Not Too Far Off: Speaking of “Brave New World”
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/08/08
The Computer Age comes, by implication, with the digitization of many things. One of those was the human genome beginning with the Human Genome Project.
With the information-based view of the world emerging for decades, the perspectives on ancient topics become less abstract-theoretical and more concrete-practical.
The issues around the human genome and its edit enter into a number of camps including leave it alone, edit only out deadly mutations, or enhance the heck out of it.
The basic dilemma with the digitization of the human genome remains the possibility of germline editing. This one raises the most hairs in a cold shiver and sweat.
Let’s take, for example, the possibility of ethics eroding and then the human genome being wildly experimented on, as we have done with a variety of other species including many mammals.
The alteration to their germline leads to the direct, rapid engineering and descent with conscious modification by human beings. The idea extended to human beings raises the prospects of the rich-poor divide, the rapid change in the direction and selection pressures of the human species — even the possibility of the creation of a new type of being built from the template of human beings.
Bear in mind, the UK Ethics Council approved the modification of the genomes of children. The future is not nigh; it is here. The questions asked for decades now have answers in the affirmative about the scientific possibility but not for the moral or ethical considerations.
The moral and ethical considerations of these makes for an interesting dilemma with huge concomitant responsibilities placed on human beings because of the power inherent in the choices made collectively in the near future for the long-term future of the species. Nothing too lofty there.
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