Design your own baby?
Many wealthy people enjoy wearing outfits which designed especially for them in nowadays. However, did you ever hear about design your own baby? A designer baby is an infant controlled by genetic engineering combined with in vitro fertilization to choose the absence or presence of a particular gene. In another word, this technology allowed parents to custom build their children. Within advances in genetics research, people may soon preselect their children's physical and personality traits just like pick out clothing materials and styles.
Technologies Involved
In vitro fertilisation or IVF is one of the advanced reproductive techniques. It has been used to fertilise eggs with sperm in to a laboratory condition. Scientists therefore have had a chance to observe, modify and change genes under microscopes. Theoretically, we may also be able to "cure" diseases in embryos by replacing faulty sections of DNA with healthy DNA in the future. This practice is called germ line therapy. Such therapy is still illegal to be tested on humans, but successfully been done on animal embryos.What is Legal
There are only two types of legal advanced reproductive technologies on humans right now. One of them is choosing the sex and genes of the baby by selecting a sperm that will fertilise an egg. The other one is Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), which is a technique screens particular embryos to put in the mother’s womb.
Ethical Considerations
After the news on designer babies was revealed, many people were surprised. Soon we need to face problems such as what is moral limit to create a baby. The whole idea can be indentified into two kinds of motivation: preventing disease and enhancing attributes. In the year of 2003, a genetically designed baby was born with stem cells from the umbilical cord would be used to treat a blood disorder in his older brother. The ethical issue followed up immediately was that the boy was born without any dignity of life. Clearly, his life purpose was pre-decided to save his older brother, created to be a medical tool.
The human race must stop trying to play God by messing with genetics and embryo alterations. We should feel guilty for daring to control a person’s free will; nobody has the right to decide the unborn child’s any traits.
Word Count: 380
The human race must stop trying to play God by messing with genetics and embryo alterations. We should feel guilty for daring to control a person’s free will; nobody has the right to decide the unborn child’s any traits.
Word Count: 380
Video
Find out more about this topic in this video :)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN9ep4B9Hw0
Work Cited List
Bonsor, Kevin. Howstuffworks: How Designer Children Will Work
Designer Babies: A Right to Choose? By Brandon Keim March 9, 2009 | 3:08 pm
Bionet. What is a designer baby? http://www.bionetonline.org/english/content/db_cont1.htm
Designer Babies: Ethical Considerations. Nicholas Agar.
Designer Babies and Slippery Slopes.
Picture References
Hey Pauline!!
ReplyDeleteThe case you had mentioned have indeed sprung a lot of arguments on the ethics and morals of designer babies ― a baby born to be a savior sibling! The baby was born … as a resource! However, in my opinion, that doesn’t have to mean that the baby was born without any dignity of life! After all, “dignity” is “the quality or state of being worthy, honored and esteemed,” and PGD isn’t about creating unwanted children for their spare parts! We should take a step backwards and examine the attitude and situation of the case…
Nevertheless, I do feel that it is unfair to the child to be born as a donor, cause then the baby can never really be sure why it was brought into this world…was it for love, or for science?
I also agree with you that we shouldn’t, as you sternly put it, ‘try to play God.’ We must know where to draw the line. We should simply leave the rest, such as human enhancement, well enough alone and seek simply to make life better for ourselves, each other, and other creatures while we are on earth! We’re playing god with these children and I hope they don't pay the price…