Pandora's box Genetically Engineering the Brave New World

[So fist]

Dolly the sheep was followed by a gigantic boom in life sciences that continues today.  The following article from the New York Times is just an example of the ever increasing level of sophistication genetic engineering is gaining as an applicable scientific practice.  Yet the moral implications are obvious.  Is it right to modify the genetic code of an unborn child?  Is it right to mess with our genetic code in general?  What do you see as the risks and benefits of this, as Fukayama coined it, "Posthuman Future" before us.  I foresee it as starting off with the elimination of hereditary diseases such as Down's Syndrome, but where does it end from their?  Why not have a blonde child?  Or one that is eight feet tall? Where do you stand on this issue?

Engineering by Scientists on Embryo Stirs Criticism

By ANDREW POLLACK
Published: May 13, 2008
Researchers in New York have created what is believed to be the first genetically engineered human embryo, which critics immediately branded as a step toward “designer babies.â€

 

[sixtyandaquarter]

We breed the perfect human, and she hates us for it.

At BEST pipe dream we'll be able to stop deficiencies in life, on a genetic level.  We can also have designer kids.  It'll be great.  Li'l Timmy comes in plaid now.

Seriously though we'll never allow ourselves to go to far ahead.  We'll do to sheep what we did to potatoes and turn them purple.  We'll have genetically enhanced chicken that grows 3x it's size 3x as fast and is less prone to break down diseases and malformes.

We'll give children in the womb a bit of a booster shot in hopes of stopping brush spots in the eyes, and maybe - maybe have the ability to adjust little things like the cleft operations many children have now being a thing of the past, possible minor deformational moves both physical and possibly mental.  It only takes one string to screw everything up, so we give it a li'l vitamin juice and it's strong as good as new.  Right?
Nothing wrong there.

We won't, as a society we simply won't, allow for anything more.  We'll never reach the day where we can genetically script our children.  It won't be like in the movies.  I want a kid with dark hair.  Tall.  I'd like him to be straight and have blue eyes.  Oh, and make him smart.  Won't happen.  We'll hold ourselves back out of fear of the super soldier.  Fear of big brother.  Fear that the randoms in life, that our cookie cutter lives just got easier to Hallmark and put on a shelf.

 

[Thundergod]

Scientific American places the wide spread usage of genetic modifications on children at around 2020(I'd have to find the magazine to figure out for sure) and I agree with this.  Think of it this way.  In the wild, animals do everything to make sure their offspring might have a better chance than their neighbor, this is the same thing.  Humans have pretty much eliminated natural selection, and this is one step closer to an uncertain future.  The thought of a couple going into a "Genetic modification clinic" and saying things like "We were hoping for an Athelete this time, could you give him Micheal Jordon's calves?" is a little creepy though.  Gene donation and Gene copyrights will see a boom at anyrate.

As for engineering non-human organisms.  I'm all for it, I think it's a really good idea, if used in moderation.  We're on our way to making super foods.  Things like the glo-fish(First GM pet) should be stopped though, that's just a waste of time and money.   

 

[Dissonance]

Can you imagine breeding thousands of genetic copies of superdissonances?  :thumb:

I'm all for it.  Sixty's ideas of a supersoldier won't really come about simply because that genetically superior kid who is supposed to theoretically grow up and overthrow everybody else will still most likely love his parents.  It would be akin to me murdering my mom because the majority of my racial makeup is white, while hers is nonwhite.

 

[sixtyandaquarter]

You make it sound as if I was suggesting a super soldier is feasible logically and realistically.  Other than having to raise it to be psychotic to ensure it's purpose, we'll still fear the concept of one group more advanced than the rest of us.

We'll fear with racism of our own creations, far to much to allow for this.

 

[Phoenix]

One thing I have to say is: Why the hell can't we be happy with what children we get? That's half the fun of it. If genetic engineering continues this way, we'll end up in a Orwell's 1984 situation.

 

[lunarhiro2002]

If genetic engineering continues this way, we'll end up in a Orwell's 1984 situation.

Or in Hitlers dreams...

 

[Dissonance]

Or in Hitlers dreams...

What?  How does this make any sense?

One, genetics hadn't been discovered when Hitler was alive - the two subjects aren't related.

Two, had they been, Hitler would've been vehemently opposed to gene-based technology, except to possibly create biologicals tooled to target specific gene sequences.  Hitler was interested in the extermination of other races and the rise (of what he believed to be) the ayran race. 

 

[4StarGeneral]

Well I have to agree with Sixty and say that we'd definitely stop ourselves before we even got close to a situation like in Brave New World. (and since I'm referencing stuff here) It could possibly go as far as "The Island" where as we have companies "manufacturing" body parts to help people who may be dying. But then again, where would it stop? Would it stop before we become almost immortal, getting new body parts to keep us alive forever?

But I digress...I doubt genetic engineering will go very far for many, many years, because its still something new, and we don't know alot about it really.

 

[Stardust]

I am not worried about general society.  We will, when the time comes, agree upon a set of laws that will regulate the changes that can be made with this new technology.  I am worried about the government, who would likely ignore these laws in an attempt to create the "perfect" soldier.  It will eventually become similar to the cloning process used in Star Wars.  The clones will have their genes modified so they grow faster, learn faster, and follow any command without hesitation.  If something has no grasp of right and wrong, what will stop them from following the most disastrous of orders?  It is not our creations that we should worry about.  It is us.

The technology could be used for good, though.  There are many diseases that could be prevented which would ultimately eliminate natural selection altogether.  This could be good or bad.  It would be good in that it will prevent suffering that would have occurred otherwise, but bad because we are already overpopulated.  Letting people live longer, possibly forever, could be devastating to our society and Earth.

However, this technology is ultimately a long way from being as advanced as what I'm talking about.  The restrictions put on the research will slow its progress until we either accept genetic "enhancements" or ban them.

 

[charnak]

very interesting discusion,

It is my Personal Belief that modern medicine is to blame for many many problems, too many people are allowed to survive where nature would have spared their inferior lives from the cruel existance of this world, too many children are born Preme or Autistic or with downsyndrome, because weak people are kept in the gene pool,

historicaly these geneticaly inferior people would have been weeded out by dissese or society,

so is geneticaly altering people the answer to this problem?

look the people around you, so many of them have such miniscule levels of comon sence that it is scary to think they  are the people going to the polls and voting, that they are working things, in my opinion this is yet another result of this,

in the coming years we will unlock many of the secrets of the human genone, so what is to stop us from choosing whether our child is a boy or a girl, endowing them with innate tallents to make the child prodegies, "I want my son to be the next motzart, I want my daughter to be the next Izzac Nuton" or even more practical things, increased immune systems hightened resistance to cancer, people who are not geneticaly prone to diabetes.

but honestly where do we draw the line, we make all of your kids into Clark Kent and Steven Hawking, but what about the people in our gereation who arent quite rite in the head, the kinds of people covered in tatoos, with horns surgicaly implanted in their foreheads and their toungs split like snakes, whats to stop a person like that from saying " i want my son to have devil horns and bat wings" or "I want my daughter to be a little charab baby, she should have angel wings" or better yet, "My daughter should be a nekkojin, give her cat ears a tail and diamond shaped pupils"

genetic engineering may fix all the downfalls of inferior modern indivuduals, but you have to think about how you geneticaly altered children will be seen by society, growning up as the only kid in school that looks like a cat,

its inevitable that people will try to make transpecites (people composed geneticaly of more than one species) in fact  i even put this in the game im working on to explain why people have fanciful animal parts.

Or in Hitlers dreams...

What?  How does this make any sense?

One, genetics hadn't been discovered when Hitler was alive - the two subjects aren't related.

Two, had they been, Hitler would've been vehemently opposed to gene-based technology, except to possibly create biologicals tooled to target specific gene sequences.  Hitler was interested in the extermination of other races and the rise (of what he believed to be) the ayran race. 

sorry to double post but i just have to point out that yes it was discovered, mandel had already discoved genetics and more importantly that is exactly what hitler was doing, he was geneticaly controling his populous, he removed the peoples whom he belived to be inferior, Jews, Gypsies, Mentaly disabled, Little people, Homosexuals, anyone born with disablities.

the premice of this was to eradicate them to prevent inferior people from contaminating the genepool,

the fact is there are no inferior people, only inferior minds, Hitler being one of them. granted people are born with genetic disabilities, but those who overcome them are only that much stronger,

by my above statement you may think i would support allowing genetically disabled persons to die, well in concept its a good idea, but in aplication it is just cruel, it would be better to see these things ahead of time, while the child is still developing, they have tests that can be done during early pregnancy to determine if the child will be born autistic, and if you crack the genetic code completly you could examine an unborn childs DNA to see if there is anything wrong with it, then it would be the parrents descicion whether to abort the pregnancy in order to spare the child from what ever cruel life he or should would have to face and over come,

to be honest i would not have problems with people geneticaly altering there children, so longs as the alterations dont hinder the childs perception of the world or phsycological developement, for example you cant make a supersmart kid who thinks he is better that everyone else, he will grow up with a god complex, in the same sence you couldnt have your child grow up with physical features that would have them seen as a freak, even though i think people with angel wings would be beautiful, and wouldnt mind having them myself.

i say childs interests should come before the parrents wishes for the child

Don't double post.  Use the modify button to add. ~ The Great Terror

 

[___]

Personally I suspect we are going to find that genetics are more complicated than "I want +2 strength, +3 int" "that'll be 5 million dollars, sir".  Attributes judged by some arbitrary human scale are not going to have much to do with genetic code, and there isn't going to be an easily identifiable set of genes that can just be tweaked to give a desirable trait that's more than cosmetic; hell even most cosmetic changes are likely to rely plastic surgery for a long time. Something as complicated as intellectual or athletic performance relies on a huge network of delicately balanced genes, and personalities, forget about it - we don't even understand enough about the human mind to understand what causes personality in concrete terms, let alone isolate genetic factors yet.  In a few centuries this will be something to worry about.

What we can change in a realistic time scale, and probably very easily, are defective genes which are responsible for a variety of hereditary diseases.  Controlling and reversing negative mutations in the human genome could have incredible benefits to health and quality of life; assuming risks are negligible, it would be a crime *not* to develop and and apply this technology.  Especially in a perfect world where health care is universally available; even so, wealthy people already benefit from a huge gap in health care as it is, and eventually expensive services become less expensive and filter down to the masses.  We shouldn't hold up new technology for fear that rich people will get the benefit of it exclusively, rather we should develop technology as rapidly as possible and deal with wealth gaps appropriately as a separate issue.

There is the complicated question of how we may affect the long-term evolution of the species by "fixing" our genome. Perhaps a handful of negative mutations could work in concert to create a beneficial trait in the right arrangement, or maybe there are structures moving toward obsolescence such as the appendix that might actually benefit from further mutation.  If we stop ourselves from mutating we may possibly stop ourselves from developing.

 

[charnak]

i do agree, it is not an issue for now, however a few centuries is a huge over estimation i would say between 50 -70 years, consider the world 30 years ago, 1978, computers took up entire rooms and networking them meant having a person swaping out reals of magnetic tape,

Poeple actualy perposly infected themselves with pathogens in order to boost their immune systems, docotrs performed "exploritory Surgery because blasting you with radiation was not an effective means of diagnosing your alements

The only thing people knew about diseases like Aids came from urban myths, the point is advances in science and technologies have advanced by unfathomable measures, in just 30 years i mean just in respect to genetic engineering,

lets go back to my vacine example, we bio engineer vacines now surface protiens from bacteria and some virus are placed onto inert cells and injected rather than injecting potentialy lethal pathogens, we have bio egineered bacteria to produce inciline for diabetics so we dont need to harvest it from cattle, we have maped like much of the human geneome already, we can predict what your children will look like based on dominant and recessivle alelles another 50 years and it is more than plausable that we will have geneticaly altered humans.

in fact gene therapy exists now, we can intruduce bone marrow which produces blood cells with genes differing from your own for patients with diseases like luqeamia (SP) and sicle cell anemia,

i do agree with nphyx, except in regaurds to the time line, also my point about the childs personality was not a direct result of the genetic engineering but rather the effects that being a social outcast will have on the child

 

[Stardust]

Even if we "fix" our genome, more problems will likely arise.  We haven't tested anything yet, so we don't really know how changing genes can affect a person.  Perhaps it will create a new disease that's worse than anything we can treat with it.  We won't truly know what we can do until we start testing on humans or animals (although I doubt this will happen any time soon).

 

[Mr. Thunderpussy]

It's funny that no one has stated that whatever we do to our bodies, we must compensate for the alteration. What I mean is, for example, I want my child to have enhanced strength in his arms. My child would have to compensate for his increased strength by developing something that can withstand the physical damage it would take when it hits something too hard. It wouldn't be able to have human skin, because it would inevitably be damaged by a heavy push or shove. Same thing for its' bones. They'd have to be more dense, which means they'd have to be bigger on some level. That automatically makes them too heavy for the shoulders to lift them, so the shoulders would have to be the same. And the body. And the legs. Then the neck would as well, not for the same reasons, but because if the body moved to strong in one direction, the force required could be enough to damage or even break the upper spinal column.
Assuming that evolution takes place and my child turns out like this. What I've got is a hulking baby that will either be considered a freak amongst his classroom peers, or I end up dead because my child accidentally rams his toy car though my chest. Assuming that evolution does not take place, I've got a child who is too strong for his own body, and will most likely end up damaging himself with each movement, or dies due to his hear smashing his innards up.

This was a pretty extreme example, but I hope you get what I mean. Not only will their be consequences if something goes wrong, but we would also need to compensate for whatever changes we make. Genetically, we have been specifically to be what we are now. If we changed something, it wouldn't fit with the rest of the makeup. So, that means we'd either have to leave GE alone, or we'd have to rewrite the whole genetic sequence, leading towards Genetic Creation more than Genetic Engineering.

 

[Venetia]

um systematicanifailure you're kind of taking this to like a magical fantasy realm.

they're not talking about making humans into super saiyans, they're talking about simply editing genes to weed out deficiencies and perhaps endorse qualities. this whole GATTACA/eugenics debate is about things we CAN do to take what we have and make it the most perfect form of that.

when two donors come in, the only genes they have to work with are the very genes which are donated. a mother and a father would have their genes combined. The combination would be edited with other available genes. It would not be comprised of magically making this chromosome REALLY BIG or something--they can't work with genetic material they just don't have.

you'd never see a plaid baby with giant muscles that its spine doesn't support because, simply put, there are no genes to do that!

perhaps, in many generations, scientists may discover a way to CREATE genetic material from simple amino acid chains, but for the time being, all they can move around is the shit they already have. rearrange, cut, paste. not create.

example: so two parents walk in. they're both black. they don't have ANY blonde genes, but they want a blonde kid. either they're going to have to find a donor for some blonde genes, or else they're not getting a blonde kid.

as for altering actual physical structure - that'd break the body down. you can splice in some "athlete" traits, but to actually CREATE a brute with little dangly legs, it'd involve a process DECADES more sophisticated than anything we'd see in our lifetime.

 

[bedi nik bzez emak]

;D

 

[Mr. Thunderpussy]

lol, I was just highlighting a highly negative example, which went towards the fact that alteration without understanding can bring on dire consequences. What's a super saiyin?
Changing even the smallest thing, like making a kids hair blond could open the window for scalp deterioration diseases (sounds far-fetched, but so did radiation poisoning from nuclear weapons), or destroying down-syndrome could create mentally unstable people in the future. I don't know. I learned all of this stuff from a philosophy teacher, so I wouldn't be surprised if my knowledge is a bit incorrect (although I have been flicking through a few websites, just for reference).

 

[bedi nik bzez emak]

;D

 

[bradleydfc]

I'm not too worried about it. There will be laws put in place, they can't make a perfect child anyway

Besides, what we could do is inject information about global warming direct into the womb.