Should We Create Babies By Design?

"Would you like a blue-eyed or a brown-eyed baby? Is Alzheimer's in your family? We can screen for that. And obesity? We'll see what we can do." In the not-too-distant future, doctors might routinely ask such questions of expectant parents. They might even alter the genes of a developing fetus and create, in effect, custom-made babies. But should they?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/humans/babies/index.html


I am of the opinion that it is not only desirable but also inevitable. That man has a moral obligation to end genetic disease and to guide the evolution of the human race.

And if the kids were unhappy, they COULD blame their parents. (Not that they don't already.)

:eyes:

...this sort of thing would wind up. Maybe just a bit over the top but honestly, all of the things that the main character describes about his culture and the world in which he lives seem very plausable.

I believe that ultimately it is beneficial for mankind to have access to this technology. However, I am worried about the granularity which we will eventually be able to control our offspring. I believe that some conditions, like manic depression and attention deficit disorder have upsides as well as downsides. Some artists, for instance, have battled with nadirs which were crippling but been allowed zeniths which caused them to produce great works of art and literature.

Just a thought.

PB

dont i have the right to live without falling down and breaking my neck, or living without pain.
Anyone against not curring this disease i welcome you to come over and clean my ass when my arms are too stiff to move. Btw right now I am stuck in a two wheel cadilac because my legs are frozen together and cannot move. Well you come over and help me with my lack of mobility? I am waitting.

If I has such a disease in my family, I would never wish it upon my children were in in my power to do so. It's bad enough that it's inevitable that any kids I have will have very poor eyesight; I'd whisk that out of our genes if I could.

the human race is not physical.

the problem is that after one generation, due to the genetic drift, you are back to zero.

guiding evolution is a stupidity

One always wonders about folks posting pro-nazi foolishness.

What an odd "poll."

to end genetic disease and to guide the evolution of the human race."

Slippery slope...who gets to make the decision? Suppose a gene which showed a disposition towards violence or depression was discovered, should that be removed, too? And it only gets more murky from there---here comes the Master race again

both here in America and in Nazi Germany. If reproductive power is one of the ultimate expressions of person freedom why limit it?

The legal protections for groups of people and those of different physical and mental characteristics still exists in American law. I fail to see the problem.

and i feel that if there is ever a general consensus by the people in power on what babies should or should not have when coming out, sooner or later there will be a consensus on who should or should not be able to breed.

I suspect that if and or when this happens, the market place will make the decision. Most science today is market driven.

if it were up to the market, all the cars on the road would still have no seatbelts, drum brakes, suicide seats, get 5 mpg, tiny poly-glas tires and still spew out 20 times more pollutants...every engineering advance would have died before it ever had a foothold....it is my experience that the market is typically single-minded, simplistic, and uninformed...The bottom line the market cares about is price...

based on the pulse of the american market, the first thing people will probably want will be to find the 'gay' gene and edit it out---others will be concerned with adding aryan physical features, then comes disease immunity, intelligence, muscle development, personality development, etc etc.

and a flashlight. We presume to influence what several billion years of physics and random chance has wrought.

The Carl Sagan timeline, showing that 10,000 years of recorded human history fits 100 times into a million years, and 100,000 times into a billion years, is instructive. All the people we know of today, all the advances, writing, agriculture, law, endless war, Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, Greece, Rome, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, America, the Industrial Revolution, the World Wars, nuclear weapons - the entire book, everything we know today - all of that would be repeated 100,000 times in a billion years. Our species has been evolving for a few million years. Several hundred repetitions of ALL of recorded human history.

Our genetic code has been evolving over a few billion years if we include our complete ancestry. This was the time it took for physics and random interactions of chemicals and energy to form compounds capable of forming into living things, and specifically into a blueprint for our structure which makes all the parts work individually and together. It took that long for the nonfunctional results of changes in the code to be discarded, for more optimal forms to outlive less optimal ones. We've gotten to the point where we can list all the genes in the human genetic code, which means that we can make a table of the chemicals in the order they appear in our chromosomes.

HOWEVER, we by no means know what each of those genes does, nor do we understand all the interactions between them, nor do we understand all the implications of changing the form of what they produce, and how the interactions between bodily systems that we alter via genetic modification would change because of that modification. Poke here, and it wiggles there.

We barely manage to avoid annihilating ourselves regularly, and we are incapable of maintaining a civil society which does not fall prey to the degenerate impulses of some of its members (greed being the primary one in evidence currently), and we want to arrogate to ourselves the claimed ability to modify the structure of life in fundamental ways ? And talk about destiny and guidance ? Please, we have a moral obligation not to kill each other over who gets to stand on top of the nearest mound of shit. Let's get that one down before we presume too much about remaking the universe in our image. It has a way of repaying us in kind when we try that.

It'll probably be just as successful as our attempts at genetically modified foods have been.

The first time a parent is given the opportunity to "upgrade" their child's intelligence, are they going to say no? Once they understand that their neighbor may have no compunctions in upgrading their child the race is on.

No parent wants to intentionally handicap their child. And refusing a genetic upgrade will be seen as handicapping a child.

Who wants to sit at a playground and point out that the slow, dense child is yours?

Just as breast implants now seem to be nearly standard equipment, genetic upgrades will also prove to be irresistibly popular.

Of course, I've never had an upgrade, so I could be wrong. :)

Ever see corn in it's natural state?

Watch The Future of Food to get a good handle on how GM food is changing everything and threatening the family farm. It is truly scary.

Genetically modifying food has not been "widely successful", but breeding has. There is a very important difference betwixt the two.

during the green revolution. Been nothing but a boon to mankind.

:kick:

And Corinthian leather?

of gene technology are abundant.

repairing genetic deformities and fixing defects, like cleft palette, in the womb are good things.

Obviously, designing kids is wrong. But we do this already by choosing who we breed with. If you have a couple who are intelligent, and carry genetic traits, these are passed on.

Intelligence is genetic, to an extent, and people choose to be with people who have traits they like. This is natural selection.

Choosing dominant and recessive traits and guaranteeing an outcome between two people is just a step further.

Very complex ethical problem.

The rich would create "perfect" babies while the poor, or middle class would be left with what nature gives them. If one wanted to create a permanent caste system this would be one of the quickest, easiest ways to do it. I can understand people wanting to do it that have genetic diseases that could be passed to their offspring, and I think that exception for those folks would be okay, as long as it would be clear that the only modification would be for the disease factor, and not manipulation of the characteristics for the sake of a higher quality "product."

incompetence, hemophilia and lunacy among other genetic traits. Perhaps laws in the future can guarantee equal access to such science. If a society minimizes wealth inequity by implementing socialism then I would fear less your dystopian views.

"Well that would be a welcome change from European Aristocracy"

Baloney.. It would be European Aristocracy on steroids.. If it were to happen today, only those who could pay could play.. And who would those people be??

Mankind can barely guide itself through the mundane matters of life, and quite frankly it has yet to be shown that we can handle modern technology without blowing our collective asses sky high. Guiding our collective evolution is simply asking for disaster. All the variables cannot be taken care, and we might really be setting the human race up for a tremendous die-off if we proceed with such foolishness.

And who gets to make these decisions? The government, corporations, the individual. Each scenario has huge drawbacks.

I say let this one alone, and cure disease other ways, not through eugenics. Besides, if this sort of population cleansing was in place fifty odd years ago, we wouldn't have benefitted from the work of Stephen Hawking, and others.

Sorry, but I find this morally repugnant. Mankind doesn't have the wisdom to play God.

Getting rid of detrimental things such as Down's Syndrome, Alzheimer's, and other Genetics related disorders will be good.

Controlling the eye color, height, skin tone, etc. of a baby. NO! It just won't be a eugenics program in disguise, but it will have severe consequences for humanity as it will ruin the genetic diversity of the species.

There are problems, of course ... It will be a balancing act, as with all technology ...

I mean it's worked so well so far. Take for example the environment...

....I'd love to not curse my son with this damn male pattern baldness.

But as for everything else, I'm already blue-eyed blond (what's left) wonderbeing, with very low risk of cancer, heart disease, and all that other terrible stuff. Both my parents are in their 70's and are very healthy/active and are on no prescriptions for anything.

Here's the thing though...and the thing that will get some of my fellow DU'ers dander up...

If genetic testing, or alteration, progresses to the point where homosexuality can be filtered out at the embryonic stage - How many parents would say: "No...I want my child to be gay"?

The same thing was said in 1978 when the first test tube baby was born.

Today, the process of in vitro fertilization is considered commonplace and utilized by infertile couples around the world.


If we don’t destroy ourselves first, germ line genetic intervention will most likely become a future reality regardless of our opinions and there is a moral obligation to use the technology ethically for all humans.

a developing embryo, however, changing the color of the baby's eyes or other racial or ethnic traits doesn't really seem right to me.

It reminds me of an old "Twilight Zone" where in the future everyone could have plastic surgery to change into beautiful people. There were ten models of men and ten models of women one could choose from. So there was very little variety in looks and you could bump into someone who looked like you several times on a daily basis.

The moral of the story was that everyone was boring looking because there was so little diversity.