Argumentative Essay On Genetic Perfect Children

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” (Ian, Jurassic park). A famous movie quote that holds the weight of every scientific breakthrough, including the process of genetically engineering babies. When trying for children, all want healthy, normal, children; but, what is normal? Normal is fluid. The status quo is normal until it isn’t. An astonishing 10% of potential parents carry a gene that subjects their child to some sort of genetic defect such as huntington's, muscular dystrophy, albinism, and many others (Jacobson). With this in mind, the question in the air is: Is weighing the risk of allowing the power hungry rich to take over with genetically perfect children a

It has been in use since around 2012 and has been busy ever since. CRISPR is, “a gene-editing technique derived from bacteria. . . In nature, it recognises specific sequences of viral DNA and chops the DNA molecule apart at these points, protecting the bacterium from harm.” (The Economist). It started as any scientific breakthrough starts, with animals. They began with small creatures, lab rats and such. They realized the dream of one day eliminating genetic diseases was close at hand. In 2017, this technology began making headlines, good and bad. Making the jump to human embryos caused a large impact worth discussing, “The landmark study triggered a public conversation on the bioethical implications of germ-line editing, as well as the lack of guidelines or regulations to prevent family planning that includes designer babies.” (Firger). With the knowledge of this issue people began to wonder the morality of creating a designer race. This means in a few short years altering genes went from science fiction to reality. With these great scientific strides comes some great responsibility. . . and

Essentially they program a specific gene sequence that allows a virus to work its way into the DNA. This then allows the scientist to program the CRISPR/Cas9 system to look for the virus and rid the sequence of the genome. It is commonly misconstrued that designer babies are made specifically by screening the embryos for problematic genes (like albinism and huntingtons) and then eliminating the embryos that have those genes and implating the ones that do not. That in itself has its own ethical and moral issues, as well as is not the case here. With this particular system it is much more complex, and potentially dangerous. Known as “molecular cut and paste,” (Saey), the system simply cuts out what it does not want, copies what it does, and then pastes it into the specific gene sequence. This is how the CRISPR/Cas9 system