Brigade XO wrote:ldwechsler wrote:To get back on topic:
Right now some deaf people (I hate the term hearing impaired. I am impaired being deaf in one ear but that is not the same as not being able to hear at all) are fighting treatments to allow people to hear. They are concerned about the destruction of their culture. So where do we go?
And therein lies part of the problem- the "culture"- or at least the perception of a culture within and without groups of people who define themselves (or others) based on those perceptions.
How many things can you think of that end up creating a sense of culture in humans? Blindness (either "natural" by some imparment a person is born with or inflicted by illness or trauma), deafness (same range), shortness, height, skin color, language, religious beliefs (or lack of) political beliefs, special skill sets- mechanical, mental etc mostly learned over time, paticipation in some activity, membership in a class or cast. The list goes on and on.
What is "bad"? What is good? The example of short (not dwarf but it was specificaly said "short") is only one position of why something is beneficial to humans- from a very specific point of view and I suggest it could reflect a sincere belief that the outliend conservation of resources by having people all "short"---or its just a point for argument.
You do realize that there are entire industries and belief systems built on making something out of others being different and there is a long history of violence being associated with both making a given difference important for some people or the being who are having things done to them or inflicted upon the for being different to break out of that situation? Race comes to mind. So does religion.
Should we pursue things like genetic changes that would eliminate things now considered congential birth defects? How about hair color. We don't really know. If we can change genetics does it have to be at the conception or pre-conception level or can you, eventualy, insert a change into a child or an adult that will correct some preceived error in their physiology?
Is that even possible without killing the individual? At our present level of understanding we do know that there are hundreds if not thousands of interactions between genes which do things to and for our bodies. It's not just snip this, substitute that, inject X into Y and you get B. It appears that genes turn on or off for affecting things at different stages of development and it is way more subtile than one tiny portion of the genetics of an individual- acting alone- does one (and only one) thing......except that there seem to be a lot of things that if you play with them will just kill you and we really have no idea what all of them are. That certainly exists for the early development of an embryo, I'm guessing that holds on a more differentiated bases for a child or adult.
The other question is who gets to decide what should be done. Politics, religion, personal power, "because we can"? The book Jurassic Park is one take on this question. The Alignment in the Honorverse is another. That is the problem, even if we can, should we and who gets to decide that they are going to do it and for what reasons and how do you keep others from doing things like creating the SuperSoldiers of the Final War or eliminating certain Undesirable traits or features from the human genome.
Way beyond my pay grade but I'm sure that there are a lot of people now out in the real world who would grab the chance to impose thier vision of humanity (and of course their personal status in the vision) on the rest of us.
Perhaps there are some of that but I think the vast majority would be content to affect their own children. Almost all of us would be willing to pay to make certain our kids didn't get cancer. And, frankly, the government would be glad to subsidize that because a small procedure before birth might save hundreds of thousands of dollars in cancer treatments later.
The problem is that we've opened Pandora's box. As we can do more, there will be pressure to use more of it. And it will certainly be hoarded by the rich.
Right now they use influence to get kids into the top schools. They pay out large amounts of money and, bingo, the kids are not in the admissions lottery but bypass all possible problems. Why not pay in advance and have your kids smarter and better looking and more disease resistant? It will happen and probably in not all that many years.
RFC has mentioned occasionally the good looks of people living in modern worlds. Some of it may be plastic surgery but a real lot has probably been genetic maneuvering.