In a world constantly changing and evolving, the idea of progress is today at the heart of our globalized societies. By definition, the idea of progress is an improvement, a development or a change. Everything around us, from industries to educational systems, social relations, and scientific fields is in the middle of huge development. Today I am going to talk about the progress that has been happening in the scientific fields and more specifically I will focus on genetic progress and selection. To what extent genetic progress is at odds with morality? And how can it change people’s vision of mankind? Genetic progress just like any progress has some positive and some limits and raises a lot of debates and questions with morality and vision of mankind. The idea of genetic progress is represented in the following documents:
“Odd man out” (p.62), an article written by CHS Globe Online (p.64), an article written by USA Today (p.64), two texts extracted from The Guardian Weekly (p.66) and “Fighting for a future” written by Jodi Picoult extracted from the novel My Sister’s Keeper in 2004.
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First of all genetic progress has positive effects. One positive aspect of genetic progress is that it allows people to learn and know more about genes. Thus, it allows to know better genetic diseases and in this way, to know how we can cure them. Genetic progress permits to avoid diseases that are incurable with medical treatments. It also permits to cure genetic diseases using PGD-preimplantation genetic diagnosis- for example, if a couple has a child who has a mortal genetic disease, they can choose to design a medicine baby who can save his/her brother/sister. This is seen in the text extracted from My Sister’s Keeper, it is the story of a medicine baby named Anna who was designed to save her sister Kate who is suffering from leukemia and all along Anna was helping her sister Kate fighting leukemia by giving her blood. Moreover, this has been also seen in the article written by USA today where Molly has Fanconi’s Anemia, “ a rare illness that kills many of its victims before the age of 7” and she was cured because her parents, thanks to PGD designed her brother Adam who had an immune system characteristics that were an ideal transplants for his sister. A second positive aspect of genetic progress is that it allows couples who are having trouble conceiving a child or cannot have at all children, to have children indirectly through surrogate mothers. A surrogate mother is a woman who can carry the children of a couple who was conceived in vitro and usually, the surrogate mother gets paid to do so. This phenomenon of surrogation is illustrated in the extracted text of The Guardian Weekly where a poor Indian woman decides to carry a couple’s child in order to gain money. A third positive aspect of genetic progress might be that through PGD, couples now can choose how their baby will look like, what hair color he or she will have, his level of intelligence which is illustrated in the article written by CHS Globe Online.
Genetic progress has some positive aspects but has also limits and a lot of critics.
Secondly, genetic progress has some limits. One of the limits is that it can cause Eugenics, which is “ the science which studies methods of improving the genetic composition of the human race by selective breeding”. In other words, eugenics is a genetic selection into the population, where all forms of handicap or difference will be rejected. When it comes to the genetic traits of a population, 'selection' is the process that chooses those traits. And Eugenics can be considered an artificial selection that interferes with the natural selection because it favors one sort of genotype, always the same. It is the case for cloning, where there is just only one model to follow, one kind of genotype to duplicate, leading for all the different identities of people to be wiped out and it leads to having no genetic diversity anymore. This is shown in the cartoon named “Odd man out”, where we can see five men on a factory belt, four of them look perfectly alike, we can assume they are clones and they are all tall and muscular and in the middle of these four men we can see a small skinny boy and he is about to be thrown into the dumpster situated in foreground on the right of the cartoon and that has written on it “ Clones R Us” and “Rejects” because he doesn’t look like the clones and he doesn’t correspond to the criteria of beauty wanted. They do not accept difference and this cartoon is a kind of criticism of the genetic progress because with this kind of progress people who are different and not with the required genes are being whipped out. Another limit and criticism of genetic progress raise is that the babies who are being chosen as the embryo who has the perfect genetic match (through PGD) to be medicine babies, meaning that they are chosen to help someone who is sick by giving blood or kidneys or anything really, are feeling rejected. And this is the case for Anna the little girl who was born to help her sister Kate to be cured of leukemia. Anna feels tired and left out and really bad because all she does is give her sister blood or anything and she doesn’t get any attention and she doesn’t have a normal childhood, she’s constantly in pain, nobody asks for her opinion if she wants to help and the whole thing just never stops. And so she hires a lawyer to help her make it stop.
In conclusion, genetic progress can be very helpful to prevent or to cure genetic disease by using preimplantation genetic diagnosis, but it raises many ethical issues like eugenics which select an only model of genotype and it prevents genetic diversity, but also many people consider it to go against religion because they feel like if we choose our baby we are meddling god’s role which goes against some people’s moral and by choosing your baby’s features you are changing your vision of mankind because you can actually plan how he looks like and many people consider this to be a very dangerous matter while others disagree.
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