“designer babies” is the term being used by the media to describe the future of modifying or selecting our children’s genes for desirable characteristics(medical and cosmetics).Are things getting out of hand with research into genetics processes? In this blog investigate social and ethnical implications of this research and technologies that have been developed form it.
What is a designer baby? It’s what the media names this futuristic technology we call genetic modification. What exactly does this mean? This mean we can choose the traits of our child we can choose their gender and pick certain traits we want and don’t want from their parents. Also we can enhance their genes by adding traits.
PGD
A process called Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis is done to screen embryos for diseases and defects. This allows doctors to choose embryos that do not have anything wrong with them and choose the cosmetic expectations of the parents and implant them back into the mother’s womb, resulting in a healthy desired baby. Gene therapy is a procedure which allows defective genes to be replaced by those that are healthier so that genetic disorders can be cured. It is only legal to do this on grown children and adults. Germ line therapy is another procedure where DNA of an egg, sperm or embryo that is defective is replaced by healthy DNA. At the moment, germ line therapy has only been tested out on animals but is illegal to have this done on humans.
Requirements:
The requirements to make such baby will take two parents to produce eggs and sperm and scientist will examine the embryos and will determine whether which baby is a boy or girl, which will have blue eyes or green eyes. You then pick out the traits you also don’t want in your child, say if one side of the family had skitzo or genetic obesity. Now on financial terms to modify your baby, it will cost roughly around 20,000 dollars. WOW! That is expensive but that is also what some parents would have to pay yearly for that child’s university, so why not pay 20,000 more to ensure that your child had an advantage. Obviously this is according to parents who can afford to pay for such procedures and so dividing the rich and poor rather the naturals and the biologically enhanced. I doubt even Canada’s free medical plan will cover that.
Is it fair?
All the more fortunate people with money can afford to pay for these big operations and have their child at a greater advantage over other children. What about all the kids that were natural born will they have to rely on pure to talent just to compete with the rest of the kids. Or will there be a divide between genetically modified children and natural born children. Will the standards change in school for your grades? How much will the government have to pay to make adjustments to this new generation of modified children? Will this be the future of our kind.
That these children with greater knowledge had advantage over everyone, or a strength far greater than any other, and what about the glory of having talent?. Will we have a generation filled with hockey players like Wayne Gretzky, basketball players like Lebron James, and runners like usain bolt. This seems more relevant to guys but this will effect girls significantly too, there will be too many pretty girls ( OH NO :p ) so they will have a lot more competition in high school and professionally as well ,such as someone who wanted to become an actress or a model.
Is it moral?
Religions all around the world would be disturbed by these operations of modifying your baby. Many believe that we humans should not tamper with god’s work and that tampering with babies will make things uneven.
Media
The media will look target all the pros to this situation, because your child will never have a disease that has been in the family and it will have the advantages medically, cosmetically, and maybe even intellectually. This is will result in further research development into designer babies and maybe we will go beyond that. We might even become hybrids.
This has been displayed in the new movie AVATAR. Where humans find a new planet and they combine human and alien DNA to create an avatar, who will interact the similar looking savage beasts.
This kind of technology is possible, with further years of research, we may be an entirely different species, and why? Because we started it with these designer babies.
In Conclusion
Designer babies, will be definitely a consideration, for many parents that have diseases and malformalities that they could pass on to their child, they might take the risk to follow through with the procedure. Although other parents with perfectly fine history might not risk it do to the risk of birth defects. Since we have information on what will happen during the child’s life , we will have to wait till there is more research put into “Designer Babies”, if there is a designer baby that lives a long life and doesn’t have and malformalities, then we will know if it is safe or not, but until then you got two options save up or forget it.
sources:
http://thetalentcode.com/wp-content/uploads/einstein_baby.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimplantation_genetic_diagnosis
http://news-libraries.mit.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/money.jpg
http://www.obgyn.net/Frontiers_In_Reproductive_Medicine/images/PGD.gif
http://www.mindcipher.net/puzzle_pictures/0000/0002/ist2_366762-balanced-brass-scale.jpg
http://branthansen.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341cae3d53ef0120a6443877970b-500wi
http://www.indiemoviesonline.com/files/editorspics/avatar-jake.jpg
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,989987,00.html
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjd728muduczNgDq_r-p31AwAUB0ODjm7y3_TXFnMkcIaU-YsZBzdCncInwNhcO4nmVdbUkq4Gk42xyLe8qn0l0wSi6rRRlQJ18z-2XjOf7UTpzPgUJ0bBfxr6qUZ2eZ5u0t8K1C_9_tVb/s400/Sepia.jpg
Haha i'm back again, twice in the same day!Who knows i might go for a third...anyways, not much to comment upon here, just that designer babies probably is not going to be to much of an issue....because they cost a whale of money. And we're all broke.
ReplyDeletemoney isn't an issue for some people like the rich, this is another one of those the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. but in this case its richer more beautiful babies. which i say is alright because it may provide some entertainment for us when the designer baby thing goes wrong. in any case if this research stops getting funds from the government i am going to be angry for not being able to try the whole thing out.
ReplyDeletebut seriously this is unreasonable, who cares what these scientists are doing right now we have bigger issues such as people dying and the earth blowing up !
overall your bio blog was pretty good and congrats on getting yout pictures too work !