The increasing power and accessibility of genetic technology may one day give pa
ID: 3508937 • Letter: T
Question
The increasing power and accessibility of genetic technology may one day give parents the option of modifying their unborn children, in order to spare offspring from disease or, conceivably, make them tall, well muscled, intelligent or otherwise blessed with desirable traits. Would this change mean empowering parents to give their children the best start possible? Or would it mean designer babies who could face unforeseen genetic problems? Is genetic engineering of babies feasible? Should parents be allowed to select the sex of their baby? Specific genetic traits such as eye color? Should genetic engineering be allowed in cases of genetic diseases?
Explanation / Answer
Genetic engineering (in human) should be only allowed for treatment of genetic disease.
Genetic engineering is manupulation of genome so as to produce different or superior functions. It is ethically wrong to use this for production of designer babies as it will be only available to rich people, it will also not allow fair chance to all the children being born. This technology is not fully developed. Currently we are able to apply this for crop modification only (which has its own problem). There ar various risk associated with designer babies. There are other factors that determine healthy growth of child (both intrauterine and after being born) beside genetic makeup, example psychological environment, physical environment, nutrition and even the microbial environment. Manupulation of human genome (which has 20,000 + genes) is very difficult and we still do not know how each of them interact with each other for optimal growth and functions.
Let's take immunity for example. For development of immunity it is necessary that we are exposed to foreign and self antigen during development so as to produce antibody against them. There are reasortment and shuffling and rearrangement of different genes to produce different antibody. If this process is modified then we can not say for sure that whether this will benefit us or not, it may be even lethal. The process is not feasible as manupulation of each segment of gene is tedious, long, costly and risky task. In current scenario the risk to benefit ratio is too high.
Allowing sex determination is ethically wrong. It lefs to disturbance in natural sec ratio of population. Take India for example where female fotecide is common and everyone wants male child as they are bread bearer of family. For proper development of society the sex ratio should be around 1.
Specific genetic traits are very difficult to introduce/change. There is no surity of how it will affect expression of other genes.
Genetic engineering is currently being used to cure many genetic/heriditry diseases. Thus type of use is ethically right. Its for the benefit of human society.
(Key points - ethically incorrect, partiality, sex ratio, risk benefit ratio, lack of research and safety, mutation )
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