Genetic Engineering: Humans Playing God

Time We Played God

On the 5th of July, 1995, Dolly the sheep was born. She was the first living organism to be cloned entirely from another. It was the first milestone in the history of human bio-engineering, but at the moment she was born, genetic research on humans was brought to a screeching halt. Since then, every single attempt at the cloning or engineering of the human genome has been blocked by the government, for reasons of ‘morality’ and ‘ethnical standards’. Many critics are calling out genetic engineering as humans ‘playing god’. However, the time might have just come. Although genetic engineering and cloning might break many ethnical and legal boundaries, it allows for medical and technological advances like never seen before,

However, the question is actually what is a human? The human genome contains a total of 3,095,693,981 base ‘pairs’, each of which carry an individual instruction or message. According to Telegraph, the average genome of a human has about a 0.1% difference from those of other humans caused mainly by genetic mutations. That means strictly speaking, a human can have 3,095,693 genes that are totally different from any other human and still be biologically a homo sapiens. The differences that moderate genetic engineering will make to the genome (improved health, physiology, immunity to diseases, etc.) will only amount to a fraction of the aforementioned figure. The modern world stretches it even further, with the acceptance of genetic freak accidents into normal and ‘human’ societies. Not only will the recipients of moderate genetic engineering not have a significant, species splitting difference from ‘normal humans’, they will also be biologically

Human science, whether it be in physics or medication, has been advancing at a breakneck pace for the last 200 years. We have already accomplished the unthinkable: split the atom, change the chemical composure of our planet forever, put a man on another celestial body and caused a mass extinction. Humans alone are responsible for the creation of species like the chicken and the dog. For a species that started out as small tribes scattered across the earth, exposed to the elements and forced to fight for resources, reaching the state that we are at right now is no small accomplishment. Currently, many of our race lives in comfort and safety, eating other animals without actually having to kill them. In a sense, the human race has become like a god, and science— a byproduct of human advancement— the pursuit of ‘godliness’. So why are we stopping ourselves? There has been an irreversible shift in society towards valuing better and stronger, and genetic engineering might just be the personification of that shift. Human society has continually drifted towards reaching our full potential, and yet the ban on genetic engineering has prohibited the only methods left to achieve that aim.

Genetic engineering—a science that can bring us many medical wonders, extend our life span and make the world better—is being blocked from developing by a group of people that are simply just afraid of change. Just like artificial intelligence, genetic