Genetic Engineering Designer Babies

On the way home yesterday the local radio station was having people call in to discuss whether or not they thought using genetic engineering for “designer babies” was a good thing or not. I only got to hear one call but it raised so many interesting questions about the ethics of genetic engineering. What difficult choices there are going to be in our futures!

1. If some people start engineering their children for intelligence, beauty, etc. where does that leave those children who get “left to chance”. Will they always be a lesser class? Read the book, The Giver, it sort of reminds me of some of this concept.
2. If we start engineering babies, will God/the Creator (whatever you choose to call the higher power) kick something else in gear that counters that?
3. If you could engineer out genes that make people sick wouldn’t you want to do that? I would because then I could engineer the Parkinson’s out of John, the allergies out of Lindsay, the blood disorder and diabetes of my Dad and probably the bad genes I inherited from both of my parents out of me. But then isn’t that part of what makes me or John or my Dad who we are? The adversity we have to handle as a result of these things make us what/who we are. If we have no adversity because we engineer everything out – what does that make us? I wonder. do you?
4. And what if we make so people don’t get sick because we’ve fixed there genes and they live for very, very long times. What does that do to the world population. I mean the world wasn’t made to handle a population that consumes the way we do and lives for 100’s of years. Will some massive disease come along and wipe out a bunch of people in order to stabilize the planet.

I think these are interesting questions. If you have some of your own thoughts, please post them.