Running head: GENETIC ENGINEERING

Building a Utopian Society
Society, Ethics and Technology HUMN432 ACC_U
January 20, 2012

How does Genetic Engineering affect society? This is a hard question, and I’m not sure that there is any one correct answer. The selection of individual traits and the enhancements in embryos has raised several moral issues that involve both individuals and society as a whole. The first thing to consider is that when selecting a particular trait does it actually pose any health issues that may not have been that may not have been of concern before? There isn’t any concrete data that could be utilized as an acceptable form of preclinical stats for human studies. Human data may present significant practical and ethical problems. Since the safety of these procedures is fairly new and is currently under investigation, there are no long-term clinical and accurate numbers of research subjects. Even with all these unanswered questions, there are still questions regarding the safety concern involving the results that the majority of genes may have multiple effects. For example, “In the late 1990s, scientists discovered a gene that is linked to memory.” (Tang et al., 1999). “Modifying this gene in mice greatly improved learning and memory, but it also caused increased sensitivity to pain.”(Wei et al., 2001) By altering genes we can’t assume that it will only affect one function, when in actuality it may turn out to disrupt other functions.
Individual’s rights and liberty issues are also an issue of concern. “The long-running debate over the ethics of germline genetic alteration has focused on the technology’s broad social implications, such as potential effects on parent-child relations, social inequalities, and the human gene pool.” (Resnik, 1999). A question that has been pondered by many is, parents should be allowed to