ldwechsler wrote:The original objection to GMO foods came from Europe. It was political and economic. Had farmers in Africa and Asia used seeds producing disease resistant crops, European farmers would be greatly injured.
So a lot of objections were made and the same sweet folk who forced DDT to stop being used also made certain the those who did survive could not truly thrive.
Right now there is a fuss over "golden rice" which was developed to carry a lot more Vitamin A than regular rice to help children in less developed countries from developing blindness. Because of lack of the vitamin, thousands of kids in Southeast Asia lose their sight each year. But 'well-meaning morons' have made it sound like poison.
That is the real problem when we deal with ethics and genetics as we see in the books. In theory, if I am a geneticist and on my own I make changes in my children's DNA that improves their lives I might be violating the Beowulf Code. If I use it to prevent my kids from getting cancer, that is fine. If I use it to give them violet eyes, which are pretty, I probably am over the line. But what if I know there is a possible problem in a gene that might lead to my child not living as long as I would like? Or, if on a tough planet, I make the kid stronger?
What was done on Grayson could be argued as a violation of the Beowulf Code. The problem with the ethical issues is that things are seldom black and white.
Actually, no. The Grayson mods would not have violated neither the spirit nor the wording of the Beowulf Code where the nature of and motive for the mods are concerned.
The Graysons confronted one of those "modded to live in their planetary environment" situations the Code specifically and clearly permits. Moreover, there was no way they could have withdrawn their population
from their environment, so unless Beowulf wants to be Janeway and worry about whether or not preventing an industrial accident that wipes out an entire star system would constitute "interfering in their development"
(I know; the writers' fault, not Mulgrew's), it's kind of a no-brainer from the morality and ethics side of the equation.
Where the Code might have had a problem is that the majority of those who received the mod weren't told that they had, which
definitely violates the "informed consent" aspect of the Code. Everything else was golden by Beowulf standards, however, and Beowulfan bio-ethicists would almost certainly have given them a pass on that one because of the emergency nature of their situation and the mindset of the population in question.
And it's worth remembering that Grayson sort of
couldn't violate the Code when the modification was actually performed.
The geneticists in question left Old Earth centuries before it was ever formulated and, in fact, performed their mods only 13 years after the Final War began, whereas the Code's prohibition on designed uplift weren't formulated until well
after the war ended. There was thus no Code for them to violate . . . and even if there had been, they couldn't have known a thing about it!
As for changing your child's eye color or making her stronger or smarter, the Code doesn't prohibit that, either. It prohibits, specifically:
(a) the inclusion of synthetic or non-human DNA in a genetic mod;
(b) modification without the informed consent of the "owner" of the genotype/DNA being modded (that is, somatic mods of almost any sort are totally acceptable and germ-level mods of children who have not yet been conceived are up to whoever provides the sperm and the ova), which is where the Grayson geneticists would be on shaky ground by Honor's day;
(c) any eugenics program designed specifically to create an "improved humanity," other than with allowable modifications --- that is, no synthetics, no nonhuman genetic material -- made on an individual, case-by-case basis (that is, no "we're going to design the next stage of the human race and
apply it across the board" mods but if individual parent(s) want to make sure their kid is smarter, stronger, etc., than
they were and no prohibited material is involved, go for it);
(d) any
weaponized use of genetic modification (doesn't apply to individuals who end up with faster reflexes, greater strength, etc., even though those sorts of mods obviously have combat implications);
(e)
any modification which the geneticist knows will have negative consequences for the health of whoever receives it, whether they want it or not (this is the equivalent of the old Hippocratic "First, do no harm" proviso and would cover things like a weight-losing mod that would produce the genetic equivalent of anorexia or bulimia).
There's a bunch of minor stuff running around in the weeds of the Code, focused around things like physician responsibility, but those are the major provisions that deal with something like the Alignment. Point (c) is the biggie, of course, and as I've said before, it stems from two different but related concerns. (1) There was no way the Code's originators wanted to risk a reprise of the "super-soldier" madness which had devastated Old Earth [obviously also a factor in point (d)]. (2) There was no way they wanted to see "racism" in the form of quantifiably differentiated genetic groups would be defined as "superior" or "inferior." (That sort of thinking, on the part of the super-soldiers, had also been a major factor in the causes of the Final War.)
Manpower has been in flagrant violation of the Code from the day it was founded, and genetic slavery is unspeakably abhorrent to Beowulfan geneticists. What the Alignment is up to would probably be
marginally less abhorrent to them, but would remain far beyond the pale.
