Slashdot Mirror
Could Colorblindness Cure Be Morally Wrong?
destinyland writes "One in 12 men suffers from colorblindness, though '[t]he good news here is that these folks are simply missing a patch of DNA ... which is just the kind of challenge this Millennium is made for. Enter science.' But NPR's Moira Gunn (from Biotech Nation) now asks a provocative question. Is it wrong to cure colorblindness? She reports on an experiment that used a virus to introduce corrective DNA into colorblind monkeys. ('It took 20 weeks, but eventually the monkeys started distinguishing between red and green.') Then she asks, could it be viewed differently? 'Are we trying to 'normalize' humans to a threshold of experience?'"
Plus infrared and ultraviolet.
When Qualia is concerned, nothing is certain. It's reasonable to produce scientific measurements of this and that. But what colours (or saturation) they *map* to inside the brain is another matter. For example, some creatures are monochromats, which means they can probably only see one colour. But what that colour actually is, is anyone's guess.
Apparently, some people have four colour cones instead of three. Do they see a new colour competely outside our range, or just have extra 'depth' to distinguish our current range more easily?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
It can't be wrong if we are fixing an inability to process particular wavelengths of light.There are definitely other things that we could do when we mess with bio-engineering /genetics etc that could raise moral and ethical issues . Now, using DNA to provide someone the ability to hear like a dog etc etc, that is more serious stuff ofcourse or maybe not.
Maybe it is moral that if we have technology that can improve our senses, it is ok to improve it even if we humans were not gifted with it at birth. I dont believe Nature is perfect.
In all fairness it is a valid question to pose.
Genetically altering humans is a fairly big ethical question. Granted curing color blindness is fairly harmless, but once we know how to do that and accept it can be done it pretty much stands to reason that we will find out how to do other things and will accept doing those.
While curing color blindness and any number of genetic defects might in the long run be the best course of action, at least from a "continuation of the species"-viewpoint, at what point do we draw the line.
I mean when we first begun to do surgery we did it to save life and for "the betterment of mankind", and now we are doing cosmetic surgery. In the case of cosmetic surgery the point can be made that people who have not had the surgery are at a disadvantage (Can't get certain jobs on ground of attractiveness, and so on), now when we start to do "cosmetic" DNA surgery we are tampering with humanity at a pretty basic level and run the risk of the species splitting off in to one (or several) different species, those who had have the genetic augmentations and those that have not.
So once we are two different species what'll the augmented species think of the non-augmented one? Will the people who for whatever reason are not able to get or unwilling to get the augmentations done be considered as some kind of untermench or will the non-augmented line be terminated all together?
I am not advocating that we should ban all genetic medicine, far from it, personally I would love to be cured of my colorblindness and I'm sure there are any number of people with various other genetic defects that would like to be cured.
This also raises the question: how do we decide what constitutes a defect, and how to we go about determining if it should be cured? Also if we are set on removing genetic defects from the gene pool how to we deal with people who do not want the cure? Do we forbid them from breeding so they will not pass on their "defective" genes?
Whatever is the case, it's a valid debate and one we'll WILL need to have before we do these sorts of things, even if they seem kind of harmless.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
I beg to differ. Color-sighted people are physically incapable of doing something that colorblind people can do.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
What if they someday find a "gay gene" (or even just those for various intersex conditions) and cure those?
"Would you like to be heterosexual, just like everyone else?"
(The interesting thing about that is that you can piss off both sides of that debate. What if, in the future, being gay or not was indisputably a choice thanks to medical science? Would those who chose to cure themselves be seen as traitors or...?)
I went to an EE prep school and had to tell one of my classmates - after he asked me if a stripe on a resistor was orange or red - that if he had difficulty discerning the two colors, he should check with the school council on this matter. They did indeed offer a variety of different courses to him simply because - by law - he would not be allowed to work with a large variety of systems based on e.g. old color coding of wiring (red and green for live and neutral) in houses.
He *could* still pursue the course he was taking, but they did warn him that in either direction (installation tech - not just the 220V AC systems but also the very common 24V and 12V DC systems used in control panels - or electronics), he would face many issues ranging from inconveniences to basically a note on his certification that would preclude him from working on various electrical systems.
On an up note - he went into mechanical engineering instead and last I bumped into him he was designing parts for water turbines/scoops that raise water from a lower water level to a higher water level without harming - and in some ways in fact helping - fish migrations.
However, he still decided to give up his first passion. Maybe he would have gone on to do great things in that field just as well.. so if his colorblindness could have been 'cured' in the term mentioned in the story summary (20 weeks), then he could have simply applied for a hiatus on medical grounds and return the next year (or try and fast-track from the next semester) without re-enrollment procedures/etc.
Yeah, the 'moral dilemma' is kinda silly. But why stop at curing colourblindness? When can I get my IR and UV vision?
Here is a tale from one of the great Now-It-Can-Told memoirs of World War I:
Of Spies &
Stratagems by Stanley P. Lovell
Lovell was the director of R&D for the OSS. The man who became Bill Donovan's Professor Moriarty. You'll find no better introduction to the real world of spy tech than here.
A most important field of deception and concealment concerned the landing of spies and saboteurs on enemy occupied coastlines, and at the exact spot where he or she would be met by friendly personnel from the underground organizations. This proved to be a most difficult problem for us to solve. Such landings had to be made on nights with no moon.
Early in the war fixed lights and blinkers were used on the shore to mark the rendezvous, but enemy airplanes and sur face vessels often spotted them. Many an agent and his reception committee of resistance fighters were surrounded, picked up and summarily shot.
The ideal shore signal to guide the O.S.S. agent to the selected place was an ultra-violet beacon. A small UV bulb, powered by a single dry-cell battery, would flash intermittently for almost a year. The difficulty arose when we found that even a person with superior eyesight could pick out the ultra-violet signal in the blackness of night only from a distressingly short range. I could not detect it at all beyond one hundred feet. I was about to abandon the UV system of landing signal as worthless, when a surgeon specializing in cataract
removals told me by chance that patients who had undergone that operation had extraordinary sensitivity to ultra-violet light. We asked for volunteers and tested several people whose cataracts had been removed. To our astonishment we found that they could see and pinpoint the little, flashing ultra
violet light from over a mile away, whereas the rest of us could
see nothing but inky blackness.
Brave, elderly people, so selected, guided our operators
infallibly to these normally invisible rendezvous. I am certain
the Germans and the Japanese never had the faintest idea of
how it was done.
Something that doesn't just give someone a 'different', 'unique' or 'special' perspective on reality, but an affliction that removes and impedes capability to function as well as the rest of us.
Actually, colourblindness can be legitimately described as a unique perspective on reality. One of my high school friends is fully red colourblind (protanopia). He's in the military where his colourblindness is an asset. Most camouflage is almost useless against him due to the patterns being designed with normal colour vision in mind. He also has far better night vision than a person with normal vision would have.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time