Designer babies - PPR style

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No, that's just a common misperception of what it means. Birth control is also playing God, but we deem it okay.

Birth control just stops the life from happening, disigner babies is making the baby the way you want it. If you want a child, why can't you trust your own DNA?

That's a good argument and a valid opinion, but it doesn't speak to right and wrong. I guess you're saying you wouldn't want a designer baby, but you don't mind if others do?

Pretty much



Naa, just because I am not a fan of it doesn't mean I should deny it to anyone. If a family already has 2 girls and would like to have a boy for their last child, why not?

My only argument against it is the slippery-slope argument that leads to "non-designer children" becomming Pariahs.

Really, anyone who thinks the combination of Government, Insurance and GMO People is a good thing NEEDS to see GATTACA.

Any child of an "oops" is a pariah from birth.

Well, what about something like Tay Sachs. Certainly you don't think one should knowingly have a child with Tay Sachs, do you? Or does that kill people too quickly for your tastes? Do we let people be born with disorders that let them suffer long enough to spread their bad genes to someone else? A line has to be drawn somewhere...

You never know what genes have some type of benefit that we aren't aware of. There could be some sort of heterozygote advantage like there is in the sickle-cell allele. And we never know what will happen in our history, it is possible that some bottleneck event will occur and make one of these "defective" alleles vital to the survival of our species. If not the gene for Tay-Sachs, perhaps a gene that predisposes one to heart disease or cancer. Will you purge every imperfection from the genome? To do so, you greatly reduce the potential of the human genome to adapt to changing circumstances and cripple future generations.

I'm a microbiology major. If there is one thing I've learned from my molecular biology and genetics courses thus far, it is that, when you get down to it, we know jack s**t about how even the simplest things work in biology. Everything we do is a stab in the dark. Hell, the greatest medical advance in the twentieth century, perhaps in all history, was an accident from a guy with sloppy lab technique who couldn't keep his petri dishes free of contaminants. We should not play around so flippantly with things we know so little about. Let genetics take its course, it has served us well for millennia.

So...you think that maybe it's acceptable for someone to die of something like tay sachs because future generations might derive some completely conjectural benefit from it? I mean, the hope that it has a benefit in the future sounds nice, but in the meantime there are very real people suffering from the effects of this. Do people have the right to condemn their immediate offspring because they refuse to engineer them over some unknown benefit to people who may not exist?

I think it's something we should not be screwing around with too much. If people know they are carriers for some genetic disease, and they know they have a risk of bearing offspring who will suffer and potentially die from that disease, then they should take that into account when deciding whether or not to reproduce.

By deciding not to breed, aren't they already "screwing around"? After all, informed decisions based upon genetics are intentional, and they do impact the diversity in genetic material in successive generations. Thus, the issue is still where do you draw the line, as when are we "screwing around too much"?

AG: Making widespread and accepted the practice of deliberately altering an offspring's traits rather than rolling the meiotic dice is a terrible precedent to set, and would without doubt lead to horrific outcomes later on. People choosing (on a purely voluntary basis, with no societal pressure one way or the other, no tax rewards or penalties) to reproduce or not to reproduce is much different. An individual in the latter case elects not to contribute to the next generation's gene pool. In the former case, humans are consciously picking and choosing certain attributes, and this is not likely to lead to as good results as we get from random shuffling in ordinary sexual reproduction.

"Without doubt"? Obviously there is some doubt for some of these things. Particularly given that no matter what is chosen, horrific outcomes seem a likely result.

I do not see why the results are better if people do not consciously choose. I mean, your own argument from heterozygous traits just seems arbitrary. Yes, heterozygous traits can protect against certain pre-existent problems, but against the unforeseen? There is not much that could be done, and it is hard to justify the suffering you do with a small sliver of possibility.

I actually think you have an ethical principle, but not one you are putting forward so much as covering up with utilitarian justifications just to seem more neutral.

That type of argument can be made over any medical advance. Any conscious attempt by humans to survive using scientific knowledge is controlling the roll of dice. That's why we're so successful and that's why we face worldwide catastrophe with out environmental changes. It's just a matter of being very careful.