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 Andrew Jerabek |
| We all desire perfect lives for our children. So is there anything wrong with giving them every edge we can afford to ensure their success, be it sending them to the best private schools or hiring top tennis pros to train them? What about removing genetic flaws before they're born?
Deciding how and when to meddle with genes may raise the most difficult ethical questions facing humankind in the third millennium. Now that the human genome has been deciphered, it won't be long before parents try to take the guesswork out of bearing children. Already, several doctors have announced efforts to attempt human cloning, making an exact genetic copy of anyone who hands over his or her dna. Other scientists are furiously working to perfect "germline" engineering, in which a gene would be permanently removed, added, or altered in an embryo, ensuring that certain genetic traits would or would not be replicated in all future generations. Surprisingly, cloning has already gained support from some doctors and ethicists as an infertility treatment of last resort. Germline engineering, though, raises more concerns. It may sound okay for parents with deadly hereditary diseases to pluck out the offending gene from an embryo. But where might that lead? Deep-pocketed parents could use the same technology to modify children in all sorts of ways, attempting to add genes for athletic prowess or intelligence, creating a social divide of genetic haves and have-nots. Princeton University biologist Lee M. Silver even predicts that, far down the road, we could end up with a new race of reengineered people who might not be able to breed with those whose genetic makeup was left to chance. Don't be surprised if another Cabinet post is created to regulate all this: Secretary of Human Nature. |