Reprogenetics and Eugenics

Reprogenetics and Eugenics

Advantages:

Reprogenetics will enable parents to give their children genes that

they themselves do not carry, thereby increasing their offspring's

chances for health, longevity, happiness, and success -- this is an

appalling prospect for many bio ethicists.

Eugenics embodies the desire and attempts of a society's leaders to

control the breeding practices of its citizens, including the forcible

sterilization or murder of those deemed as carrying undesirable genes.

Reprogenetics, by contrast, is concerned with the question of what

genes an individual child will receive, not with the vague,

unscientific goal of improving a society's gene pool. Moreover, it

gives control to individual prospective parents. While eugenic

practices led to a restriction of reproductive freedom and worse,

reprogenetics can do the opposite. It could help parents have children

with a higher likelihood of being healthy, without bringing direct

harm to anyone else.

Reprogenetics can be understood as an extension of parents'

fundamental motivation and desire: to protect their children and give

them all possible advantages in life. Parents in affluent societies

already provide environmental advantages to their children after

birth; reprogenetics could allow them to pursue the same objectives

before birth.

Of course, neither environmental nor genetic advantages guarantee

healthier, happy, successful children. But the lack of guarantees does

not prevent parents from spending US$140,000 to send their children to

the elite private university where I teach. If democratic societies

allow people to spend money to buy environ...

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norms, which would otherwise be shifting over time. For example, some

aspects of the behaviour of nobles at the court of Louis XIV were seen

as entirely normal then. Today they would be seen as seriously

deviant.

There will be two species of humans - those with genetic enhancements,

the superhumans and those without, the subclass. As they say in the

film, Gattaca, "we've got discrimination down to a science."One might

say, the only alternative, and one that may never be politically

viable: is a single world state in which all children are provided

with the same genetic enhancements and the same opportunities for

health, happiness, and success. James Watson, the co-discoverer of

DNA, believes it to be the responsibility of science to address the

'genetic injustice' that leaves people with inherited conditions.