…contd…
i just wanted to add a few excerpts from this British news article. i thought it was an excellent read… It is extremely long but a fantastic read. i would love some comments on it.
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…what if, instead of crudely cheating with hypodermics, we began literally to programme children before they were born to become great athletes? Muscle size, oxygen uptake, respiration - much of an athlete’s inherent capacity derives from her genes. What she makes of it depends on her heart and mind, of course, as well as on the accidents of where she’s born, and what kind of diet she gets. And her genes aren’t entirely random: perhaps her parents were attracted to each other in the first place because both were athletes. But all those variables fit within our idea of fate. Flipping through a catalogue at a clinic for athletic genes does not; it’s a door into another world.
And as we move into the new world of genetic engineering, we won’t simply lose races, we’ll lose racing : we’ll lose the possibility of the test, the challenge, the celebration that athletics represents. Say you’ve reached mile 23 of a marathon, and you’re feeling strong. Is it because of your training and your character, or because the gene pack inside you is pumping out more red blood cells than your body knows what to do with? Will anyone be impressed with your dedication? More to the point, will you be impressed with your dedication?
“Genetics” is not some scary bogeyman. Most of the science that stems from our understanding of DNA is marvellous - cancer treatments, for example. But one branch of the science raises much harder questions.
…suppose you’re not ready. Say you’re perfectly content with the prospect of a child who shares the unmodified genes of you and your partner. Say you think that manipulating the DNA of your child might be dangerous, or presumptuous, or icky? How long will you be able to hold that line if germline manipulation begins to spread among your neighbours? Maybe not so long as you think. “Suppose parents could add 30 points to their child’s IQ,” asks the economist Lester Thurow. “Wouldn’t you want to do it? And if you don’t, your child will be the stupidest in the neighbourhood.” That’s precisely what it might feel like to be the parent facing the choice. Deciding not to soup your kids up… well, it could come to seem like child abuse.
…] With germline manipulation, you get only one shot; the extra chromosome you stick in your kid when he’s born is the one he carries throughout his life. So let’s say baby Sophie has a state-of-the-art gene job: her parents paid for the proteins discovered by, say, 2005 that, on average, yielded 10 extra IQ points. By the time Sophie is five, though, scientists will doubtless have discovered 10 more genes linked to intelligence. Now anyone with a platinum card can get 20 IQ points, not to mention a memory boost and a permanently wrinkle-free brow. So by the time Sophie is 25 and in the job market, she’s already more or less obsolete - the kids coming out of college just plain have better hardware. The vision of one’s child as a nearly useless copy of Windows 95 should make parents fight like hell to make sure we never get started down this path.
…] Though our lives in the developed world are easy enough by comparison with lives in other places and other eras, challenges remain. Or, as when we run marathons, we can invent them. Our parents try to draw us maps, which we can follow slavishly, burn in the fires of our rebellion, or glance at from time to time as we chart our own courses. But these new technologies show us that human meaning dangles by a far thinner thread than we had thought. What if the ending to our story is already written, our compass already set? What if we have been programmed, or at least must suspect each time we choose a path that we have been nudged in that direction by our engineered cells? Who then are we?
…] We’d have to start considering more carefully what we owe to society (which is to say what we owe to children in general, and to the future) as distinguished from what we owe to our own individual children in our own particular moment. Over time, this politics will let us say, “This far and no farther.”
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