Bharat Pradeep
“So what cool features does your baby have?” How freaked out would you be if you heard these words? In the future you may be hearing a lot of this due to human genetic engineering.
Genetic engineering is a process that involves altering the structure of an organism by changing its genes. Though there are many advantages on paper, in reality it takes away the fact that each person is one of a kind.
Sure it might be fun to build a baby to see what a perfect child would look like for you, but then the baby isn’t unique from every other, and could simply be made by someone else. It essentially turns something living into an appliance, such as a phone, that could be the exact same as one of your friends.
Without being special, all those saying about how you are important are meaningless. You wouldn’t be able to tell your child that there is no one else like you, which is a disheartening thought.
Of course there are some parts of changing your child that could be advantageous. Scientists are trying to create immunity to diseases which could be seen as a good thing. But thus far, insight into this hasn’t yielded acceptable results. Princeton molecular biologist states that when trying to do this work on animals, it only had a 50 percent chance of working. And on top of this, he adds that when it did work, 5 percent of the time a new mutation was created that posed a problem that could be as big as the one they were trying to solve.
Of course for some, genetic engineering is the only option. According to http://www.womenshealth.gov/publications/our-publications/fact-sheet/infertility.html, 10 percent of women aged between 15 and 44 have difficulty getting pregnant, sometimes due to genetic complications. These women can get this problem fixed by having healthy cells injected into their eggs, causing the problem to go away. But this raises another problem. The eggs of the once infertile women contain the DNA of the women who assisted her. So now, the baby has the DNA of a male and two females.
To me this causes discontent because now the baby that is supposed to be the creation of you and your partner has characteristics of another woman that you may not even know.
As is evident by now, genetic engineering should not be introduced to humans. It should be left with food as it is now, as there it has many benefits, and even if there is a problem, at least it isn’t affecting a human being that many people care for.
