Imagine now that you and everyone else in this room all had super brains, super athletes, and all were good looking. Now imagine that everyone had the exact same genetic make-up. Impossible maybe? Crazy? Definitely. Well this kind of environment might be the same around the world in a couple of years. Certainly not far from our realm of possibilities. I am an ex-scientist of the field of where certain genes within a human are manipulated to a "better"" state. In other words, human germline enhancement. According to the renowned pediatrician and gene-therapy researcher W. French Anderson, "It's going to happen pretty quickly, and it's going to happen in the guise of something else." Scared? [pause] You should be. Good morning pure humans. Today I will explain why we should not continue research into the exacerbation of social and economic inequity, the elimination of genetic diversity, and worse yet, the destruction of mankind. I [pause] am talking about human germline enhancement and why I am against it.
This technology requires a great deal of work and resources. In other words it will cost a great deal of money and be limited in availability. Most likely only families with a higher social and economic status will have the option of accessing this technology. Then parents with the thinking of "I should be the same as the people around me"" would have the parents eventually come up with the perfect genome. These choices would become the beliefs of the surrounding society other than the parents or guardians themselves. This so-called advantage would cause society would eventually break up into two different groups, the enhanced and the non-enhanced. So to speak then this would further promote the huge pre-existing social and economic inequity.
Another potential outcome is the total loss of genetic diversity, the very factor that has helped us as a race to overcome all kinds of environmental problems.
