September 17, 2006
The Slippery Slope
Welcome to Gattaca, boys and girls.
Encouraged by Britain's ruling on colon cancer, a London hospital is proposing to prevent autism by eliminating male embryos, which are more likely than females to get the disease. Two weeks ago, the New York Times described an American patient who plans to screen her embryos for an arthritis gene. The probability that the gene will cause the disease is only 20 percent, and if it does, the disease is highly manageable. ... A PGD technique unveiled three months ago can find genes that won't harm your child but might, if combined with other genes, cause disease in a later generation. British patients are already asking clinics to filter out embryos carrying such genes.
It gets worse. Embryos are being genetically tested to see if they are suitable to donate cord blood or other body parts, then they're carved up. Insane. But what really gets me is this quote:
Another patient, described in the same article, set out to scan his embryos for colon cancer and ended up chucking two more for Down syndrome. "You kind of feel like you shouldn't be doing it," his wife confessed. "But then why would we go through all of this and not take those extra precautions?"
That's true. If you're going through IVF anyway you might as well screen for these things, because these embryos are either going to be killed or die frozen anyway. But I can't help thinking about the German doctors who "kind of felt like" they shouldn't be conducting experiments on live subjects. Eliminating genetic diseases is a good thing. But that so much time, money and lives are spent on IVF when there are so many children around the world who need adoptive parents seems vain and decadent.
I mean, aren't these parents concerned about passing on whatever gene made them not fertile enough to conceive naturally? Hmm?
Posted by b-applegate at September 17, 2006 11:47 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://blogs.princeton.edu/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1028
Comments
Soylent Green is people, after all. And the argument will be that we are making life better... for whom? The extraordinarily privileged, and of course, the doctors. You'll catch some heat for this one, I think. Well done.
Posted by: Fred at September 18, 2006 11:04 AM
Ben, I read this way too late to have anyone notice my response, even you... but here goes.
We will now be able to improve the human race in the short term. If everyone follows the logic of IVF for the purpose of betterment of humanity and uses the selection technique of eliminating male embryos, we would eliminate all disease very soon. Does it matter that extinction is not a disease?
Posted by: Gregg at November 20, 2006 12:29 PM