That's the point I was making, Terrence. What caught my attention was the following sentence in Lather's original post, especially the ending, in bold:
We will predetermine the health, beauty, mental vigor of any
offspring we choose or are authorized to have.
Here was my comment:
I presume you have read Brave New World. Once you have some entity -- let us say, the state -- in the business of authorizing the number of offspring you may have, what's to prevent it from deciding against letting you define its characteristics the way you want? Or from deciding that it would be more efficient to raise children
in bottles, on the assembly line, according to its own specs?
It was earlier in the post that I addressed the problem of the technology itself. Lather was talking about a complete, top-to-toe, engineering of the embryo:
...in "engineering" a human being you must 1) think of everything; 2) be able to control everything, and, most importantly, 3) have your priorities perfectly straight. How can you expect that of anyone?
To dot the "i": We could easily delete what otherwise would have proved to be the most valuable traits in the genetic code of the unborn child. And a trait that we might think valuable would turn out not to be.
As I said, I have no problem with genetic engineering if it is used to "edit out" debilitating hereditary diseases, for example. But that is limited genetic engineering, for a limited purpose. I personally would not want to see it go any further.
Joan
P.S. Brave New World was written before Orwell's 1984, yet at the moment, the realization of its scenario seems to me to be more likely than that of 1984. |
