Genetic Engineering Benefits

Kathi E. Hanna, a science and health consultant, states, “Many believe that use of gene transfer at the embryonic stage for enhancement would reach far beyond the limits of acceptable medical intervention” (Hanna). What is genetic engineering? Is it safe? Can it benefit humanity in the future? Genetic engineering is the changing of characteristics of an organism by manipulating its genetic material, or genome. Scientists have been genetically modifying basically everything from plants to animal and to humans. Genetic engineering, while it does have benefits to help the human race, has the possibility to go out of control and must not be pursued due to the harm it can cause to society. Understanding the goals of genetic engineering and

Linda Tagliaferro explains the Genome Project and its “revolution in medicine”. This project was huge back around 1989, which had plans to create the perfect human beings. The project planned to help human change their genes and make them stronger to prevent diseases and help avoid people who have “genetic flaws” (Tagliaferro). Scientists will take the egg and sperm of a healthy human female and male, then combined them to test it genes and if it has developed any sort of disease. If any were developed, the embryo would either be tossed or it could have its genome changed to rid of it from the disease. This genetic engineering tactic was used to test for making new improvements in the health of human through use of unborn babies. Harless explains the human race has made ” genetic improvements” since the early age of man. However, even with this adaption, in today’s world we could not make a “perfect world” for humans, but we can make improvements: ” Genetic engineering will never make a perfect society, but it has enormous potential to make society better than it is by making us better than we are” (Harless). It took centuries for our ancestors to completely adaptations to the world, which made humans stronger and more intelligent, but scientist wants to make us better but could lead to a severe consequence. For example, Ray Bohlin states,

In “The Case Against Perfection,” Sandel describes that cloning “violates the right to autonomy” and is a way for a parent to gain that picture perfect child that everyone always dreams about. This process allows parents to choose the specific traits that they want in their child; however, this takes the “right to an open future” from them (Sandel). Choosing what your child should be like and what they should do with their life can slowly ruin a person. The generated child could feel more like a product rather than an actual human being. Sandel state that certain prenatal tests can “detect genetic abnormalities” and have the ability to determine the sex of the fetus. These tests allow for a parent to choose the sex of their child by taking a couple of fertilized eggs and look at the sex and check for the possibility of defective flaws. The parents choose the perfect egg and get rid of the imperfect ones (Sandel). Just like the paraphrase above, this shows if it takes a significant amount of embryos and fetus’ to find one perfect child, then the situation goes from parents looking for a child to a situation of murder to many unborn children. That is extremely inhumane, especially if it is a parent just looking for one specific