When people think about genetic engineering, the first thought that comes to mind is often about corn and pest resistant varieties of soybean. Things that are somewhat removed from everyday life. Things left to scientists and biologists. People most likely wouldn’t think that this technology could one day soon play a much greater role in their lives. Doctors may be able to craft a “custom baby.” Who wouldn’t want to give their child the best looks or the best brain? Shouldn’t parents do everything possible to give their child the best possible life? The short answer: no. People should not genetically engineer their children because it would invariably harm culture as opposed to improving it. The gene pool would shrink to a mere puddle and the gap between classes would grow to a huge chasm. Both of which could only ever serve to wound and degrade society.
If people were able to pick and choose which traits their children would have, only a very select few would be chosen. This would cause a tremendous drop in the size of the gene pool. People would more than likely choose to give their children the genes for blonde hair and blue eyes, long legs and narrow waists. This may not happen immediately though. It would most likely be a gradual decrease in the amount of physical variation. People would want their kids to look at least a little bit like them, so they would not necessarily make their children look so drastically different from themselves. As the generations pass, however, those changes will build and strengthen to make the population look very homogenous. People would make their children have a slightly lighter skin tone and slightly lighter hair, until eventually, everyone is the same. Now the argument exists that people have different ideas of beauty. Not everyone likes blonde hair and blue eyes. People value diversity. All of which is very true, but when it gets down to the wire, people do on a much wider scale find the nordic appearance beautiful. One just needs to look at the prevalence of blonde actors in Hollywood, or the number of people who dye their hair or wear colored contacts. Even when people say they find brown hair or green eyes to be beautiful, if given a brunette model and a blonde one, they would typically say that the blonde is more attractive. The individual may not prefer blondes but, if 90 percent of the population values the trait, people will still make their children paler. Beauty plays a large part in success in our culture. Pretty people tend to be able to get farther ahead faster. Given this fact, the thought that giving their daughter blue eyes will somehow help their child succeed, is a strong one. An idea that could potentially outweigh any prior desire to give their child red hair.
Not all beauty comes in the form of hair color and eye shade though. Long legs and a narrow waist are also considered to be beautiful by the great majority of the population. When everybody starts to have longer legs, the standard of long will change. While now, it may be that a thirty four inch inseam would be considered a long leg, as time goes on the average leg length would become thirty four inches. At that point, long would be considered a thirty six inch leg, then a thirty eight, and so on and so on. At what point would it stop? When would people say enough is enough? That answer is perhaps something that we will never know. These superficial changes do not only apply to women either. With men pressured more and more to be strong and muscular, they too would see some drastic changes in physique. They could very easily become hugely tall and hugely muscular. These drastic changes in body structure would prove disastrous for society. Invariably there would be a fairly large group of people in the world who would abstain from genetic engineering for moral or financial reasons. These people’s children would have no chance of succeeding. In sports, for instance, the genetically altered people would be able to throw farther, jump higher, run faster. They would be taller and stronger in ways with which the other kids could never hope to compete. These kids, who today could be wildly successful at baseball or track, would be relegated to the worst jobs available, which would drastically reduce a large group’s standard of living from birth onwards. This would destroy any hope we could have of an even playing field. Because of the fact that genetic engineering a child would more than likely be a very expensive procedure, only the middle class and up could really consider the option, leaving the lower classes hopeless. With genetic engineering, the higher classes would become astoundingly beautiful, intelligent and athletic. Even if a person from the lower classes were to be considered a genius by todays standards, s/he could never hope to compete with all of the people who had been lucky enough to be engineered by their parents. All of this would cause the gap between rich and poor which already exists to expand and become even more difficult to break through.
Genetic engineering does have the potential to do great good in society. It could feasibly wipe out disorders like Down Syndrome and Autism as well as a whole host of other physical and mental disabilities. But, this raises the question: do we really want to wipe out those groups of people? People with Down Syndrome or deaf people tend to look at themselves as a community. A group of people that are defined by these deficiencies. These are people who view themselves as perfectly capable, which they are. People with Autism are not necessarily relegated to a wheel chair in the same way that deaf people do not need a translator by their side at every moment. In that respect, wiping out these disorders would mean wiping out those communities, something, which under any other circumstance, would be labeled as genocide and prompt a massive UN effort. At the same time, going and ‘fixing’ any of these abnormalities, parents could just say something akin to “while you’re in there, could you make the baby have longer legs?” If fixing major problems is easily justified, then making changes to basic physical appearances could be just as easily justified. People with the desire to alter their child’s appearance will figure out a reason to do it regardless. Even though they may have the best intentions at the start, the draw of making your child beautiful and smart would be huge. Parents do tend to do anything and everything possible to give their children the best life possible. Whether this means getting them into a top notch pre-school or fiddling with a couple genes, it will be done if its made available. This same situation has come up numerous times before, with technologies that at first had only the best intentions for their use. As Nancy Gibbs says in her essay “If We Have It, Do We Use It”, “Human-growth hormone was intended for children with proven severe deficiency, but it came to be used on self-conscious short kids”. Even though genetic engineering may have benign intentions now, in the future as the idea becomes more widespread, people will doubtless use it to play off their vanities.
Genetically engineering our children is something that has the power to do both good things and terrible things. On one side, it could help people live slightly better lives, but on the other it could carry the tools for wiping out whole communities, warping our bodies to unrecognizable proportions and carving a canyon between classes. Given all of these things, genetic modification is not something that can be used as a viable means of improving people’s lives. The consequences of human vanity are far too great.
Nancy Gibbs, “If we have it do we use it?”
