A Brave New World: A look into genetic engineering of humans

Ok this is a report I did for my debate class, the general theme is A Brave New World and looking into the future of genetic engineering of human beings. Enjoy!



In Alduos Huxley’s provacative book, A Brave New World, science fiction is taken to a new level. This book speaks of the future of the human race. In this future, people are made in bottles and conditioned to do predestinated work. People are taught to serve the production. This book presents a portrait of a society, which is superficially a perfect world. At first inspection, it seems perfect in many ways: it is carefree, problem free and depression free. All aspects of the population are controlled: number, social class, and intellectual ability, which are all carefully regulated. The real question throughout the entire book is: at what cost is this perfect world coming at? The answer is quite obvious. The cost is high. This leads into my question: should society should allow for genetically altered or engineered babies? The answer to that is no. There are 3 obvious reasons behind this.
The first reason is quite visible, if there is an esthetic standard of beauty or even a standard of intelligence, there will be little to no variety or change in people. When there is no change culture cannot be cultivated. Also, the lack of a multicultural society does not promote growth through education. There will never again be world history, only history of a certain type of people, which in itself is uninteresting, this being the least to worry about. Science, therefore, is used as a means of control. As we try to move forward in genetics, it will conclude with its hold over us. This is made clear by the book’s ideology of “community, identity, and stability” versus individual freedom. When we are forced to conform to society’s standards, we lose all hope for democracy and suddenly life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness morphs into a dark and endless pit instead of life, liberties stolen, and the pursuit of another person’s idea of happiness. The price we pay by becoming a mass of common people is deep and graduated human relationships, is virtue, is courage, endurance, faith exchanged for uniformity and spiritual misery. We are already on that slope with the experimental administration of genetically engineered growth hormone to healthy children, simply because they are shorter than average and their parents would like them to be taller. “The belief that…science always moves forward represents a form of laissez-faire nonsense dismally reminiscent of the credo that American business if left to itself will solve everybody's problems. Just as the success of a corporate body in making money need not set the human condition ahead, neither does every scientific advance automatically make our lives more 'meaningful',” says Co-discoverer of the DNA code and Nobel Laureate Dr. James D. Watson. .

This in truth leads to my next reason against genetic alteration of humans, the oppression of human differences. People may think that by concurrently creating one “species,” we are ridding ourselves of racism, but they are mistaken. The Council for Responsible Genetics argued that Problems rooted in poverty, racism and other forms of inequality cannot be remedied by technology alone. The solution to end racism is not to brand all people with the same appearance, but to make those that are racist gain an improved perspective. When people are made into a common body and are brainwashed to believe they are the standard, anyone who falls out of that standard is potential to be victimized. So while people think they are curing racism, they are actually creating people who are more racist. Some characters in Brave New World differ from the norm and are oppressed as such. Shouldn’t we be asking ourselves this as a human race: isn’t the point of life to be celebrating our human differences, that which makes us unique? But truly Since the parameters of beauty can never be set, we can never have a perfect race of people. The idea of beauty never manifests itself and changes throughout the years. Given the historical role of the United States in conquering the notions of equality and individual rights, the authorization of instrumental values with regard to human genes is somewhat surprising. If 'a man's home is his castle', how much the more so our bodies and genetic makeup. One would think that people would have legal control over their own genes; however, that does not seem to be the case.
While examining all of the options and outcomes of genetic engineering, one never comes to realize that there are health risks involved, which comes to my third point. As last year was said in a CNN online article, Switzerland voted against genetic engineering and they argued that tampering with genes posed "incalculable risks" for the environment and the prospect of unethical treatment used in experiments. Results of flaws in this technology cannot be recalled and fixed, but become the negative heritage to countless future generations. One occurrence that Huxley could never have been able to think of at the time, 1936, is the health risk involved in genetic engineering. If a scientist makes one mistake during the whole process of genetic alteration, he make cause a mutation and in turn a genetic defect that the baby never had to begin with. To think that a parent would pay this extreme price and ruin his/her child’s life just to have them have blue eyes, is ludicrous. Many prominent scientists have warned against the dangers of genetic engineering. George Wald, Nobel Prize-winning biologist and Harvard professor, wrote: Recombinant DNA technology [genetic engineering] faces our society with problems unprecedented not only in the history of science, but of life on the Earth. It places in human hands the capacity to redesign living organisms, the products of some three billion years of evolution. As biologist Professor George Wald was quoted as saying: "Our morality up to now has been to go ahead without restriction to learn all that we can about nature. Restructuring nature was not part of the bargain." "The Case Against Genetic Engineering." Reprinted from The Sciences, Sept./Oct. 1976 issue. An irreversible attack on the biosphere as such is something so unheard-of, so unthinkable to previous generations, that I could only wish that mine had not been guilty of it

These three reasons: 1. One mass, 2. Opression of outsiders, and 3. Health risks, play a major role in giving genetic engineering a second thought. The point and ending result of genetic engineering is that the pursuit of happiness in our lives is carried to an extreme. The question still remains: what is the price tag? As has been our experience with most technologies, the promise of benefit in the short- term is overwhelmed by long-term disasters. This perfect world has a good side: there is no war or poverty, little disease or social unrest. It is clear that that citizens of this perfect world must give up love, family, science, art, religion, history, and a sense of self. Through it all, what really occurred is the enslavement and entrapment of man by science. What should be thought about is that there is nor can never be any true perfection, as everyone’s opinions and ideas vary, therefore there the utopia that we feel we must attain is truly a figment of society’s imagination.