Why Build-a-Bear When You Can Build-a-Baby?

In a world obsessed with perfection, it’s no wonder that people have started to turn to genetic engineering to screen out various diseases linked to genetic disorders. Cystic Fibrosis, Down syndrome and Anaemia are just some of the over 4 000 currently known genetic disorders, stemming from any of the 30 000 genes that are present in the 23 chromosomes of a human being. Along with being able to diagnose these genetic disorders, scientists are also working on gene therapy to basically fix the malfunctioning genes by replacing them with functional ones through many ways including virus implantation and, in the future, surgery. All these advances are giving the human population greater longevity and hope to those who suffer from serious illness linked to genetics. But these advances are also resulting in a new trend throughout the world: genetically engineering your baby. Sounds like fun, right? Just choose a gender and add a bit of brown hair and then some blue eyes. Why stop there? Why not throw in some height, or some intelligence? All of this is becoming a reality as genetic engineering transcends what we’ve ever thought possible; it’s gone from fixing life and death errors to ‘fixing’ the future. Here's a short newscast about the topic:



All of this is done through In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) where the embryo is ‘conceived’ in a little test tube or Petri dish in a nice, sterilized lab. The little embryo, along with a few other of its ‘siblings’ sit in optimal conditions until a cell can be extracted and screened for the eventual traits of the future child. Based on what the parents want, a suitable embryo is then selected and placed into the mother, where it develops like a normal embryo would. And voilà! You’ve got yourself your ‘dream child’.



I’m sure it sounds tempting. Being able to choose almost exactly how your child turns out, ensuring that they won’t be born into a diseased future from the genes they have, and being sure that they’ll be able to excel at anything they want to try. Plus, what’s one genetically modified child in a world of over 6.7 billion people? It’s like a cup of water being poured into the ocean. No one is going to notice it, so what could possibly go wrong? While genetically choosing your child might give you a warm, fuzzy feeling inside knowing that you’ve made its life a lot easier, it’s probably going to have horrible repercussions on the rest of the world, not to mention the ethical issues that go along with it.


One large problem is the future of children if genetically engineered children become widespread and favoured over natural children. It has already begun to become popular around the world in the form of gender selection. “Dr. Steinberg, Director at The Fertility Institutes, claims that they are performing on the order of 10 gender selection fertilizations every week, each for a fee of $18,400.” (singularityhub.com) It seems like a lot of money just to choose the gender of the child. What happens when children can be customized in every single way? The price tag would be huge.

Even in the present day, parents can be disappointed that their children don’t turn out the way they expected. With a fee so large, it seems like these designer babies would be investments that parents make to ensure perfection. Can you imagine being told you should be what your parents want you to be because they paid thousands of dollars for you? If genetically engineered children become popular, and they probably will, it seems that parenting will begin to lose the warmth and love that is supposed to go along with it, and become a competition of the best child, along with giving parents a mindset of ‘I paid a lot of money for you, so you better turn out the way I planned.’


From an ethical standpoint, genetically engineering babies is close to crossing the line. Using IVF creates many embryos, from which only one is selected. The fertilization clinic is then responsible for the rest of the unused embryos. More often than not, they’re just discarded as if they were unimportant. This brings up the debate of whether or not an embryo is considered ‘living’ and has a right to remain so, even if the parents don’t want it. Using these methods to engineer babies would result in hundreds of unused embryos that would be simply discarded because they’re deemed useless.

Is it right to have these future children being thrown away simply because they don’t have traits desired by the parents? Some bioethicists state that genetic screening was supposed to be used to deter life-threatening illnesses from taking hold on future generations, but see engineering children to avoid certain characteristics is a bad use of the technology.“I’m totally against this. My goal is to screen embryos to help couples have healthy babies free of genetic diseases. Traits are not diseases,” as said by William Kearns, a medical geneticist. (hplusmagazing.com) Some embryos are not allowed to develop because they don’t meet someone else’s standards, which from many people’s views, is ethically and morally wrong.


As I heard earlier this week on the radio, more and more children are being born prematurely or in multiples each year. The two main reasons for this are older mothers, who are causing children to be born earlier, and multiples, which often force doctors to remove the children by means of a caesarean section. Multiples are a common effect of IVF, because more than one embryo is usually transferred over, to increase likeliness of getting pregnant. This also increases the risk of having children die early, or missing important development during the last few weeks as a fetus. Genetically modified babies may have ‘ideal traits’, but if we get carried away, it could result in different issues.

Another issue is linked to the last bio-blog topic of biodiversity. We’re already so enchanted by the media and its concept of ‘real beauty’ that cosmetic surgery is on the rise. Now we would be able to save our children the hassle of doing this later by choosing the best cosmetic traits before they’re even born. Not only will this decrease the biodiversity and the genetic pool of the human race, but eventually, everyone may begin to look extremely similar. In a society where some traits are more desired than others, one can only imagine what everyone would look like if we could predetermine the outcome. We’re fighting natural selection and making it become unnatural. What trait will be ‘special’ when everyone has it? Genetically engineering babies seems like unnatural selection and goes completely against biodiversity.


As Dr. Steinberg, the leading geneticist of a Los Angeles clinic, says, “[Trait selection] is a service [and] we intend to offer it soon.” (online.wsj.com) At the moment, this technology is part of an industry that brings in huge profits annually. Geneticists such as Steinberg may be thinking about the parents and the children, but they’re also probably driven by the ‘rewards’ of such a popular industry. Soon, babies won’t be left up to chance, but carefully selected to meet the parents’ every whim. Our society prizes aesthetics so much that this technology will definitely be used by people around the world, by more than the many people that use it right now to choose the gender of their children.


This technology originated to help find genetic disorders, and help stop them from ever occurring. This newfound industry is moving away from what was originally intended, and things have definitely gotten out of hand. Artificial intelligence was supposed to be able to create perfect ‘humans’ that would fit into society. With genetic engineering, who needs to build robots when you can just build a baby? This inevitable future is going to take the depth of parenting and turn it into a competition that is going to homogenize society, along with throwing everything out of balance not, to mention the embryos that are being thrown away like trash. Compliment someone’s child sometime in the near future and you might just hear, “Thanks. I picked the parts myself.”

Sources:
"A Baby, Please. Blond, Freckles -- Hold the Colic" - The Wall Street Journal

"Designer Babies" - Time Magazine

"'Designer Babies' Ethical?" - CBS News

"Designer Babies - Like It Or Not, Here They Come" - Singularityhub.com

"Designer baby row over US clinic" - BBC News

"Designer Babies: A Right to choose?" - Wired.com

"The Great Designer Baby Controversy of '09" - h+ Magazine

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Poisoning Biodiversity

Biodiversity is the foundation of sustaining life in the environment. What is biodiversity? “Biodiversity reflects the number, variety and variability of living organisms. It includes diversity within a species, between species, and among ecosystems.” (greenfacts.org) Another way to explain biodiversity would be by watching this video:

Without it, species of organisms throughout the world would be susceptible to events such as disease and environmental disasters that would potentially wipe out the entire population. By having biodiversity, resistant organisms would be able to survive, and continue a population by passing on the resistant genes, eventually reaching equilibrium once more and keeping their stable niche in any ecosystem. But how are humans affecting biodiversity? Simply put, humans are affecting biodiversity in a way that could be irreversibly negative.


Humans have been on Earth for thousands of years, and have been affected by the same things as animals, like natural selection and evolution. In this modern age, humans have become immune to things that would otherwise control the ever-growing population. Unlike other organisms, we do not let the weak to fall to predators because they hinder the rest of society, but we show compassion and shelter them from dangers that nature would normally pose. As animals evolve to adapt to new environments affected by global warming, humans simply develop tools to combat their changing environments. Humans have developed methods to avoid having to be affected by nature in any way, which creates ignorance to their effect on the bigger picture. We feel as though we are separate entities from nature, not part of the web of life. The truth is that everything we do affects other organisms elsewhere, which is leading to a decline in biodiversity.


One way that humans have greatly affected biodiversity is through forestry worldwide. Through forestry, we limit the number of natural habitats available to animals. As rainforests in South America are cut down to be used as lumber and paper products, the area in which animals may live is greatly reduced. Sure, planting seedlings where trees had just been cut down may help, but not the animals that need larger trees to survive. With the long time it takes trees to grow, most animals are out of luck when it comes to forestry. With declining habitats, smaller organisms begin to become more concentrated, and become affected by limiting factors. These limiting factors cause extreme natural selection, and remove the weaker organisms from the species. By removing many of the weak at the same time, possibly important genetic information is lost forever, reducing the biodiversity of the species.


But organisms lower on the food chain are not the only ones affected by habitat loss. Organisms higher up are also affected, possibly to a greater degree. “In general the most threatened species are those that are higher up the food chain, have a low population density, live long, reproduce slowly, and live within a limited geographical area.” (greenfacts.org) As habitat is lost, and the population of smaller organisms decreases, so will the animals above it, following the concept of limiting factors. Animals that have slower reproduction cycles are given less chances of passing on genetic material to the next generation. This greatly affects the biodiversity of a species, and places the species at risk of extinction from just one disease. Ecosystems everywhere are affected by this concept of limiting factors and loss of genetic material simply because humans are determined to expand their land. While humans gain habitable space to accommodate for their growing population, animals lose their habitats and are left to nature and limits that lower their biodiversity.


Agriculture is one area that is greatly affected by biodiversity. The human race is bent on achieving productivity and effectiveness, no matter the cost. That’s why crops nowadays are being bred and genetically modified to be bigger, have a shorter growing season, and become resistant to common fungi and diseases. You might think that it’s alright, since they’re helping become resistant to certain things, but it leaves the crops to be weak to others. The domestication of plants has allowed humans to cultivate crops over many generations to determine the best one for consumption and commercial trade. Once a good subspecies is found, it’s mass-bred and cultivated, and becomes the main crop for worldwide consumption. But what does this do? It decreases the biodiversity in our crops.


One example would be the modern banana. The truth is, it’s really a Cavendish. Every banana you see in a supermarket, or that is part of the 100 billion Cavendish bananas consumed annually worldwide is exactly identical to the very first one discovered in the 1950’s. Every banana is the same; resistant to the same things, and weak to the same things. But best of all, bananas are seedless and sterile. The original one was cross-bred between two similar plants, and produced the Cavendish plant. It was continually bred through cuttings taken from the plant itself. In this way, each offspring plant is identical to the parent. But the modern banana wasn’t the same one used before. Gros Michel was the species of banana that used to be cultivated on plantations in the exact same way as the modern banana. The only difference was that the entire species was wiped out by a fungal infection called Panama disease. It sent the banana industry into an uproar. Now, the modern banana is being plagued by a more resistant strain of Panama disease, surviving through pesticides and killing previously resistant plants. In this way, the lack of biodiversity is unsafe for the well-being of any organism’s species.

But what of it? If bananas were cross-bred in the first place, and can only be reproduced by asexual means, then it was set up for destruction, right? What does that have to do with crops now? Domestication of plants and animals alike is leading to the homogenization of these species. In history, plants and animals were by natural means, to get varying offspring. Now, breeding comes down to wanted characteristics; plants that grow more fruit, cows that produce more milk, chickens that lay more eggs. Nothing is going to have the diversity of what the species did before. If any of these organisms is susceptible to a disease, chances are they are all going to be wiped out. Domesticated organisms might be facing more danger than wild ones, because of the way humans have been affecting their biodiversity.

Humans have a negative effect on biodiversity with the expansion of their land. Habitats are lost, and animals of all trophic levels are being affected through the loss of genetic material. By breeding plants and animals to fulfill the needs of humans, they are losing their biodiversity and could be facing the fate of the banana, which has as little as five years left before they’re all gone. We are causing an extreme decline in the amount of diversity and genetic material left in the world. While we’re busy finding ways to effectively clone animals, we’re not figuring out how to properly increase biodiversity. Biodiversity is a block upon which the world stands, and we’re slowly letting it erode, until the foundation is gone. Soon enough, we will all realize what we’ve done to this world and what the future will hold. We’ll have left our mark; we’ll have poisoned biodiversity.

Sources:
"Defining species: The indirect impact of humans on biodiversity"

"Scientific Facts on Biodiversity and Human Well-being"

"Loss of Biodiversity through genetic engineering"

"Can This Fruit Be Saved?"

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