Re: [DIYbio] Which country has the most progressive human GM laws? China?

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The hot person you'd like to mate with should have a choice in the
matter. Whether the resulting child has any choice is just the hard
fact of nature, but imposing further unilateral decisions on someone's
genetic fate based on your perceptions of "cool" is against the basic
outlines of bioethics; informed consent and beneficence.

When you act in the direct, objective interests of the child it's
acceptable, although that requires two prerequisites:
A) The technology must be ready, or you are taking a risk with someone
else's entire life and genetic fate. That rules out
germ-line/embryonic genetic therapies for the next decade at least.
B) You must have someone objective and disconnected to sanity check
your idea of "beneficent", *especially* if discussing your own
offspring, for whom you will certainly have no objectivity.

You'll be thinking "a child, much less an unborn one, can't give
informed consent, so it falls to the parent". Yes, that's true, so the
parent must give informed consent. But you have to accept that, as a
parent, your ability to be "informed" when you give your consent is
undermined by your lack of objectivity; get a second, objective opinion.

It is likely that, after lots and lots of legal, ethical and moral
wrangling, society will come to a set of legislation-backed norms that
will effectively act as a hard "bioethics committee" by simply banning
what's decreed to be unethical. In fact, that's essentially what the
moratoria on human cloning and engineering are; a state-level
understanding that it's wholly unethical at this point in time to mess
with the genetic fate of a human being without a sound medical basis.
And as time goes by, I expect those rules to relax as the technology
becomes more predictable and as social attitudes to engineering
change. We'll see where time takes us in that regard. By that time,
we'll probably be considered outdated old farts by our younger kin,
who'll whine about legislation getting in the way of making GFPeople
at the drive-thru zygote hackshop.

On 03/25/2013 10:24 PM, Nathan McCorkle wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 3:12 PM, Cathal Garvey
> <cathalgarvey@cathalgarvey.me> wrote:
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>>
>> My personal feeling on human "reproductive engineering" is that
>> if the fundamental goal is to create a healthy, happy human
>> being, then that's Ok, but if the goal is to make yourself happy
>> by choosing or tweaking a human being to your tastes, that's
>> selfish and not-ok.
>
> isn't that what everyone does when they choose a 'beautiful' woman
> or man over an 'ugly' one? Why do the two have to be positioned
> diametrically? I have no doubt I could conceive of some 'cool'
> genetic mods that wouldn't detract one bit from the 'being' being
> happy (I can also think of seemingly boring mods that would not
> impact their happiness too)... I know plenty of people who have
> kids mindlessly/aimlessly because it simply 'happened'.
>
> Who's ever mentioned GM-ing humans so they specifically ended up
> unhappy? I could foresee that as being an unintended side-effect,
> but it doesn't seem like a purposefully unhappy human would even
> be valuable for the most shrewd economist. Depressed people don't
> have high GDP.
>

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