Michael Andreucci
Building Better Humans
What if humans could pick and choose what they wanted their child to look like, act like, even being able to choose how intelligent they are. While this seems impossible and unrealistic, humans are on the verge of taking control of our evolutionary process. In fact, it’s already happening, but in its nascent form. Genetic engineering like this is currently being carried out in labs and clinics and probably will not be available to the general public for a while. Right now, the main thing that the geneticists working on this are able to accomplish is identifying single gene mutations that cause diseases such as huntington's diseases and extracting that gene from the embryo. While this is an awesome thing to be able to do, it’s not even the coolest part about what scientists are heading towards. In the near future, humans will be able to use the same process for finding the mutated genes to find the desirable genes that hold character traits such as intelligence or empathy. This could lead to a multitude of things, both good and bad but I will get into that later in this section. It is estimated that in approximately 2-3 years we will be able to sequence the cell of a five day old embryo and be able to tell how tall the child will be within 1-2 inches. In 5-10 years we will be able to identify what the child’s IQ will be within 20-30 points. What this would allow scientists to do is to select the “best” embryo to implant in the mother. This could rapidly change increase the intelligence of a family, community, and country which would bring along evolutionary changes to our species that normally would have taken thousands to even millions of years through normal evolution.
This brings me to my question. Is this ethical to do? Just because you CAN do something, does that mean that you should? While all this genetic engineering sounds like a good thing, it could lead to so many horrible outcomes because we really have no idea what we are messing with. For instance, if scientists were to remove a mutated gene that causes huntington's, who’s to say that that same gene also protected the embryo from a different disease that we don’t know about? As much as we know about the brain, there is still way more that we don’t know about and dabbling in this kind of genetic engineering could lead to horrible consequences and we as a populations need to assess the risks versus the rewards of doing this. What if having a child turns into a consumer product? What if someone orders a 6 foot 5 child and he only turns out to be 6 foot 2? How will the family react? Would they be disappointed with their child or want a refund? There are so many things that could go wrong if we make this kind of genetic engineering a normality.