The advancement of genetic engineering techniques has raised the question: well, what about humans? If we can modify other organisms to have more desirable characteristics, can’t we do the same to ourselves? While genetic modification of humans is a possibility, there are a lot of ethical concerns involved. One argument against it is that by genetically modifying our babies, we will be “playing God” and that it is not a natural process. Another concern is that of eugenics, a social movement to improve the genetics of humans that has existed in the past. Francis Galton, often considered the founder of the eugenics movement, suggested that elite or higher class people were high class for a reason and should only mate with each other to maintain this “superiority” in their genetics. This resulted in the involuntary sterilization of people who were considered to have undesirable traits, such as mental retardation. So as you can see, this had a significant negative impact on the freedom and equality of people at the time. But rarely is an issue so black and white. Some scientists argue that genetic modification of humans is inevitable and will eventually happen. So should genetic engineering of humans be downright banned or should there be a line drawn out a little further? For example: should we allow genetic modification to prevent a baby from developing a disease but NOT allow genetic engineering to make a baby have blue eyes? For a brief look into some of the controversy surrounding this topic, take a look at this news clip: https://youtube/watch?v=3_c-6m9yJTA For those wanting something a little more in-depth, the following article takes a look at some of the limitations that we should consider imposing on this technology going forward: nature/scitable/topicpage/genetic-inequality-human-genetic-engineering-768 Have a great weekend!
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 22:00:00 +0000
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