Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ment. Perhaps it will confer the illusion of total control, but that illusion
will eventually yield when the limitations of the technology become
manifest.
Even if genetic engineering did not confer an exceptional degree of
control, there is another way in which it might upset the balance between
the productive and the procreative aspects of parenting. Genetic tech-
nology, one may fear, could supplant the gardeners' stock—that is, the
raw material—and thereby destroy the continuity between the garden-
ers' product and its predecessors. Heirloom tomatoes may be excep-
tionally tasty, yet what makes them heirlooms is not their taste but their
lineage—that they derive from an uninterrupted succession of vines, bred
for centuries.
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These varieties link the modern consumer with medieval
horticulture. The introduction of laboratory-created genes into human
beings would, it may be feared, disrupt a natural progression—even one
that is assisted and guided by human beings—and mark the end of a
natural history.
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By severing its link with nature, genetic engineering
would deny or diminish a child's moral status.
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Interestingly, adoption does not raise anything like this kind of
concern. While there is no biological continuity between adoptive
parents and children in the usual sense, adopted children are the product
of a long natural history to which the parents equally belong. By analogy,
gardeners merely plant seeds in different soil. Similarly, most forms of
assisted reproduction do not raise this specter of ending or departing
from a natural history, since these technologies merely engage artificial
means to extend a natural lineage. It is not even a threat posed by
cloning, which preserves the fruit of past recombination.
The concern that children be born rather than made may reflect the
reasonable insistence that children should be ends in themselves, not
merely instruments to achieve ends prescribed for them. This important
moral principle, however, does not rule out genetic engineering as such,
but only that which parents employ in search of a “perfect” baby or one
that meets certain specifications. It would be just as wrong for parents,
in order to fulfill their own ambitions, to insist on a course of athletic
training for a child. The objection lies not in the technology but the
brazen purpose to which it is put.
To see this, consider a hypothetical example. Suppose that parents filled
in a child's genome by randomly selecting from a pool of manufactured
