Should we engineer our children?

[Silverhair]

Robert A Heinlein, in his novel "Friday" explores this concept, and a lot of others too. Fun scifi novel that asks some good questions.

OK, so through some sort of scifi time warp a parenting lab from the future pops up downtown. (I am using that format for the question to exclude the experimental aspect from the question. I want to narrow the question down to it's core.) Using their proven 100% reliable technology, you can choose the traits your child will have. Since they will be in the child's genetic code they will be inheritable to his/her children & so on. Of course that child can have their own children reengineered for that matter. You can give extra intellegence, great health all the way into advanced old age, a super life span of 500 years (OK, maybe that's stretching it too much - 120 years then.)atheltic ability, very strong immune system, better eyesight, and let's not forget beauty. The techinque will use mostly your & your partners genes with certain enhancements from other human sources for some DNA sequences. No non human sources will be used. So you are only doing what nature has been doing for hundreds of millions of years, but you are doing it greatly faster.

For the sake of the discussion we shall assume that the cost is affordable - what ever that is.

Do you do it? Reasoning please

Modify the above - some non human sequences will be used. Do you do it? Reasoning please.

I will give my own thoughts later. I want responders to be responding to the question,not to my answers.

[onebigbadwulf]

1. Hell yes

I don't want my kid being a freak, I want him to be a GOD

[Rowdyboy]

2. What if it is proved that there is a genetic predisposition

to homosexuality? One tweak of the dna and your little boy or girl will be heterosexual. What should one do? Is it progress? Not to me, but I'm sure that many people differ.

Also, genetic "beauty" is worrisome. I'm afraid the human race will lose too much by accepting artificial standards of "proper facial structure".

To eliminate hereditary disease or genetic defects? Certainly. But exactly what is a genetic defect?


BTW...I want to be Lazarus Long when I grow up! Heinlein is my favorite sci-fi author.

[karlschneider]

3. Mox nix to me. There won't be any homo sapiens as we know them in a

few thousand or a few dozen thousand years...
In the end, nothing really matters.

[Silverhair]

6. There's a thought. Eventually our sun will become a red...

giant, swelling to encompass the earth and killing all life on this planet. So we engineer ourselves into a supersmart space adaptive species and head for the stars.

[Nlighten1]

18. It won't take a thousand years.

There is no stopping this. It is Pandora's box in a way, it has already been opened.

[Silverhair]

19. That's why I asked the question. It IS inevitable. n/t

[DemExpat]

21. Many wil opt not to use this engineering....

or not be able to afford it......

and a split "human race" will take place....I think I read something about this in a book review of Fukijami????

Not a positive scenario IMO.

But on the other hand, I'm thinking that the downsides of using engineering will be quickly discovered (or experienced) - defects, long-term weaknesses, etc. because nature will ALWAYS have a heavy hand in life forms.

DemEx

[Silverhair]

22. Interesting. I have read several SciFi stories on humanity

splitting into the superpeople and the ordinaries. My favorite one involved a brain surgery that turned a person into a hyper-super-genius, (IQ 1,000+), but the price was the lose of sight.

[democratreformed]

4. Whew!

My first instinct is that NO I would not do it. I have a great respect for nature and don't believe that it should be tampered with.

That being said, would I change my mind after considering the disadvantages my child would have in a world of "superhumans"? Lord, I don't know.

My next instinct is to run away from the problem - find a place where people live normally - go back to the good old days.

Unfortunately, I have come to realize over the past few years that I really don't want to go back to the good old days. I have come too perilously close to having to grow my own food in order to eat. So, I had to rethink my longing for those days.

Really and truly, we have to move forward. We have to accept the changes in society and deal with them the best we can. That includes technology and science. It will take a lot of thought for me to come up with a complete answer on whether I would genetically engineer my children in order to cope in a changed world.

[Maple]

5. Absolutely, positively!

And I'll take the 500 year lifespan! Or better!

http://www.transhumanism.org/

"Transhumanism: The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.

Transhumanists encourage study and discussion of emerging technologies which overcome the limitations of the human body, and the consequences of those technologies. We also seek to expand technological opportunities for people to live longer and healthier lives and to enhance their intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities."

[BloodyWilliam]

29. I'll keep rerolling until my kid has an 18 in STR, CON AND INT!

[Rowdyboy]

7. Isn't it bizarre when a great question like this gets ignored?

Do you ever wonder whats going on when "yak" or "thong" threads get great response but really serious topics die for lack of interest. Hating to sound like your mother, but that says a lot about us.

[democratreformed]

8. Good point, Rowdy

I gave up on serious intellectual discussion here long ago.

[moz4prez]

9. we must

nature is a cruel and malificent force — there isn't anything unethical about manipulating it to our apparent advantage.

[Silverhair]

10. OK, here's my thoughts. Well, actually my wife's thoughts.

Over the years I have come to greatly value my wonderful & intellegent wife's thought on all subjects. I, by my nature, am a high risk personality. (Hey, anybody that would use poker as their only income for a few years definately enjoys a larger than usual element of risk in their life.) She is more nurturing, more attuned to children than I am so I posed the question to her.

Absolutely YES. Have to. Otherwise our kid would be above average in a world of superpeople. In other words - a sickly, ugly, dunce.

She hesitated on the idea of non human DNA, saying that she would have to see what benefit was being gained and at what cost.

BTW, we both laughed and had fun with that picture of the glow-in-the-dark mouse in the GM thread.

[DemExpat]

11. NO! Let's engineer society to accept/embrace difference.

DemEx

[ComerPerro]

12. No

When everyone is extraordinary, no one is extraordinary.

[Xyxzy34]

14. And isn't that a good thing?

No one is better than anyone else by virtue of where, how, and to whom they are born. Only our actions will determine how we are judged.

[ComerPerro]

15. No, I don't see it as a good thing

My skills will not be unique. Neither will yours. What is the point when everyone has a 200 IQ, can run a 4.5 40, and has amazing artistic talents?

Average is still average, no matter how high the bar is raised.

[Xyxzy34]

16. Now if someone has a 200 IQ they can abuse someone with a 90 IQ

No more, when everyone is engineered to perfection, only our actions will decide our place in the world.

[ComerPerro]

25. I disagree

Bush has a 90 IQ and he is abusing people of all IQs.

[Silverhair]

26. Please, Let's not have topic drift. There are lot's of other threads

for Bush v2.0 bashing.

[Xyxzy34]

32. If everyone was engineered to perfect intellegence

Bush wouldn't be in office. And his big business friends would never have been able to attain their wealth, because it isn't easy to abuse someone just as skilled as you.

[jmm]

13. If somebody would engineer their children

then they shouldn't bother having them. If you can't love and accept your children as the individuals they are and feel the need to fundamentally change them into your idea of perfection before birth then parenthood probably isn't for you.

[Silverhair]

20. The question embraces more than love and acceptance.

Why do you send you children to school? Can't you just love and accept them the way they are - uneducated? You send them to school to get the tools they will need to survive in the modern world.
And numberous studies have shown that very early enrichment of the infants enviornment can boost their IQ by signifigant amounts. The same concept would apply here, just that you are giving them, & your entire line of decendents, a really nice toolbox before birth.

[democratreformed]

17. Yay!

Finally, some discussion.

[Instant Karma]

23. I suppose I could argue this from either perspective.

If one says yes then one is saying they would give their offspring every possible advantage for survival, and who wouldn't want to be able to pass on that opportunity to their offspring? In a sense genetic alteration is no more revolutionary than immunization against diseases. I don't know if the expanded lifespan is so appealing as much genetically altering for the better the quality of life capable from such a decision.

On the no side, I would lean toward the law of unintentded consequences. Since the proposal as set forth assumes that it is affordable, then that means everyone could do it and therefore, the same pressing problems with overpopulation would swell. On the NO side, I would also argue against it for the simple sake that since so much is tied to geneology it is impossible to quantify the features one might be passing up in favor of the features everyone would choose. It is impossible to know with those other features absent what would me missing from the human race as a result. For instance, one could genetically modify certain personality disorders from the species but we know the disorders of some personalities has created some incredible art, written or otherwise. What might we be missing?

[hatrack]

24. Let's make class, ethnic & social divisions permanent & transmissible

Who would be the first to take advantage of genetically converting kids into godlike, 1:50 marathon-running, perfect SAT-scoring violin prodigies? The very rich, of course.

Assuming such modifications were transmissible to the next generations, a few decades would be enough to produce a wealthy genetic elite who would likely, by dint of their (artificially induced) intelligence, prodigous skills, athletic or mathematical or artistic abilities, rise to the top of the fields for which they'd been engineered.

And what of you, John and Jane Doe? You may not be wealthy with a capital W, you may be merely lower upper-middle class, but what will you do? Are you going to NOT engineer the son or daughter you're making plans for? Are you going to condemn him to a "bright-normal" or "normal" life? Are you going to, by sheer Luddite recalcitrance, eliminate any chance of his getting into the right elementary school, the best high school, the most desirable prep school, or the truly prestigous university? Are you? After all, John, there's still a chance you'll make partner in your firm, and almost every married partner of childbearing age is already huddling with the geneticists. If you don't engineer your children, what will it do to your career? More fundamentally, what will it do to your childrens' careers? Are you happy to settle for middle-management on their behalf? Or do you try and keep on keeping up with the Joneses and all of their descendants?

And let's say you don't want to engineer your kids, but your family has a history of heart disease or cancer, or osteoporosis, or maybe slight obesity. "Sorry,' says the insurance company, 'if you want health coverage, you're going to have to get things Taken Care Of. After all, why should we tolerate the risks of such problems with you and your genetic heritage when such problems are voluntarily avoidable?"

And let's say the engineering is all that you could have dreamed of. Your son Josh looks like a melding of you and a young Tom Cruise, broke the State Track Meet* (engineered) record for the discus his sophmore year and loves computer programming. Your daughter Valerie is a stunning, athletic valkyrie who runs marathons in 2:10, eats differential equations for breakfast and plays one mean cello. Here's the question - are these accomplishments theirs? Or are these accomplishments the results of laboratory manipulations probably performed by a computer-driven gene sorter? Are they doing these remarkable things, or is something artificially hard-wired into their DNA responsible. More fundamentally, are they themselves? And what happens when they start to wonder about their talents and interests? What happens if they ask the same questions about themselves? If all you can do and learn and be and accomplish is no more than a Chinese menu of options your parents picked at the clinic, it doesn't leave much room for meaning in individual achievement. It doesn't leave much room for the concept of "individual".

So, by all means, engineer away. If you want a world permanently, irrevocably shattered into genetic haves and genetic have-nots, if you want the constant grinding struggle between the North and the South set in stone, have at it. If you want to institute the most corrosive rat race ever imagined, go to it. Oh, and by the way, if you've been engineered (through no choice of your own) to be superhuman, how hard would it be to view those not so modified as less than human? After all, in every quantifiable measure, they're already lesser beings. From there, it's a short step to contempt, indifference and dehumanization. And that, in particular, is a road we don't want to go down.

Edited: spelling

[Silverhair]

30. Extremely well reasoned. There is a famous SciFi story in which

humanity splits, the smarts control the world and are caretakers of the dumb, the smarts finally get tired of cleaning up after the dumbs and kill all the dumbs.

Interesting question on what achievements in that really mean.

In this thread I refer to SciFi a lot, because that is where so many good questions are asked and different answers explored.

Are we now in charge of our own evolution?

[DemExpat]

31. Plus....offspring will be in a position to blame anything they want

to on their parent's choice to engineer,(r not to), or on the medical technicians, etc.

DemEx

[BloodyWilliam]

27. More proof that kids are like OS distros.

If you want to by like any old parent you can just go with the Easy Install of Windows XP, just pop the disk in (yes, that is innuendo :evilgrin) and let the program load. If you want a fine-tuned performance kid, you have to get in there, customize the kernel, load the exact packages you want, and basically configure everything manually.

My kid, on the other hand, will be like MacOS. Streamlined, not-too-micromanaged, but powerful enough to do anything. A GUI anyone can get into, but a UNIX infrastructure (and support for X11 programs) customized for optimal performance.

...of course, that demonstration of geekitude is proof that I won't likely reproduce. :silly:

Although as an idealist techno-geek, I'd gladly make my kid the lovechild of Captain America and the X-Men.

[jody]

28. Interesting ethical question. The problem is more complicated than DNA

as discussed in "The Unseen Genome: Beyond DNA", November, 2003 issue of Scientific American.