Designer Babies

[laughing weasel]

There needs to be a way to increase the general access to this technology. Why should the world be denied future Einsteins Beethovens and Edisons when we have the technology to create a virtually limitless supply of them what will the future be like with a thousand Aristotles and Newtons. The main problem will be ensuring that one group does not dominate access to this new technology or the Luddites will gather and burn the libraries. “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” from a hot topic bumper sticker.

 

[Naomi]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with designing your baby to have many superior traits if you can afford it. You have the money, you afford it, then you buy it. What's up with this ad hominem chatter?

Consider two people with the same disease. One person can afford treatment and the other can't. I don't hear people raising hell about the fact that Johnny can afford to get treatment for his syphilis and Bobby can't.

I don't hear people raising hell about the fact that person A can afford to protect his home with the latest technology and surveillance from crime and person B can't.

If you can afford to give your little baby boy an IQ of 300, top athlete genes, longevity, an acne-free life, and a 12 inch penis (by the time he's through with puberty, of course ... no odd ideas here), you buy it all.

 

[Nasor]

You all seem to be assuming that this sort of technology will be so expensive that only the rich elite will be able to afford it, but there’s no reason to believe that will necessarily be the case. It’s quite possible that this technology would be relatively inexpensive and widely available. It’s already possible to determine the sex of your baby for around $500, which is hardly out of reach for most people in the developed world. Once it’s figured out how to tweak key sections of the genome for improved health, intelligence, etc. it might be possible to create a standardized, inexpensive process (perhaps involving tailored viruses?) to implement it.

 

[Nasor]

If people were to start then that would make us nonhuman. It is our flaws and our differences that make us humans.

What a load of crap. What makes us human is our ability to create things like math and poetry, think rationally and logically, solve problems creatively, express ourselves in artistic ways, and ponder the universe and our place in it. That's what makes us special. Our flaws just get in the way of all that and prevent many people from being able to lead happy and rewarding lives.

It’s quite silly to have sentimental attachment to your flaws. What’s the difference between creating a medicine for treating people when they’re sick and engineering someone so that they don’t get sick in the first place?

 

[Asguard]

nasor you are making a mestake there


A) the developed world Ie it wouldnt be avalable for more than half the world population by defult

B) you are forgeting human nature, firstly the docs performing this would end up being just like cosmetic surgens, ie if we charge it people will pay it and the ritch (and powerful) wont LET it become widly available. Think about private schools for a second. Do they really HAVE to charge 1000 a term? lets see, you have 30 kids in a class so that is 30, 000 a term gross per class. does it REALLY cost that much? no but the ritch will pay it because they want to be "special" its what our sociaty is built on and i dont think it would change just because its "not fair"

Naomi at the moment the goverment loans money to students so that moeny isnt an issue when you go to uni (or rather so that its not just the ritch that go). take a world where robots (owned by the ritch) do the meanial and the elite upper class have the good jobs because of this tech

how does the average joe survive? how does an acident from the ritch suvive? poverty and homelessness are already a huge problem but if you had your way there wouldnt be ANYONE climbing out from it because there would be no WAY for them to help themselves. How is this good? why does someone deserve that life just because there parents sliped with the condom? because that is what you are saying. Every child who was an acident or "a little sooner than we expected" ect would stave to death. Is that worth having a few ritch mozart einstines?

 

[Nasor]

nasor you are making a mestake there


A) the developed world Ie it wouldnt be avalable for more than half the world population by defult

B) you are forgeting human nature, firstly the docs performing this would end up being just like cosmetic surgens, ie if we charge it people will pay it and the ritch (and powerful) wont LET it become widly available. Think about private schools for a second. Do they really HAVE to charge 1000 a term? lets see, you have 30 kids in a class so that is 30, 000 a term gross per class. does it REALLY cost that much? no but the ritch will pay it because they want to be "special" its what our sociaty is built on and i dont think it would change just because its "not fair"

It would probably be extremely expensive at the very beginning, but it’s absurd to think that doctors would keep the price artificially high. If there was a demand for it then normal competition would causes the price to lower.

You might be surprised to learn that most private schools barely scrape by even with the high tuition they usually charge. I assume that each class has to have a teacher, and the teacher’s salary will immediately eat up all $30,000 – and that’s assuming that the teacher isn’t very well paid.

 

[Asguard]

ummm my mother IS a teacher and i GARENTIEE she is not taking home 120 000 a year
no way, not a chance
she is making around 50 000 at most i think

And ok so the docs charge reasonably but they arnt the ones charging YOU, They just charge the hospital or clinic. Its them that decides what YOU pay and they are being privatised, ie owned by the ritch. I just cant see the ritch being fair with this ever, and it only takes 1 generation being stoped from access and thats it, game over

and you still havent addressed the issue of what happens to children born the old way. It would be WORSE than gatica because gatica didnt take robots into acount.

 

[Nasor]

ummm my mother IS a teacher and i GARENTIEE she is not taking home 120 000 a year
no way, not a chance
she is making around 50 000 at most i think

My mistake, over here a 'term' is usually half the year.

 

[Naomi]

Asguard.

You seem to have no grasp on economics.

The "ritch" jack up their prices. So what? Some hospitals will do it for less.

The "ritch" will need to get some big-ass lobbying going on to get a monopoly on that, because nothing short of governmental intervention will keep the monopoly going for more than a month.

Not to mention the load of ad hominem you're spouting. Basically all I see is sentimental attachment to one's flaws, as someone said.

You forget that people in the Third World already suffer such lives because their parents "sliped" with the condom. Oh, and I'm sure universities there can give financial aid. Oh, and I'm sure universities in the US give financial aid to international students, because they actually don't.

Oh, and since when did Amadou Diallo choose to be born black? Since when did the Chinese, when their towns in the US were burned and razed by crazy white mobs "protecting the good old order of America" choose to be born Chinese?

You're just regurgitating what's already going on as some horrifying thing of the future.

 

[Lemming3k]

The problem is it would be a world of 'perfect' people, but whos idea of perfect? It would be the parents who make the choice, if it had been up to my girlfriends parents what she was like she'd be entirely different, and incredably unattractive to me, i really dont think i'd enjoy a world where chance of who you are is denied and somebodies idea of perfection is implanted instead, some people dont want to be perfect or dont care, and why should anyone decide what their children will be like? The gap will widen between rich and poor and will be wider still between us and the third world.

 

[alty]

I think the term 'designer babies' needs to be more clearly defined though. On one level it means babies that have been genetically altered to produce certain aesthetic traits, such as blue eyes or red hair. That kind of genetic alteration I am wholeheartedly opposed to as it is rather vain and superficial to insist your child has to grow up with certain characteristics because you or the society of the time considers them aesthetically pleasing.

However there is another type of 'designer baby', one which is genetically modified in order to have a certain blood type or similar quality, in order to prevent another person from dying due to an incureable genetic disease or something similar. In this case I feel that it is vitally important that we permit families to make the choice of whether they want a 'designer baby' (they shouldn't be called that - it's just a media buzzword designed to rile up the ignorant) and accept their decision. I certainly don't want to live in a society that feels it has some kind of moral justice to watch a person die when their death could be prevented by having another genetically modified child with the right blood type. If its between doing something 'unnatural' and watching people die I know which side I'm on.

Also to say that we shouldn't allow the latter because the former might happen is, in my opinion, a very weak-willed argument. After all, why use morphine as a pain reliever when it might cause people to become heroine addicts? Yes, if we allow babies to be altered so that they can save another person's life (and live a perfectly normal life themselves) it may open the door to aesthetic alterations to babies, but that's a hurdle we have to jump over when we get to it. After all, if in 50 years the majority of public opinion says that we should be able to aesthetically modify babies who is to say we're right and they're wrong? We shouldn't sacrifice the lives of people who would otherwise have lived just to make a decision that should in all reality be taken by the next generation. Don the veil of religious piousness if you want, but never forget that by preventing this vital path of research you are inevitably cutting short the lives of thousands who may have lived.

 

[Lemming3k]

I think this thread is discussing the first type of designer baby you mentioned, where it is gentically engineered to be 'better' than everything else, perhaps a seperate thread should be started to discuss the latter of your ideas where it is done for a medical reason to save a life.

 

[locknroll]

I don't have a problem with designer babies. The rich already send their kids to better schools, better hopspitals, etc. This is only a more exagerated version of this. I do have a problem with giving babies traits that are in style at the time, for instance - a baby with blue eyes and blue hair. If styles changed it would be the equivalent of naming your baby dumbass or leet.

 

[Nasor]

I do have a problem with giving babies traits that are in style at the time, for instance - a baby with blue eyes and blue hair. If styles changed it would be the equivalent of naming your baby dumbass or leet.

You might be right. But then again, at the moment how your child turns out is pretty much completely random. It would probably be better to have some control over it than none at all, even if you don't know exactly what future trends will be like.

I agree that engineering people for ‘stylish’ improvements would be pretty questionable, but there are all sorts of other, more legitimate improvements (smarter, better immune system, stronger bones, etc.) that pretty much anyone would agree would always be beneficial.

I still think it’s unwarranted to assume that such treatments would always be available only to the rich. The price of pretty much any medical technology always starts out high and then eventually falls to levels that everyone could afford. It would probably only be available to the rich when initially developed, but there's no reason to believe that the price wouldn't fall. There are plenty of precedents for this; like I said before, it used to be horrifically expensive to select the sex of your baby, but now you can do it for about $500 - and the price drops a little more every year.

Also, even if it was only available to the rich (and like I said, I doubt that would be the case for long) I wouldn't oppose it. If there were a cure for a fatal disease that cost $100 million to make, obviously most people would probably be out of luck if they came down with the illness. But if the child of some extremely rich person were to contract the disease would you tell him "I'm sorry, you can't spend your money to buy a cure for your child. It just wouldn't be fair to all the other people who can't afford it"? I doubt it. I don't think it's reasonable to tell people that they can't expend their legally-acquired assets in order to improve their children's chances of being healthy and successful. I mean, would you tell someone that they can't spend their money to send their kid to a nice private school? Or that they can't hire a high-priced lawyer to defend their kid when he gets in trouble with the law? Spending money to engineer superior kids doesn't seem qualitatively different from any of the numerous other ways that rich people have to give their children better lives.

 

[kula]

I suppose the choices are :

a) we leave it up to nature to evolve us into the future

b) we decide our own future and evolve ourselves

kula

 

[Tiassa]

Kula

That may be too restrictive a selection. There's a third condition that combines the two, but I haven't yet a neat sentence for it:

• Start with a comparative idea: There is no supernatural. Whether it's ghosts or angels or gods that one believes in, there is no supernatural, for anything occurring within the possibilities of nature is natural. If any ritual magick, for instance, actually worked, there would be nothing "supernatural" about it, as the "magick" would only have served as a conduit for routing natural processes.

• Likewise: Nothing is artificial. The proposition first struck me when I went through a brief phase of watching lots of anime videos in a short period; I can't tell you for certain which one it was, but for some reason "Bubblegum Crisis" sticks in my mind. The idea occurred to me after I was left nearly retching by a scene in which schoolgirls were discussing the cybernetic enhancements they wanted. It struck me as sickening, the idea of vanity enhancements, but inasmuch as there is no supernatural, it occurred to me that the other end of the "natural spectrum" includes the possibility of there being nothing artificial. That is, even an "artificial" evolution is a natural evolution. We don't consider honey artificial, as it's the produce of bees. Were we not human, and watching humans alter themselves, there would be nothing artificial about a natural system exploiting nature in order to change the relationship between the system and the nature it exists within. Altering our DNA is no more artificial or natural than replacing somebody's eyes or ears with cybernetic enhancements.

Furthermore, I would go so far as to postulate that humans don't decide anything about our future when we undertake our own evolution. All of the tailoring of our genes we attempt may yet prove futile should the Universe itself present us with an unimaginable cataclysm.

So it seems to me there's a third option wherein humanity simply takes the gamble and leaps blindly into the precipice; that is, we do what we do, and nature will continue to do what it does, and we decide nothing inherently in undertaking such an endeavor.

 

[kula]

Kula

That may be too restrictive a selection. There's a third condition that combines the two, but I haven't yet a neat sentence for it:

• Start with a comparative idea: There is no supernatural. Whether it's ghosts or angels or gods that one believes in, there is no supernatural, for anything occurring within the possibilities of nature is natural. If any ritual magick, for instance, actually worked, there would be nothing "supernatural" about it, as the "magick" would only have served as a conduit for routing natural processes.

• Likewise: Nothing is artificial. The proposition first struck me when I went through a brief phase of watching lots of anime videos in a short period; I can't tell you for certain which one it was, but for some reason "Bubblegum Crisis" sticks in my mind. The idea occurred to me after I was left nearly retching by a scene in which schoolgirls were discussing the cybernetic enhancements they wanted. It struck me as sickening, the idea of vanity enhancements, but inasmuch as there is no supernatural, it occurred to me that the other end of the "natural spectrum" includes the possibility of there being nothing artificial. That is, even an "artificial" evolution is a natural evolution. We don't consider honey artificial, as it's the produce of bees. Were we not human, and watching humans alter themselves, there would be nothing artificial about a natural system exploiting nature in order to change the relationship between the system and the nature it exists within. Altering our DNA is no more artificial or natural than replacing somebody's eyes or ears with cybernetic enhancements.

Furthermore, I would go so far as to postulate that humans don't decide anything about our future when we undertake our own evolution. All of the tailoring of our genes we attempt may yet prove futile should the Universe itself present us with an unimaginable cataclysm.

So it seems to me there's a third option wherein humanity simply takes the gamble and leaps blindly into the precipice; that is, we do what we do, and nature will continue to do what it does, and we decide nothing inherently in undertaking such an endeavor.

I think i almost agree !

Yes, everything is natural, what ever course we 'decide' to take, and i do understand the oversimplification of my options !

We can try to alter our DNA, using external tools, in an attempt to fulfill a future perceived need/desire. (medical genetic research)

We could decide to live 'in harmony' with nature, stop technical advancement and see what nature throws up.

Or, and i think this is the most exciting option (if possible), we could use our consciousness and biofeedback to program our own DNA, internally.

Do we evolve for a future in space or are we going to take our chances on Earth ? With either scenario, what would we 'need' for the best chance of survival ? Most of our skills seem to be for survival, intelligence, consciousness etc but i do think we will need to make a choice of sorts in the future about the direction we want to take (if indeed we have not already taken it/are taking it)

kula

 

[laughing weasel]

I am just enough of a socialist that I believe that there should be some way of equalizing the quality of representation in court. I do not think the American justice system can continue with the wealthy receiving greater access to justice than the poor. If the system is not repaired eventually there will be another revolution as no one likes to know for a fact that the government treats the poor and wealthy as to separate classes. If genetic manipulation slowed the ability of the hard working innovative poor (malcontents) then they would be forced to utilize their abilities to seek change, probably violent change in the system. Although the basic technology prices would come down the high end would always be more expensive ensuring the continued plutocratic domination of the wealthy.

 

[Dr Lou Natic]

What a load of crap. What makes us human is our ability to create things like math and poetry, think rationally and logically, solve problems creatively, express ourselves in artistic ways, and ponder the universe and our place in it. That's what makes us special. Our flaws just get in the way of all that and prevent many people from being able to lead happy and rewarding lives.

It’s quite silly to have sentimental attachment to your flaws. What’s the difference between creating a medicine for treating people when they’re sick and engineering someone so that they don’t get sick in the first place?

Excellent post.
Our flaws are just a result of dysgenics and we should be embarrassed and ashamed of them.
I'd prefer if lesser people were culled from the genepool but I suppose manipulating the lesser people's genes is better than sitting on our hands and watching our species become hideously incompetent, which is what we're doing now and have been doing for some time.
Its not "the way things should be" like people try to make out, its disgusting negligence on our part. When we escaped natural selection it became our responsibility to look after ourselves. That would mean our own domesticated breeding program with strict standards, but no, we've just been partying for a thousand years. Its absolutely shamefull. I don't agree with hitler exactly but respect the fact that he at least could see there was a problem. Unfortunately he made eugenics a dirty word, but its only a matter of time before we come around. The irrational religious moral code is slowly cracking away from society. Once its gone it will only become too obvious how desperately we need a eugenics program.

 

[Lemming3k]

Ok, im going to explain a reason why i disagree with messing with genetics. Because you wont know when to stop. Feelings are considered a weakness by many, such as compassion and caring, we all need somebody else sometimes and thats considered weak, my girlfriend gets ill a lot, she has lots of niggly diseases, but i would never choose someone else over her, not even someone identical in all other ways but without the diseases. Why? Because our flaws bring us closer together, she has her weaknesses and i have mine, it means sometimes i need a companion, a friend, a lover, and that is what a true human is. If everyone was genetically perfect we'd all be loners, we'd have no need for feelings or emotion, only logic, no need for help or a friend, only a partner for reproduction purposes, its not attachment to flaws its attachment to people through emotions, which some would argue you dont need, you might aswell be a robot, or a vulcan.