However, on the other hand, this could actually be a good direction to move in. We can not only eliminate genetic diseases, but also genes that predispose us to other common diseases like cancer.
...and they should. Nobody deserves a suboptimal quality of life due to genetics.
I'm a strong techno-optimist, and I think we should have an extremely open mind to the possibilities offered to us by these advances, and we should fight the tendency to fortify our little local maximum out of fear - but we also need to recognize that some really dangerous things lie ahead.
But genes or not, I brought it up as an example of something that we're clearly NOT comfortable removing (even if we could), although there's still plenty of communities where not being gay "would for some reason improve the child's quality of life".
Why are "we" clearly not comfortable with that?
Indeed, if "we" are all uncomfortable with that then we needn't worry about anyone doing it. You seem to be worried that some people are going to want to specify non-gay children but think they ought to have them anyway. For some reason.
On the other hand I admit it might make me queasy to think of parents deliberately engineering their children to be gay. As in "Oh honey, let's make our third child gay, it'll be fun!"
Yes, especially given the fact that the only reason people have children is because nature intends to replace the parents with their offspring, using rules crafted by natural selection, not the parents' tastes.
In fairness, sex was invented at least 1.2 billion years before parents could have possibly had "tastes". The reason we reproduce sexually rather than just churning out clones of ourselves appears to be that we're more resistant to parasites/diseases if our genes keep constantly shifting into new combinations rather than hanging around for too long looking exactly the same.
This wouldn't necessarily be impacted by the parents' deliberate choice of a few specific alleles.
That's certainly high on the list, but replacing one population with another on a regular basis is also on the list.
> This wouldn't necessarily be impacted by the parents' deliberate choice of a few specific alleles.
Of course it would. Evolution can be a complex topic, but there's one simple fact at the center -- nature knows more than we do. An organism's ability to survive, to prevail over other genotypes, speaks louder than any of our expressed tastes and choices. That means if parents make the wrong choices, nature will step in and correct them.
In fact, life was so perfect that the writers had to postulate the existence of non-genetically-engineered people in order to have any drama at all. "Wouldn't it suck if you were born into this society without any genetic enhancement?" the movie asks. And the answer is: yeah, so you should genetically engineer your children.
We already bar people with heart defects from participating in space programs.
You mention the heart defect. In the movie, the heart defect is only genetically potential, it is implied that if the character had it they would be dead before the events of the film.
Gattaca is just a scifi movie, not particularly good at science realism. We should not take guidelines for Artificial Intelligence research from the Terminator movies, and we should not take genetics guidelines from Gattaca.
Meh. Neither does anyone else, and it won't happen by itself.
If GATTACA was the cost of everyone being healthy, I might take it, but it won't be. We get the world we want, by and large.
Hmm, not sure about that. The rich get the world they want, by and large.
Progressive damage to mitochondrial DNA is an important contribution to degenerative aging. Wholesale replacement of either mitochondria or mitochondrial DNA (via any one of four or five different approaches) is a very viable near term goal. All of the necessary component of such a treatment have been demonstrated in animals and human cells in the laboratory over the past decade, leaving just the painfully slow regulatory and development process.
However, when I put myself in place of people actually being harmed by this, I think it totally makes sense.
And this process you (and I) are afraid of...This is not the beginning. It has begun since we started to vaccinate people.
But where does this stop? Replace a gene -> replace mitochondria -> replace a whole chromosome -> replace the sperm/egg -> replace the whole child. We've come back to the real world, i.e. adoption.
However if this becomes widespread, we should be fighting to preserve diversity of benign genes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
Is a good read, also the movie Gattaca (obviously fiction, but raises some interesting questions).
I think there is a parallel to geo-engineering. It sounds like it'll lead someplace troublesome. people can't be trusted with it. OTOH, we have international conferences where they're trying to reach some sort of decisions about how much carbon there should be in the atmosphere. Maybe they'll be deciding how warm it should be, or how much rain europe should be getting.
Once we have the ability to influence these things we are geo-engineers, eugenicists, etc. It's not a choice. Not any more than we chose to take horses, ship rats and house cats to every part of the world.
In fact, if people start inventing words for things that we already have words for it's a good time to start paying attention, likely you're being sold on something.
All of these are called eugenics (though the first is not really focussed on genetic traits); pretending that "eugenics" doesn't carry any baggage because of it's association with Nazi Germany seems pretty disingenuous.
Eugenics is scary, morally complicated, exciting and possibly inevitable. It has some historical associations with fascism and 20th century modernism in general.
The whole thing make people uncomfortable. It's hard to criticize when people just get creeped out by the idea.
Perhaps this is best left to our grandchildren.
Fortunately for me, my mother's GP discussed the matter with her and actually argued against the recommendations of specialists and I turned out perfectly healthy.
This matter only came up in conversation when she mentioned that the GP in question had died and I said I had never liked him as a kid and she pointed out how ironic that was as he saved my life.....
The problem with any kind of structural attempt at removing undesirable traits/children with defects from the population before they are born is the false positive rates are very high. Fortunately for you you're here and healthy. The flip side is that you might not have been healthy and then there would be a significant burden on those around you and society. These are very difficult problems and the harshness and ease with which people talk about them and pass judgement are in stark contrast with what a more informed person would probably conclude.
The wikipedia article is particularly precise when it comes to articulating the problems stemming from slippery slope arguments around this subject.
In the end, Eugenics is a tool that can be used for good and bad, just like every other tool. But it needs very good oversight and the use cases displayed so far are not all positive in my opinion.
Hint: What a disease is and what not, depends a lot on the environment.
If instead you had explained why you disagree with the parent poster and offered some information on how best to define a disease, you most likely would not have been downvoted.