Say you’re not ready to genetically engineer your child (McKibben)
April 13th, 2007 | Published in Genetic Engineering, Science, Quotes, Culture
Say you’re not ready [to genetically engineer your child]. Say you’re perfectly happy with the prospect of a child who shares the unmodified genes of you and your partner. Say you think that manipulating the DNA of your child might be dangerous, or presumptuous, or icky? How long will you be able to hold that line if the procedure begins to spread among your neighbors?
Maybe not so long as you think: if germline manipulation actually does begin, it seems likely to set off a kind of biological arms race. “Suppose parents could add 30 points to their child’s IQ,” asks the economist Lester Thurow, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Wouldn’t you want to do it? And if you don’t, your child will be the stupidest in the neighborhood.”
That’s precisely what it might feel like to be the parent facing the choice. Individual competition more or less defines the society we’ve built, and in that context love can almost be defined as giving your kids what they need to make their way in the world. Deciding not to soup them up … well, it could come to seem like child abuse.
–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), 33-34