Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
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The implications for justice. Physicist Freeman Dyson's comment
that “market-driven applied science will usually result in the invention
of toys for the rich,” nicely expresses the sentiment of many skeptics.
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Genetic engineering will be expensive. Many in the United States have
no health insurance, and in any case, standard policies do not pay for
high-tech reproductive services, which will be available only to the afflu-
ent.
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The effect will inevitably be to widen already immense social
inequalities.
Some believe that the elite will become a genetic aristocracy—smart,
attractive, artistic, musical, athletic, resistant to disease, and so on. Sce-
narios sketched by enthusiasts such as Silver and Sloterdijk have some-
times been taken up by critics, who predict that we will segregate into
different castes and eventually different species. Thus, Dyson warns that
in the absence of regulation human germ line engineering “could cause
a splitting of humanity into hereditary castes.”
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Others believe that such
scenarios rest on false assumptions about the contribution of genes to
differences in human mentality and behavior. Their concern is rather that
the emphasis on genes will result in a shift away from more effective
medical, social, and environmental means to improve human health and
well-being. (In a rather bizarre reversal of the usual distributive argu-
ment, James D. Watson argues that we owe it to disadvantaged people
to develop genetic engineering technologies.
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The impact on parent-child relationships. The concern here is that the
parental desire to have a certain kind of child or, as Barbara Katz
Rothman suggests, a particular kind of parenting experience, will reduce
the child to an artifact and distort parent-child relations.
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Critics ask
what will happen when after all the effort and money expended to
produce a child designed to certain specifications, the result disappoints?
And they worry about the psychological impact on the children, who
may feel even more constrained by parental expectations than they do
now.
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The impact on assumptions about human worth. Some critics object
to any judgment that some genes are better than others. For example,
Robyn Rowland writes that “whichever way it is organized, through leg-
islation or 'choice,' the outcome of eugenicist attitudes means selecting
humans of value and nonvalue.”
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Others fear that assumptions about
what is desirable will embody the values of scientists and biotech entre-
preneurs, who will become the “self-appointed arbiters of human excel-
lence.”
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(It was primarily the prospect of a socially biased definition of
desirable qualities that led a once-enthusiastic Haldane to reject a posi-
tive eugenics program.)
