The Book
The Code Breaker touches on the advancements mankind has made in our ability to read and now write the genome. My cliffs touch only on the area of the ethics.
The age of designer babies is upon us and the only question is what will the politics allow and what will individuals available themselves if allowed or through the black market.
Cliffs:
- uncontroversial uses are things like seeing an unborn child has a defective gene that will result in him being born with Sickle Cell Anemia. A quick correction of that gene removes that lifelong burden.
- A controversial use is described as using the technology to address the 'heritable' parts of our DNA (height, looks, etc) such as was the recent case of the Hong Kong '
CrispR Baby Scandal'
- the philosophical and theological issues are touched upon
in this video suggesting we should consider mankind dabbling in what would be considered 'God's Realm' along with other questions.
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So some questions:
1- Do you have a formed view on this for or against, other?
2- Do you think theological questions should be part of the over all discourse and decision making going forward?
3- Do you think such 'ethical' type and 'religious' restrictions would largely only be a factor in more 'Western Countries' and more totalitarian nations (China, Russia) would gladly see this as an exploit and advantage they could gain while America and the West hesitated wrestling with them?
4 - if you had the resources and availability and had a child birth approaching and you knew the science was perfected and thus you could give your child what are considered ideal traits (height, looks, etc), and you faced no penalty for doing so, would you?
5 - what things would you consider to be in the ethical batch to 'correct' (diseases, dwarfism, etc) and which ones would you consider unethical (looks (blonde hair, blue eyed, height (do you set a limit?), etc)