Term Paper on "Designer Babies"

Term Paper 4 pages (1246 words) Sources: 0

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Designer Babies

Oh look at her! She's just perfect!" We hear people say this all the time about newborn babies. However, the truth is that few babies are "perfect." They may carry genes that will predispose them to serious illness later on, or in some cases, guarantee that illness's development. Some little girls are born with the predisposition to develop a genetic form of breast cancer, while other children inherit, with certainty, the genes that will cause cystic fibrosis or Huntington's Chorea, a devastating and always fatal neurological disease. If you can control for those things, though, why stop there? Why not make sure your child has a high IQ, a pleasant personality? While we're making choices, how about the family that has four daughters and wants a son? Would it be all right to make their last child a boy? Their first? What if they want a child with blonde hair and blue eyes? Where will the line be drawn that separates acceptable use of this technology from unacceptable?

In the movie "Jurassic Park," a man with superficial knowledge about cloning hires a staff of researchers to bring dinosaurs back to life, so he can build a fantastic theme park. The researchers manipulate the genes to get complete strands of DNA, only to find that they could not control the science as well as they had thought: although the dinosaurs are all supposed to be female, somehow, the dinosaurs are breeding. As one critic of the park says, "Life will find a way."

In 1993, when that movie came out, it was science fiction. Today, however, we have the ability to selectively choose which babies will be born based on their genetic characteristics. While some people make convincing arguments for this, others wonder about unintended consequences. it's time for people to decide whether we should be able to select our future children based on genetic traits, however, because the technology to do so may be just around the corner (Jonietz, PAGE). Researchers have already nearly doubled the lives of both roundworms and fruit flies by changing only one gene (Jonietz, PAGE).

Some parents already have some control over the type of children they have. For those parents who need donor egg or sperm, they preview the characteristics of the person supplying the eggs or sperm. However, that is not terribly different than choosing one's mate, which could at least partly be choosing the genetic pool for one's children. However, science is on the brink of going much further.

The first applications of genetic manipulation will likely be medical. Embryos will either be manipulated to treat some genetic illness, such as Huntington's Chorea, or selectively chosen to develop to term based on the absence of the Huntington's gene. Huntington's Chorea is a devastating illness, and it would be hard to argue that children should be born who are destined for the terrible fate of that illness if it could be avoided. So, having such options can look attractive to families with such troubling medical histories.

The problem is that genetics is rarely that simple. Most of the time, genes only show a tendency, and experts cannot say whether the developing child will develop a specific illness or not. Even in identical twins, sometimes one develops a disease influenced by genetics, such as schizophrenia, while the other does not. Nevertheless, genetic researchers believe that eventually we will be able to screen embryos for combinations of genes that predispose people not only to life-threatening illnesses but for personality traits as well (Jonietz, PAGE). However, people's personalities aren't as simple as a cluster of traits. Suppose, for instance, we could identify a cluster of genes associated with Attention Deficit Disorder AD/HD. Would it actually be good… READ MORE

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