SRL Archive - Discussions & Debates

First off for those of you who need to know.

Genetic Testing is the process of analyzing human DNA, RNA, chromosomes, proteins, and certain metabolites in order to detect heritable disease-related genotypes, mutations, phenotypes, or karyotypes.

(Simplified)
To make that definition understandable to some, genetic testing is the process where we look at certain things within our bodies to determine various things. Such as whether you will have a disease or need a certain type of medicine.

Now, Genetic Testing by itself has little controversy and is considered my most to be ethical to some limits. It is often used for diagnostic purposes and can save lives.

However, it can lead to many complications and problems with its results, chief among those, genetic screening and selection.

Before I go any further though, I have to give a quick science lesson so that some of you may fully understand its implications and foundations.

A quick summary of genetics in some aspects

With regards to this debate I will lay out some basic teaching for this topic.

Genetic Testing primarily works by reading our DNA. What our DNA does is contain genes, about 35,000 of them and some other non-coding regions. Genes are very important, they are the "recipes" for proteins and other functions of our cells. Although we have figured out all of these "recipes" it is much harder to isolate what each one actually does, but we are rapidly assembling a guide to every gene and its effects.

These proteins and the few other things genes code for are VERY important! They dictate many things, such as eye color, hair color, skin color, and many other things. However, the scary part for many is that they also code for things such as, intelligence, athletic ability, height, weight, and behavior!

These genes interact with the environment to determine "phenotypes" or the actual outward effects of genes.

Now as I have said Genetic Testing looks at these genes and can tell you many things. This is where it is useful and (relatively) un-challenged. Often times you can take genetic test to find out whether you will have a heart disorder or many other things, so that you can take medication to help prevent it.

Now onto where this all gets ethical and confusing.


Consider this, we can now scan for genes and we are now learning many of their effects, it is now possible to take a test by simply removing a little of your blood and in many cases they can tell with a good degree of certainty your most probable ways to die, heart failure, lung cancer, Parkinson's etc…

Pretty scary? Some think so, now this is where you start to see the moral problems.

First let me start off with an introduction to the next moral problem.

Genetic Selection

This is a true story.

A family had a boy, however due to the parents genetic make up, they had a close to 75% chance of having a child with a rare, painful, and deadly bone marrow disease.

Turns out the boy had the disease. The parents were un-fazed though and wanted to have another child, however this is what they did. They in-vitro fertilized a few embryos, and then did a genetic test on them to find out whether this child would have the disease, they then implanted the embryo that did not have the disease and was going to be a boy, they wanted to him to have a brother.

So they artificially selected their next child to make sure he did not have the disease, but, above that, they also selected the boy to have bone marrow matching the older brothers so that he could donate his marrow to possible save his brothers life.

Sounds great right, the boy saved his older brother's life. But it raises a lot of questions.

If genetic screening is allowed to be used further, it is going to be very complicated. If we already allow selection, who is to prevent the next couple from picking their child so that he is 6 foot 5 and has a IQ of 150?

Lines will have to be drawn and they will have to be drawn very carefully… This is called Genetic Selection.

Now for the other one,

Genetic Screening

Insurance companies already often do background checks to see if your family has a history of lets say… heart failure. Now, they often refuse coverage to those who fit these profiles.

However, what if an insurance company decides to make you take a genetic test before they accept you. If they see that you might die in two years, there not going to insure you, seems unfair right?

It also gets even worse when you consider companies hiring employees, if a company has fifty applicants for a high level job, they want the best applicant for the job right?

Well with Genetic Screening, they can figure out who will be the best suited, hardest worker etc…

Once again, scary is it not?

So here is what the debate is about, should genetic selection and screening be allowed, if so, to what extent? If not, why?

Just so you all know I am for genetic selection and screening to a certain extent.

Let the debates begin!

Why is this wrong?

What is wrong with everyone being 7" and having an IQ of +200?


When everyone is rich, no one will be.

Variety is what makes us human. To take that away (and as robot said) have an army of 7" highly intelligent people won't stop the variety amongst people though. Those with the most variance will become more and more prominent. People only want intelligent children because they have a better head start on life. If everyone was equally intelligent, then they would want sporty children or artistic children as they would have a better chance, because there would be more 'demand' for them as all the jobs requiring intelligent staff will have had all their positions full and most likely there will be large amounts of people unemployed etc, thus returning the natural variance as the varying people reproduce.

~ To allow genetic screening to play God is careless - to disallow genetic screening that could save millions of lives is careless too. For everything in life, there must be balance - nature insists upon it - and when we disrupt the balance, it will right itself with even the most devastating conclusion.

Wow. I never knew it could be used like that.

In Genetic Selection…

I think that people should only be allowed to use this to save lives (as in the case of the two brothers, they saved the one who was dieing and the one who was born by keeping the disease from it). But to basically go and create their child like on a video game (however you want), would end up being the end of humans.

In Genetic Screening…

The insurance company thing is a hard one. They have the right to, but they also don't have the right in a way. They should probably just be limited to family records and such. However, with the employees, I think that they should be allowed to do so. The best person gets the job that way, and the world would be a better place.

Overall, I too think that it should be allowed to a certian extent.

Just about everyone thinks it should be allowed to an extent. The more important question is where to put the line. For example, you said it's allright for them to have a selected child that would save their older sons life, but in return, the younger brother will have to go through a lot of horrible procedures etc. at a young age (I know for a fact that bone marrow is a particuarly hard thing to get out - mainly because it's inside the bone and thus the bone has to be 'broken' to get to it) so that brings on the morality in which should 1 man suffer to save another against their will? Also, at what age could a younger sibling give reasonable consent to it, as it's pretty obvious that at a young age they could think they were just helping and not realising the pain they will go through - not to mention the psychological effect it will have on them for the rest of their life… I really do need to learn to express my thoughts in a shorter way…

From: mixster05
Just about everyone thinks it should be allowed to an extent. The more important question is where to put the line. For example, you said it's allright for them to have a selected child that would save their older sons life, but in return, the younger brother will have to go through a lot of horrible procedures etc. at a young age (I know for a fact that bone marrow is a particuarly hard thing to get out - mainly because it's inside the bone and thus the bone has to be 'broken' to get to it) so that brings on the morality in which should 1 man suffer to save another against their will? Also, at what age could a younger sibling give reasonable consent to it, as it's pretty obvious that at a young age they could think they were just helping and not realising the pain they will go through - not to mention the psychological effect it will have on them for the rest of their life… I really do need to learn to express my thoughts in a shorter way…

When a young child is faced with a decision, the parents make it for them. It's the parents' decision to do what they did, and the kid probably won't even remember it when he's older. Yes, it is probably horrible to go through, but it was the parents' decision, and it turned out to be a pretty good one.

One thing I don't get with the story with the 2 brothers. Exactly how young was the younger child when he gave the marrow to his brother? If it was at about a year old, then I stand by what I said above, if he was older, I'm not really sure. Because then they would have started to understand life and those memories don't fade altogether.

So I stand by what I said in the first post, with the addition of this…

If a child is young (about a year old or less), and it will almost definitely survive the things it has to go through to save another life, then it should be done. The child will probably not remember it, and just be praised for it. It will feel to him that he has done nothing but yet has really done something. And if the parents consent to it, really the child doesn't have a choice. When you are young, your parents make your choices.

By the text, I gathered that the 'child' was almost full grown by that time.

From this -

chance of having a child with a rare, painful, and deadly bone marrow disease.

'deadly' would probably mean that he could die if he wasn't helped soon. So I assumed that the second child was born (within a year) and they got the marrow out of him as soon as they could (which could probably be at around 1 yr. old or so).

And by this

Sounds great right, the boy saved his older brother's life

He couldn't have been too old if he is reffered to as 'boy'.

The verdict Hurgy? :p


And also, with my previous post -

If the disease the older brother had was painful and deadly, I highly doubt that anybody would let their brother suffer if all they had to do was go through a few days of pain to end their brother's pain for life (and let him live a longer life).

Well, I highly doubt you could successfully harvest bone marrow from a infant and have the infant still live after the procedure…

Besides, there would be about none there.

Similar situation -

Some of that debate emerged in 2000, when Lisa and Jack Nash briefly made the news when their son Adam was born in Colorado. The Nashes already had one child, six-year-old Molly, who was born with a rare genetic bone marrow disease that would kill her unless she received a transplant from someone with the identical tissue type. Both Lisa and Jack were carriers for Fanconi anemia, a genetic disorder, leaving them with a one-in-four chance of having another affected child each time Lisa got pregnant.

The Nashes elected, instead, to conceive 15 embryos and subject them to PGD, or pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. A single cell was taken from each embryo and tested for the presence of the genetic mutation that causes Fanconi anemia. Then the Nashes went a step further, and had the embryos checked to see which one carried a tissue type that matched their daughter, Molly's. Adam was born in Denver in August. In September, doctors in Minnesota performed a stem cell transplant on Molly, using blood taken at birth from Adam's umbilical cord and his bone marrow. Today, the Nashes have two healthy children. Faced with the same situation, many American parents would undoubtedly choose the same course.

So, according to that (unless I misread :p), you can take some at birth. This article also makes good point in the next paragraph.

EDIT: Oh wait, not exactly the same kind of case… She needed tissue in there…Hmm

At the same time, the Nash case raises the unsettling possibility of parents bearing children not to love and cherish them, but for the purpose of harvesting their tissue. And what about parents who simply want their kids to be like them, genetic warts and all?

Same story as above, but now I think this applies to the brothers too

Should parents be permitted to create a child who could save an ailing elder brother or sister? An example is provided by Linda and Jack Nash from Englewood, Colorado, whose first child Molly suffered from Fanconi anaemia, a fatal disease that attacks bone marrow. The couple went through five cycles of test-tube fertilisation before producing in 1999 an embryo that was screened, found to be clear of Fanconi anaemia, and whose tissue matched Molly's. Scientists led by Dr Yury Verlinsky, a geneticist at Chicago's Reproductive Genetics Institute, then removed stem cells from the baby's umbilical chord and transplanted them to Molly, who was then six. These replenished her marrow and Molly now seems free of the disease thanks to her baby brother Adam. 'It came to me that God created Adam and took his rib to create woman,' says his mother, Lisa. 'The rib is the source of marrow, and it saved Molly's life.'

And another topic to discuss. So we know we don't want anyone to be perfect, but how about free from disease, illness, and inherited weaknesses. Would that be good or bad?

Taken to it's ultimate conclusion the human race would stop evolving and die out.

It's genetic mutation that helps up evolve and improve as a species, yes things go wrong but if we start correcting genes that don't conform to the norm we lose that chance genious gene or the chance of a natural gene evolving to combat various cancers etc..

As for dying out as a race… We need genetic diversity to survive. It is for this reason that incest is illegal. The more inbreeding the more genetic problems occur until it is no longer sustainable.. Once we start correcting genes at source from our templates of "Perfect Genes" we lose that genetic diversity.

I also belive it is morally wrong to predetermine a persons future based on our subjective view of thier genes.

@ Runescapian: They said it was a 'BONE MARROW TRANSPLANT', not stem cells :p



But the human race as a whole has already stopped evolving. Once a race becomes sentient, makes tools, builds itself fortresses to shut out the danger, why evolve? Life is lazy, it will not create super-beings by itself unless life is pushed to by outside forces (and besides, where those super-beings exist they would be normal to everything else on that planet).

There are special circumstances, like how an Inuit's body reacts differently to cold than those in tropical climates, etc, but that isn't really a genetic change… It's a behavioral change.

Sentient beings still evolve.. to say they don't would be like saying that all humans before the renaissance or industrial revolution etc.. were not sentient. Over the past few thousand years alone there have been huge leaps in intelligence and physical ability.

Bone marrow isn't very difficult to get out. They don't have to break any bones. They usually take it out of the hip bones using a long needle. I'm sure it's uncomfortable, but it's not anything like breaking a bone.

I think that the way health insurance is paid for in the US is going to change a bit in the future. I think there is a role for insurance companies, but anyone with a genetic disease should get subsidized insurance through the government. It's not their fault they have the disease. It's not like a smoker or alcoholic or food addict that destroys their own health. The whole issue gets very tricky for insurance, and also for employment.

Do you really want someone that has a genetic predisposition to anger or violence or sexual depravity teaching kids? If they found genes that were linked to these sorts of behaviors, would you want your kids' teachers screened?

Our systems of health care and also of criminal justice are geared toward dealing with problems after they have already occurred. We don't do enough preventative medicine, and doing more screening may make that more effective and more prevalent. And I think everyone would agree that's a good thing. But should we be doing the same thing for criminals? Should we be creating databases of people genetically predisposed to felonious behavior? We already have sex offender databases where we discriminate against people after the fact. What if we could implement preventative counseling or something along those lines after screening people? Why wouldn't that be just as good of a thing?

It's an interesting question. Having children is a deeply personal decision, and I think people should give parents a lot of leeway on such decisions. But there should be limits.

If you and your spouse have very serious genetic incompatibilities, you really shouldn't be having children together. You shouldn't be creating 10s or 100s of embryos just to try to find one to be implanted. There are plenty of kids out there that need to be adopted and loved and raised by people that can afford such procedures in the first place.

The whole In Vitro Fertilization process raises similar questions. It's a costly, complicated process, so people want to create enough embryos to have a good chance that it will work the first time. But creating life just to kill it or to put it into liquid nitrogen for decades isn't very respectful, and I think people should be responsible with that procedure.

Intelligence? Its not really intelligence, just what we know. Intelligence is putting that to good use, which I can sadly say most people can't. Our physical ability hasn't grown either, where did you get that?

Just saw the news, Britain is trying to get everyone's DNA who they believe is likely to commit crimes, although, whether or not they will use it for screening, or just as a database to solve crimes is still undecided.

Great debate, we definitely need a subsidized insurance for those who are found to have a genetic disease or pre-dispositions to a disease, as tarajunky said.

if it were to ever happen, there would be a much larger gap between the rich and the poor
the rich people would buy the best possible genes, while the poor would have to use natural methods
the majority of people would be trapped in a society where they are ruled over by a very rich, very intelligent and very athletic minority,
how could the poor possibly defend themselves when their exploiters are engineered to be simply better.

but i don't think this will happen in the foreseeable future, since biologists find genes very very complicated, it read somewhere that it will take 500 years to be able to control something like height.
and the research could be slowed down with religious or moral groups saying its against their beliefs.

But who's to say we are not ruled by a very intelligent and athletic minority already?

When was the last time you saw George Bush have a speech not written by someone else that actually made sense/ saw him do anything athletically demanding?
If anything, we are still ruled by a semi-feudal system mixed in which democracy. People say that everyone is born with an equal future - but it's not the case. Everything down to the town you are born in, the quality of your childhood/teenage life, what your parents do - they all can seriously affect your future. Having a rich family while living near good schools can enable you to achieve a lot more, even if you weren't the sharpest knife in the draw, while being born in a run-down area to parents working minimum wage and going to a not so good school can lower your chance or earning well, even if you were quite an intelligent person.

From: R0b0t1
But who's to say we are not ruled by a very intelligent and athletic minority already?

because when i see rich people in real life, its obvious they aren't, the posh, golden-toiletpaper, private school boys are just like normal people save for their upbringing,
they are only products of nurture, not nature

Yes, that future is a very likely probability, although I find 500 years a pessimistic prediction.

In the near future (less than 50 years probably) something very similar to what you are say could be quite possible. You do not need to do any actual genetic engineering to have the "best" genes, nothing complicated has to be done, in fact, all we have to do is use what nature developed over the course of 4 or so billion years.

Consider this, most genetic variation in a population results from two factors,
1) Crossing over of homologous chromosomes during gamete formation (Just think of it as switching part of one chromosome with another)
2) Random Assortment of Chromosomes (Think of it as reshuffling a deck of cards)

This allows for incredible variations in any persons individual code, while it is true that no "new" genes are introduced it can still result in different expressions of genes.

Now, this is why parents can have one kid who turns out to be 6 feet tall and another, who is 5 feet tall.

So nature has already developed ways to create variation, which then over the life of an individual, this specific variation is "assessed" and is rejected (Killed) or accepted (Lives to reproduce) This is natural selection of course and it picks over time the best.

So what if we could use this selection process on embryo's? Fertilize a hundred eggs and select the best one to be implanted and be born. We already do part of this in in-vitro fertilization, (Implanting and fertilization), the only thing left to allow this to occur is a complete understanding of what each gene does and thus we can scan that embryo for the best genes.

This is a very possible event within the near furture as I have said.

No need to buy the genes if you just let nature make them and you select the best of the best.

Yes in-vitro is expensive, but it is not out of the range of the average "middle" class couple. This new technique is not much more difficult, and while it could be expensive at first, the incredible benefits it could potentially offer would result in it being made much more accessible over time to the general population. Why make 100k off of 1,000 couples, when you can make 5k off of a 100,000?

Now of course there will be those who are not able to access this tech or have the money too so your prediction of an under-society is correct just it will (hopefully) be a minority.

Ultimately though a bit farther in the future when gene therapy is more practical you could "buy" good genes, just since the code of a gene does not change and it is universally readable, keeping these genes secret and thus charging for them to be administered is impossible, it is the equivalent of all music and software without any anti-copy protection at all, you only need a computer, (or gene therapy clinic) to get it all.

Hope everyone can see this next possibility that arises out of genetic selection and screening. I look forward to some discussion on it.

It's much more complicated than you make it out to be. We have roughly 30k genes. But the more we learn, the more it seems like all the non-coding regions of the DNA are going to be more important than they seem now.

There have been less than 10 people have their genomes completely sequenced. The first public one was James Watson. The second was Craig Ventner. Between those few people, they have identified 12 million SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms). Those are positions in the DNA where one base is changed to another. In Ventner's DNA alone they identified 4 million new SNPs that had never been found before. So if you extrapolate that out, the estimates are that there are somewhere north of 100 million SNPs in the world population. So, for each of us there aren't 30k possible variables, there are 100 million or more for each person.

On top of this, scientists have found that different families with the exact same disease causing mutation (exact same base changes, etc) can have completely different diseases! Some may develop advanced aging (progeria), or heart muscle diseases, or muscular dystrophy, or alzheimers, or any number of variations in the severity of each of these diseases.

The complexity is truly astounding. And the rate at which scientists are pinning down the function of single genes is figuratively a snail's pace. Finding out which of the tens of millions of SNPs have a function is a truly daunting task, and it will take a long time for scientists just to figure out HOW to approach the issue, let alone do it.

Yes, I defiantly have simplified many things. I'm not expecting this to happen tomorrow.

We defiantly still have a lot to learn about the interaction between environmental factors, gene expression, what exactly non-coding regions do, how exons and introns play into everything, etc…

However, once it becomes common place to completely sequence your genome, which realistically is not that far off at the current rate of progress in making that tech available. Brute force databases should be able to still work out, with a good deal of accuracy, reliable predictions of what someone will be like, given a their genome, sure it is impossible to say 100% on anything.

Ultimately, we all know that the future still has things that we could never predict and some of those things might hinder or help this advancement.

But odds are this is still very possible and once we understand to a greater degree the processes themselves we might be able to predict the causes of any change in our genomes. The thing that should not be under-estimated here is the ever advancing speed of computers, fifty years ago, we had just discovered what DNA was made of with almost no idea of what any of it meant. The progress we have made in fifty years is amazing considering that, and as we also know, the speed of progress is exponentially increasing, more has been discovered in the last hundred years than all of history in terms of knowledge. Fifty years from now who is to say it won't reliably happen?

Yeah, the sequencing technology is growing by leaps and bounds. It took almost 10 years for a concerted effort of many institutions and researchers to finish the first draft of the human genome. Now there are new machines available that can sequence 2 BILLION bases per day. They can finish an entire genomic sequence in about 2 days. Of course, it costs $100k to do it.

There's an X-prize of $10 million for the first company that can produce a technology to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days for less than $1000 per genome.

http://genomics.xprize.org/

I think that will be completed in less than 5 years at the pace they're going now. At that point it becomes something that could be used affordably in the clinic. However, just because a technology is available to physicians doesn't mean they're going to use it. I think it will take a whole new generation of doctors that have received a fundamentally different type of training in order to embrace such technology. Individuals will probably embrace it for their own personal reasons as you've discussed before doctors do.

That was a very important point you brought up about how even if the technology is in place it might not be adapted immediately. I really did not consider that but you are very right when you say that. It probably will not become wide spread immediately do to the lack of training in the field and will take time for new doctors, who have been trained in these areas, to make it common place.

Odds are specialty clinics will open very soon after this technology becomes available, for private use as I have said. But wide scale usage in your average "doctors office" will take much longer. Especially since the world we live in is so concerned about legal issues.

Wait. Wait.


Bioshock much?



Those who have access to the therapy will become consumed by being 'better', those without will need to protect themselves…


Situation: Image fashion crazy women. Imagine fashion crazy women with superhuman abilities. Now imagine them fighting over more superhuman abilities like they might fight to get to the best clothes rack… Thats what everyone will be like.

Until, eventually, like the citizens in Bioshock's Rapture (city), they will have been altered so much they may not really be human. Technically.

Thats a little to far out there, sorry :)

The technology that we are discussing here is mainly for selection at birth, choosing the best baby possible, however, what you mention, on the fly modifying to get the "best" is more like gene therapy. While gene therapy is possible today, it is very limited in its applications, and will take awhile to be able to be used efficiently and effectively for whatever you chose to want.

Now, you must also remember, we can only use genes we already have discovered and know what they do, in order to use this. Furthermore genes code for proteins, and proteins by themselves do not allow us to jump a thousand feet in the air.

There are no "superhuman" abilities that could be granted by this since there are no genes that allow us to shoot lasers out of our eyes or be bullet proof… un-fortunately :)

The only abilities this code grant you are abilities other humans already have.

However… in the future it may be possible to create entirely new genes that could do wonderful things, though that is a long way away.