It is within human nature to strive for perfection. To be the best we can be, and now humans are on the brink of discovering how to finally reach this “perfection” we desire through genetically modifying fetuses or in other words creating a designer baby. However, should we really turn to designer babies in our search for perfection? In my opinion I do not believe we should because there are so many unforeseen consequences of designer babies that we cannot comprehend. We may come across bacteria that were originally harmless but due to the genetic engineering it became pathogenic to humans. Or worse mutations could come about from our careless tampering with genetic engineering. As Stephen L. Baird stated in his essay “Designer Babies: Eugenics
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Should people really mess with human genetics without knowing the full impact of the consequences? In “Designer Babies” by Shannon Brownlee she discusses some of the problems in regards to the regulation of designer babies and some of the effects that can come from messing with anything involved in the development process of the embryo. Brownlee brings up an experiment done on an embryo the ended up in “the first baby conceived through cytoplasmic transfer”(1) and it “endowed the child with extra bits of a special type of genetic material, known as mitochondrial DNA”(1). Later on a child involved in this experiment was “diagnosed with “pervasive development disorder”, a catch all term for symptoms that range from mild delays in speech to autism”(2). Although the researchers involved in the experiment said that “it is extremely unlikely that cytoplasmic transfer and the resulting mishmash ntDNA is to blame”. However, the group cannot be 100% positive which led Jim Cummins, in Brownlee’s article, to say that, “ To deliberately create individuals with multiple mitochondrial genotypes without knowing the consequences is really a step into the dark”(2). We cannot be sure what caused the child’s disorder, which can cause several people to believe that the cytoplasmic transfer may have been the culprit of the child’s disorder. Nothing is for sure currently when it comes to the genetic engineering of
Should people really mess with human genetics without knowing the full impact of the consequences? In “Designer Babies” by Shannon Brownlee she discusses some of the problems in regards to the regulation of designer babies and some of the effects that can come from messing with anything involved in the development process of the embryo. Brownlee brings up an experiment done on an embryo the ended up in “the first baby conceived through cytoplasmic transfer”(1) and it “endowed the child with extra bits of a special type of genetic material, known as mitochondrial DNA”(1). Later on a child involved in this experiment was “diagnosed with “pervasive development disorder”, a catch all term for symptoms that range from mild delays in speech to autism”(2). Although the researchers involved in the experiment said that “it is extremely unlikely that cytoplasmic transfer and the resulting mishmash ntDNA is to blame”. However, the group cannot be 100% positive which led Jim Cummins, in Brownlee’s article, to say that, “ To deliberately create individuals with multiple mitochondrial genotypes without knowing the consequences is really a step into the dark”(2). We cannot be sure what caused the child’s disorder, which can cause several people to believe that the cytoplasmic transfer may have been the culprit of the child’s disorder. Nothing is for sure currently when it comes to the genetic engineering of