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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?"
One word:
Khan
How will the future consider children who may be cured by simple GM of diseases? My friend's son is a hemophiliac. A genetic modification could save him from an early death and a lifetime of pain. Would this change make him a GM freak? If so, are you saying that he should suffer this disease because God ordained it?
The more you scare people, the more they will pay you
Red Dwarf covered this issue. After the proliferation of genetic enhancements the world sporting bodies stepped in banning genetic enhancement. The response was the creation of Genetic Alternative sports, the Genetic Alternative sports killed normal sports inside a couple of years, of course even that required a few rules:
Joking aside, I'm unsure what would happen in the real word. Sports. We haven't seen a "Narcotics alternative sports" emerge after drug taking was banned, however the critical difference may be in how socially acceptable genetic enhancement is. Whoever makes the decisions is going to have trouble either way though, I can see the headlines now Little Johnny kept out of school sports record books because of asthma treatment..
Seriously, GATTACA has an excellent point. "There is no gene for the human spirit." I'd go further, there is no gene for life.
You must admit, if we could genetically protect our immune systems from AIDS, that it would be a good thing really. But who knows...maybe that new immune system wouldn't work against something else...
- Sighuh?
Somehow I think our understanding of genetics and the way humans develope is too small for any of this to be fruitful in the near future. Thinking ahead, if we could alter our genetic code(ie. create enhanced humans) really we would only be starting back up the process we stopped. The way I see it, through society humans have slowly stopped natural selection from occuring within our own population. The last major occurance of natural selection in humans that I recall was during the Black Plague in Europe. Only people who produced a certain protein on their immune cells(I have forgotten its name) were able to survive the plague. So now the survivors all carried that gene, which helped them and their offspring be immune to similar diseases to the plague. This happens in nature all the time, but in humans it doesn't seem to happen much anymore. Diseases are not always a bad thing, in the long run they are often helpful in preserving a species.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
The rights of GM humans might be an issue soon enough, sure. But what I fear most is the fact that we might lose touch with ourselves and create an upper class society of GM humans, with the new lower class being unable to afford the GM in their family. In fact, what might happen if we carry this too far and create a human that can hardly be desribed as a human any longer? Call me a doomsday prophet but this is what I fear most about GM, the division of the human race into several factions. The upper class and lower class, the new humans and the old humans, the superior humans and the lesser humans... Much like what Hitler dreamed of...
The human genes are one of the few things we should not muck around with too much, except perhaps to remove "bugs" in our genetics which allow for horrible diseases like parkinson and thousands of others. Repairing our DNA? Fine with me, if controlled properly. Enhancing our DNA to give us abilities beyond those of normal humans? No way, imho.
Hate me!
Whats wrong with improving upon our faults?
monoculture vulnerability ?
lack of knowledge ?
and, most importantly, the ethics of performing experiments in humans ? (after all, there can be no more extreme experiment than tayloring an organism)
Remember, in order ot improve, you need to learn, and make a lot of mistakes. These poor mistakes will breath, live, love, laugh and hurt. Do you not, as the originating scientist, have an ethical obligation to these resulting future persons ? What will you do, debug and reboot them ?
I'm not saying this as a christian (I'm not), or as a person who totaly opposes eugenics (I'm not that either) but as a person who believes a measure of ethics is important.
Working for necessity's mother.
The term Frankenfood is just another useless word by which none of the environmentalists can back up.
You see, I too thought that they spliced animal and plant genes together to make better producing crops.
But not so. This is what they would have you believe.
I'm not Flamebaiting, and I'm not Trolling. I was honestly surprised at what I learned from this episode of this show (which is great, btw), and how the only spliced genes in plants are from other plants.
Yes, really. Regardless of what Greenpeace would have you believe.
The environmentalists have made us think that genetically altered food is as bad as can be, and that we should stay away from it. That it's not regulated in any form or fashion. That the food industry runs amok with itself, feeding the world with whatever they can come up with in their Mad Scentist Labs.
But this is completely false. Any GM food is regulated far more than regular food, and these GM foods can save lives.
Dr. Borlog, the scientist who invented GM food, has saved an estimated billion lives in third world countries by making less land make more food. His research and development since the 1970's, when it began, is groundbreaking to say the least. And yet there are groups who protest this on a consistent basis. And you never see any of these group's members starving, do you?
A true tragedy was when an African country decided not to take an American donation of tons of corn because the environmentalists convinced the government of that nation that the genetically altered food was poison. An estimated 25,000 people die every day of starvation, and thousands of innocent people died in that country because of that misinformation.
Now I'm not for a GATTACA like society, but if we can GM a person so they don't get Downs Syndrome, or Cystic Fibrosis, I'm all for it. Most people are against it for moral reasons, not scientific ones.
These kinds of arguments hurt others whether they mean to or not.
For thousands of years, the whole point of human existence was to perpetuate and improve both quality and quantity of life. Every hospital, every ultrasound, every drug and every anti-smoking poster exists solely to increase our lifespans and improve our quality of life. So why all of a sudden are people saying "No" to taking this quest to the gene level?
My sister-in-law has her masters in biology and is persuing another masters in genetic counselling. Curiously, she feels differently than I do about this. I believe that if we have the knowledge and the power to identify a Parkinson's, cancer, MS, Autistic, Down's, Lou Gehrig's, or a thousand other markers in our zygote's genetic code, and to eliminate that threat, then who in their right mind *wouldn't* do it? Why *wouldn't* you want your child to not have to go through the agony of being deaf or suffering through their twilight years consumed in the sad cloud of Alzheimer's?
She, on the other hand, believes that we shouldn't meddle, because if we do as I just described, it's a small step to handing prospective parents a form, letting them choose their baby's sex, hair colour, height, etc. I say, "so what?" Once again, why *wouldn't* you want to let people choose what their children will look like? The child has to have SOME eye colour, it's going to be either brown or blue or green or something ANYWAY, so what's the harm in letting the parents pick?
"We shouldn't be playing God," they say. But aren't we already? Haven't we been playing God since we started artificially extending peoples' lives through drugs and machines? Aren't contraceptive drugs "Playing God?" Aren't C-section births "Playing God?" Why do people accept all of those unnatural interventions, but draw the line at the next logical improvement of life?
I believe that if society can eliminate those horrible genetic diseases from our gene pool, along with reducing obesity and the violent tendencies that produce dangerous criminals (yes, physiological links have been shown), then the sooner society will improve. Yes, it might suck for those of us who are already here and can't re-write our genetic code, but this is not without precedent. Do we deny cancer treatment to everyone, just because there are people who are beyond treatment? Since they won't survive cancer, then no one should? It's ridiculous.
Science, medicine, and arguably society as a whole exist for the sole purpose of improving life. Evolving. I believe if we're at the threshold of these discoveries, that bring such amazing promises to our children and grandchildren, then it'd be counter to all the progress we've made so far in the last few centuries to stop now. We owe it to our children to use our knowledge to improve their lives. That's WHY technology exists.
You can't say in-vitro fertilization and abortion are OK, but genetic manipulation is not. It's hypocritical.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
The current state of affairs is exactly that, a situation where genetic modification technology is so crude that animals like Dolly, when they are viable at all, largely have various genetic defects associated with them.
Still we have scientists filled with hubris rushing to produce almost certainly defective clones. We can't even get Democrat/Republican mainstream agreement that birthing so many defective humans in experiments is just wrong. They're bickering over the lost economic opportunity of therapeutic cloning.
There may come a day when we can quickly and without error make clones or gene modifications. At that point we can get into whether human souls need to be carried around in a stock, biological chassis assembled the old fashioned way. We're just not there yet and we need to stop our current crop of frankensteins from creating armies of humans doomed to painful genetic diseases and early death.
I was thinking about this once - consider:
1) The body modification crowd - the carbon units running around with bolts/pins/rings through every body part they can pierce. In the extreme, there are folks like the snake man and the cat man, who are getting surgery to look like, well, a snake-man and a cat-man (dude)!
2) The furry crowd - folks who fantasize about being anthropomorphic animals.
Now enter GM. Given a sufficent level of understanding of genetics, what is to prevent somebody from modifying themselves to be an antropomorphic wolf or whatnot?
Now consider the other side of the coin - there will be folks who tweak their pets - at first to cure things like hip displascia, but also to make the animal a better companion (we've been doing this for millenia - consider recent studies that show that dogs are better at reading human body language than wolves, even when the wolf was raised from a puppy by humans).
Now consider some of the ludicrous laws that used to exist in places like South Africa - determining who is "white" and who is "black" by ancestry.
We might very well end up with a situation in which two individuals, indistinguishable by inspection, are accorded different rights, because one is a anthropomorphic wolf (a wolf made to look human) and one is a lupopomorphic man (a man made to look like a wolf).
Imagine the legal mess that will be!
www.eFax.com are spammers
For thousands of years, the whole point of human existence was to perpetuate and improve both quality and quantity of life. Says who? I am serious. Your basic assumption is flawed. There is no real evidence of this. Regardless of that, many MANY MANY people would disagree with your asssumption, for many different reasons. I myself would take issue with the idea that boosting quantity of life is even remotely positively connected to improving quality. It seems to me that history has shown it to be the opposite, that an increase in population generally leads to a decrease in quality of life. We can't have both. Not everyone is a Progress Junkie like you, and many of us don't trust people that are to make ethical decisions for everyone else. You obviously don't have the perspective or historical background to speak with authority on issues like this. I am not suggesting you can't say what you want to (please do!), but you have to understand that the rest of us are being perfectly sensible in ignoring your advice. (I am also not suggesting that I am the authority on these subjects, but I am not suggesting that everyone should go along with what I believe, either.)
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
Lets take a step back a do a reality check.
First, some basic genetics. It rare for a single gene (protein) to have a single function, and its rare for a given trait, say height or intelligence, to be governed by a single gene.
Also consider that we all know there are trade-offs and optimizations that have to take place in engineering, including genetic engineering.
So let's say you find a gene where one form predisposes the person to have a higher intelligence (say a more sensitive neurotransmitter receptor). So you put that form into a bunch of test babies and see what happens.
Maybe nothing happens.
Maybe they have an IQ that's 20 points higher on average than the general population.
Maybe the also show an increased incidence of manic depression, or epilepsy, or....
Back to the drawing board, lets try again. We found a gene we can modify to give a child super-strength.
Cool!
Funny how so many of them are completely debilitated by pulled or torn ligaments and tendons, and the occasional broken bone that couldn't handle the extra stess imposed by the super-muscles.
So much for super strength, they end up super cripples.
I'm trying to make a couple points here. First, it will take several generations just to test any given genetic manipulation, more to figure out how the requisite panel of genes will have to be modified to give an overall superior human.
Second, you can't just modify one gene and make an overall better human. There are trade-offs and unexpected consequences. Just because you have the parts manual doesn't mean you know how things work.
The one area where genetic manipulation can pretty much be guaranteed to be productive is in curing genetic diseases, where we know the gene, and we can change it back to "normal".
As for "Frankenbabies", any of you want to volunteer your kids for testing?
In Heinlein's "Beyond this Horizon", in addition to the typical gun-toting libertarian utopia, there was a rather interesting approach to Eugenics.
Basically, instead of creating new genes, couples would go to the genetic engineer when they wanted a child, and their child would be created from the best possible combination of their genes. If the father had one gene for diabetes, and another non-diabetic gene, the non-diabetic gene would be choosen for his offspring. If the mother had one gene for flat feet, and another gene for a normal arched foot, only the arched gene would be choosen for her offspring.
Now, this is an interesting approach, and one that has several benefits going for it. First of all, you aren't introducing new genes to the germ line - you are only maximizing the genes that are there. Second, its a harder policy to criticize - Its easy to pass a law against giving people new genes, its harder to pass a law preventing a mother from giving her son Tay-Sachs disease.
I agree that medicine and social programs have tampered with the standard notion of natural selection. But humans should also be observed on a higher level of Darwinian selection. Instead of just looking at survival of the fittest WITHIN a species, humans have shown that it is necessary to also look at survival of the fittest OF ALL species. Without this perspective, it is easy to get lost on the question of why humans have succeeded AT ALL. We should therefore look at humans with a point of view of the community rather than the individual. Without the community, humans would never have come to dominate.
One may argue that humans are successful because they are intelligent. Intelligence goes only so far - it's the knowledge that is passed on that is more important. Otherwise, we'd have people reinventing the wheel every generation, and never get to the point of building upon that to even make a cart.
Getting back on topic: Your conclusion on the result of the Black Plague is problematic. If the survivors passed on the gene in question, then why were there so many occurrances of the Plague in the same location over the centuries? Paris just kept getting hit with it into the turn of the 20th century.
I would instead prefer to look at WHY plagues occur and what stops them from re-occurring.
Given the necessity of humans to depend on each other, the tendency is toward denser populations. Conditions within any population produces an environment conducive to any other species willing to adapt. The Black Plague is an example of a special case. It took a while for humans, in general, to adapt to this threat.
One of the 'faults' of humans was to develop cities in identical ways. In particular, I'm thinking of waste disposal - just dump your trash in the trench in the middle of the street and let the rain carry it to the river. Since so many cities had this environment, a single species of parasite can easily infect multiple cities. (NOTE: since this is a geek forum - extend this to computer viruses with everyone using one OS).
You could attack this problem in one of two ways: (a) let individual natural selection take its course or (b) adapt the cities. Until just recently, the approach was (a). Once humans began to adapt as a whole (mandate washing hands before surgery, better waste disposal, water treatment, use of quarantine, etc) then there was less of a strain on the population density of the city. Each of these activities create their own problems, but such is the game of adapting.
Diseases are not always a bad thing, in the long run they are often helpful in preserving a species.
The species would be preserved WITHOUT disease, so I fail to see how having disease helps in preserving the species. Perhaps you could argue that disease acts as a "necessary evil" to produce a "greater good", but since the disease species are inclined to adapt to immunity it's a never-ending battle.
On the topic of GM-humans, I can see using this IF AND ONLY IF human existence would cease without it, including the loss of human interdependence (without which humans could not succeed). I don't see this happening anytime soon, but this would be another way that humanity would adapt to a threat. The oddity is that the result would no longer be "human" - what is being saved is civilization.
This is not my sig.