Page 28 - Humanism 2019

Genetically Engineering Babies: A Threat to Humanity

By Tyler Thompson, COMP student

46 XX & 46 XY. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. F. Gariépy, are highly concerned that genetic engineering
Everyone you know, everyone you love, every human who technologies could become precisely this type of extended
ever was or will be was begotten from this ancestral code. phenotype. Currently, genetic engineering seduces us with
Our musings, our struggles for survival, our battles for the prospect of ending genetic diseases and ushering in an
domination, the love of our peoples and our past times, age of a super human form, Homo uberalles, if only some
every infant’s suckling, every father’s moral lesson, every throw off the shackles of sexual replication and allow
young couple’s love, thousands of languages and fertility clinic mainframes to embed their codes in the
innumerable tools, every thief, and every servant are all human genome. With the first genetically engineered
attributable to the seam-stem of the double helix. humans gestating today, this theory must be taken at
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least as seriously as the theory of anthropogenic climate
DNA is a very small stage in a vast material cosmos. change.
Think of the Planck epoch, when subatomic particles
weren’t yet recognizable and not even the four Gariépy’s ground-breaking work, The Revolutionary
fundamental forces could independently influence the Phenotype, which lays out the likely steps that
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behavior of matter. Think of the primordial soup where transformed the primordial protein world into the current
protein replicators begot DNA world, explains that
new orders to the particles very rarely in biology, a life
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of the sea. Think of form develops a
yesterday, when libraries “I value us, with all our faults and reproductive advantage by
and alphabets stored codes rough edges, with all our diseases evolving the ability to
of grand design. And think replicate from either its
of the mainframes and and deformities, because that is us. native (genetic) code or
computer chips of today We can cure disease without from a new phenotypic
that house and transmit code. This relationship is
our data, allowing us to changing our genome. We do not called a “replicator tango.”
more significantly morph need to ‘cure’ the human condition.” In fact, this relationship
our pale blue dot and appeared to exist between
ourselves. RNA chains and DNA
chains in the most recent
But on this day man has reached a crossroads in our common ancestor of us and retroviruses. This relationship
evolution. Our knack for modifying ourselves in the name also most likely occurred between some archaic protein
of healing may very well manifest an “extended and its RNA phenotype, leading to the first RNA-based
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phenotype” that spells the end of DNA’s dominance, and life forms. By uploading our DNA-based genetic codes
with it, that form we call human being. Biologists, like J.-

25 HUMANISM IN THE HEALTH SCIENCES 2019 • VOL. 22