4thTimeLucky

I don't think anyone has posed this topic yet (feel free to shout at me if they have), but just looked at a Guardian article and thought: should we... shouldn't we...?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/genes/arti...947409,00.html

The floor is all yours....

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JNshorty

well if we make a perfect race they will undoubtedly realise they are perfect and then do all things possible in their nature to take over the world and unite it under their rule....

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JStrider

there was a movie... Gatica i think... where they did just that... and the people who were conceived naturally and had problems were limited to menial type jobs... like janitors and whatnot... then the people who had been concieved from purified genes - without problems were the scientists and astronauts....

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inkriminator

I think the real problem would arise when only when the rich could afford the procedure...then the wealth gap would manifest itself physically/mentally, not merely economically.

BBtB

I personally think it is a sick sad world that we are creating for ourselves. Wether we evolved to were we are now or we were created by a supreme being I don't think we should be fucking with stuff like this. Luckly I will be dead/old before this world comes about.

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Cynthetiq

sheesh... classic reading by Aldus Huxley called BRAVE NEW WORLD...Epsilon semi-moron...lowest man on the totem pole....

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annie1

bad bad bad idea

krwlz

i think cloning is wrong, not for religious reasons, but simply wrong....what is the point? why do we need it? i think some tomahawk missiles should be deployed to every cloning science lab in the world pronto

JadziaDax

Could you please elaborate on that?
It helps, in a discussion, to make your point clear and back any statement with facts or opinion.
Just saying "I agree" or "I disagree" with no reasoning behind it does no good for your side of the case.

Sorry for the interruption...
Now, for my opinion:

Eugenics is morally wrong. Adolf Hitler attempted to create a "master race" which lead to the Holocaust. Nothing good can come from it. In theory, you would be creating mutations even more undesirable than what already exists in society.

Haven't people learned from what happens in animals when they breed them for certain characteristics? Look at how the life spans of certain breeds of dog are so short due to all the inbreeding and crossbreeding done for certain traits.

We've come this far without cloning and breeding "super humans". I think it only spells trouble.

4thTimeLucky

Well, things seem to be looking a little one-sided at the moment, with the general consensus being summed up by the logorrheic annie1.

So here comes the devil's advocacy bit:

- With the greatest respect to JadziaDax [I'll be the sychophantic quote at the bottom of her posts any day] the Hitler argument is bunkum. Firstly, we are all aware of many factors contributed to the Holocaust and a "master race" was but one tiny one of them. Secondly, the Nazis were the first to publish the link between smoking and lung cancer in 1943 and their scientists were employed by the US post-war to help with the technology that would place a man on the moon. Are we also to condemn these advances because they have the hand of Adolf Hitler upon them?

- Why so, in theory? Would a mutation that prevented Cystic Fibrosis be undesirable?

- Yes they have. The result is the agricultural system we have today, that allows us to farm the high-yield animals that we do and keep our food at the quality and price that we have come to appreciate. And that is without even considering GM foods, which hold out the possibility of creating crops that will produce higher, more certain yields not only in the West, but also in third world countries.

- At one time we had also come this far without electricity, the automobile, the vaccine and well, everything! And quite a few of those looked like trouble at the time.
"All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to life but doomed to failure from an engineering standpoint."
(Editor, 'The Times' of London, 1905)

To JStrider: Yep, it was Gattaca [spelling corrected], a great film. But cinema speaks both ways. In Gatica the super-humans rule over the normal-humans, but in Blade Runner the super-humans are the slaves of normal-humans. You may think neither is particularly desirable, but films about the quiet progress of science are rarely box office hits.

My devil's advocate conclusion:
Eugenics holds out the promise of a better world, where the science to pre-emptively cure people of many debilitating conditions is funded/fuelled by the desire of a rich minority who want to have beautiful, brainy kids. I believe that such cures would be wonderful things and that whilst the funding source is not ideal, the rich will always have beautiful and brainy kids because they are able to attract beautiful partners and fund expensive college educations.

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spanky spangler

<pedant>

The film was Gattaca, from the four letters used to represent the genetic code (GTCA)

</pedant>

4thTimeLucky

Eugenics means lots of things to lots of people. The International Congress of Genetics concluded that the term 'eugenics' is used in so many ways "as to make it no longer suitable for use in scientific literature".

Having said that, eugenics almost certainly covers "finding cures for diseases" and therefore should be something you support. In fact eugenics goes one better than cures, it is about creating humans who will never suffer from cancer, cystic fibrosis, myopia, asthma..... in the first place

The first big success for genetic engineering was the production of insulin by genetically modified bacteria. Eugenics merely takes genetic engineering one step further: rather than having to modify bacteria to create something that cures diabetes, why not modify humans so that they never suffer from diabetes in the first place?

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4thTimeLucky

Well I'm glad that we have been able to introduce you to it



You have hit the nail on the head in a nutshell there!
On the one hand we have the hope of a world with less disease and brighter, fitter, happier human beings.
On the other we face the risk of creating a monstrous world and being unable to put the genie back in the bottle.

As an informed citizen the choice, quite literally, is yours.

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raeanna74

Sure you could make someone's definition of perfect but they would still be flawed by human nature. The law of nature is that everything tends toward a state of disrepair. They might start out perfect but any of you with children try and tell me you didn't see your own child as perfect when you first saw them. Also a person's personality and abilities are extremely affected by their environment, experiences, and education. We all have to potential to be successful what we do with it is what makes us who we are. Perfection by any one person's standard is unobtainable no matter what their genes are.

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hrdwareguy

Genetically making the perfect baby.....have to pass and just take my chances. Now discovering that they have severe health issues that could be corrected such as deformaty, apnea, things like that...maybe I could go for.

BTW, who decides if the perfect baby has blue or green eyes, black or brown hair (we all know it's not blonde :P) and so on and so on. The perfect baby is different to everyone. To me, the perfect baby is one that is born alive. Even better if they are healthy.

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