Aggregated News
Published by Henry Holt
Copyright 2003
"Right now, all around the world, ten thousand scientists are assembling ten thousand different pieces of the human genetic puzzle. Most of this work leads in exciting directions-toward new and better cancer drugs, a vaccine for AIDS-but such research may also lead to something much darker: to attempts at genetically engineering human beings in the womb, designing our children to make them smarter, prettier, "better." We've already done such work with a long list of other mammals, and scientists right up to James Watson, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, now urge us to try the same trick with our kids, arguing that it is both inevitable and desirable. "Going for perfection," Watson calls it. But in fact such genetic tampering threatens to destroy the very things that give meaning to human life….
"The engineers promise to complete the process of liberation, to free us or, rather, our offspring from the limitations of our DNA, just as their predecessors freed us from the confines of the medieval worldview, or the local village, or...