The Pros And Cons Of Human Gene Therapy

“Human-gene therapy has been one of the most ambitious goals of biotechnology since the advent of molecular techniques for genetic modification in the 1970s”. In the 1990s Somatic-Cell Human Gene Therapy (SHGT) was successfully tested on a patient with bubble-boy disease.1 This form of therapy targets existing genes or stop new ones from producing. This type of cell therapy only targets the non-reproductive cells of the patient. This is the main difference between this form of therapy and germ-line gene therapies. Germ-line therapies that modify embryos target the egg and sperm cells so that the improved revised code can be passed down to the following generation.1 Recently, over the past couple of years, the genetic modification on the human

Just as other forms of technology continue to develop, the question now is how far will genetic modification continue to develop? Many geneticists suggest this research be put on hold in fear of genetic modification eventually leading to the practice of specifically selecting genetic characteristics of offspring, in other words, creating “designer babies” . However, if this gene-editing technique is successfully developed, diseases that are genetically dominant, such as Huntington’s diseases, polycystic kidney disease, and sickle-cell anemia can be avoided. Eliminating these common chronic life-long illnesses, which affects more than 100,000 patients yearly, can help decrease the number of patients hospitals receive daily and increase human

Currently, this topic is along the lines of abortion because those who are for abortion would say the mother has the choice. In this case the mother, and father, would have the choice to use gene-modifying technology on their unborn child. On the other hand, those against abortion would say that the child is a gift of God and a human being once it is conceived meaning terminating the pregnancy would be murder. This view could carry over to germ-line editing because humans are still tampering with unborn humans who have no voice and this tampering could lead to more complications, even murder, in the end. If the U.S., among other countries use this scientific technology, some religious countries such as Iraq which has a culture of very strict religious laws that would most likely be opposed to editing genetics of human embryos. However, there are already many disagreements between countries on what is allowed and what is not. As germ-line editing is compared to abortion above there is a high chance, if this biotechnological editing is one day allowed to be performed on actual pregnancies, there will always be a disagreement on whether or not this is ethical. No one person has the exact same ethical view point because no one person is the same which means there will always be conflict when it comes to genetically