The Rights of GM Humans

An anonymous submitter writes "Some of the powers that be -- not just talking heads -- go on record about our genetically enhanced future in this Village Voice article. The anti-doping watchdogs of the Olympics say they'll ban GM athletes, and even athletes who have a grandparent with an enhanced germ-line. Would Ivy League schools slap a quota on these people to fend off the enraged parents of the "normal majority?" Imagine how a politician would fare if it became known she'd been tweaked in utero. Human history is rife with aristocide and mob attacks on perceived elites. Today lawmakers and regulators are eager to ban the technologies that would be needed to create a new breed of intellectually and physically superior people. But who's willing to stand up for the rights of this future generation? Environmentalists already deride GM crops as "frankenfood," so how far behind could the demonization of GM people be?"

Comments

Re:Frankenfood

[Nosher]

I'm fairly neutral about all this stuff, but I would still question a couple of your assumptions: just exactly where does a resistance to glyphosate (a widely used herbicide made by a certain famously litigous megacorp) occur in nature? For 'tis this gene that was inserted into Bt Corn making it impervious to this weedkiller. That's something a whole level above regular cross breeding as it works by the insertion of more-or-less artificial genetic code. Also, most of these crops never make it anywhere near the "third world" as the patents on them normally preclude such non-profit uses.