregulated. Seriously, there are enough of us here, that the only way we'll REALLY fuck up is if we keep going the way we are.
I want to see athletes engineered to run 25 miles an hour for hours on end.
I want to see people with IQ's off any scale.
Hell, I want to see decathalons with supped up athletes where half the contestants explode before the end.
Bring it on, I like it and we need it. Fuck all you Naysayers in your nice comfortable existence.
Well, IMO, this goes against natural selection.
... and definitely something to consider when you bring up natural selection.
:)
I have no problem with your opinion except this point. The reason being that by improving medicines and such, we are ALREADY going against natural selection. To put it bluntly, and it's hard not to make this sound completely immoral, we are weakening the human race as we speak. Let me take a chance to explain.
Let's take the simple example of sight. If I'm completely near-sighted I can get a pair of glasses. In the days when natural selection mattered for humans and sight, let's say 500 years ago, I might die before I can have offspring because of my poor sight. THAT is natural selection. My genes are now removed from the gene pool before I can "replicate" them into others - and because of natural selection, fewer and fewer people have poor sight.
Now let's take this to another level. Let's say a recessive gene that causes a disease is common among a population. If that population surives past sexual maturity and passes the gene along, natural selection fails and the disease's gene spreads. This is a decidedly bad thing.
I won't even get into the moral grounds of the issue, I just wanted to give another side of the coin. It's not necessarily my two cents - but probably someone's
I too, expect to be flamed.
----- rL
Unfortunately, yes. Many of the world's greatest artists, writers, and musicians had genetic "defects" of some kind. For these people, their problems are what drove them to greatness.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Just to through a kink in your argument that homosexuality is a defect. True, it is one in terms of individual evolution, but you dismiss a broader "species" effect. Perhaps homosexual couples provide a certain benefit to traditional or modern society.
For example there is species based reason why women can no longer have children after a certain age. Not only would pregnancy be difficult on the older mother, but older women (and men) can provide help to raise others' young children who are probably healthier. In the case of grandchildren, there is a point at which the gain in terms of having mroe kids is less than if an older person just helps their grandchildren.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
He means it's a "defect" in the evolutionary sense. That people who are sexually attracted to the same sex are likely not to reproduce.
His "duh" for gene-based homosexuality arises from the fact that an individual carrying such a trait is likely not have offspring, and that consequently, such genes render such individuals evolutionarily unfit.
His "wrong sex" was intended similarly; in most species (that is, excepting certain hermaphroditic species where androgynous individuals "become" female upon receipt of sperm excepted), the "right sex" for purposes of propagating one's genes is the opposite sex.
No judgement on moral fitness was passed. Only a judgement on evolutionary fitness. The two things are not the same.
Likewise, as a heterosexual male who Doesn't Want Children (my idea of "fun" is babysitting a newly-overclocked Athlon XP 2000+ for a few months, then upgrading it to something faster, rather than spending 18 years plugging data into a newly-fabbed homo sapiens :-).
If there's a genetic component to not having a paternal instinct, I carry it. That is, I am evolutionarily "unfit", my instincts are evolutionarily "wrong", because I have chosen to have certain bits of my anatomy snipped to ensure that (barring a serious upfuck on the part of the surgeon) I'll die without propagating my genes.
(In any case, it's a moot point now, as homosexuals and childfree heterosexuals can now pass on their genes by donating eggs or sperm and fertilizing in vitro. But evolution never anticipated primates with brains big enough to pull off stunts like that ;-)