Eugenics, In theory & practice Options

[PaulAllen]

Eugenics is the idea of altering human heredity to benefit people, such as genetically implementing defenses against disease. But it can also be used to create designer babies that look however you could want. There are certainly benefits and many risks. After World War II, when the Nazis' horrific eugenics program was revealed to the rest of the world, eugenics essentially dropped out of scientific vocabulary and has since become a largely ignored subject. But as science discovers more and more about genetics and how heredity works and can be altered, eugenics is possibly one of the most sensitive bioethics issues of the 21st century.

Thoughts on its allowance? Regulations and restrictions and ways of enforcing them? Altruism or playing God?

[Comptine]

You have the absolutely wrong definition of eugenics.

Eugenics is improving the human gene pool. Not changing the genes themselves. That's a completely different type of "science" (genetic engineering is science, not eugenics)

Eugenics was created to eliminate undesirable hereditary elements by controlling mating. To improve the human gene pool, they tried to stop people with undesirable genes (girls who got pregnant too early, criminals, disabled people, and during the Holocaust, anyone who wasn't straight, Catholic/Christian, and Aryan). Eugenics works with human beings that are already developed, functioning, and living in the world. They do not touch genes at all. Rather, they control the people who they believe have bad genes and stop them from reproducing and passing the bad genetic material onto the offspring.

Genetic engineering, however, works with genes themselves and tries to alter the type of genetic info offspring might get. This is the science that can help decide on the sex of the child, eliminate genes of hereditary disease, eliminate or implant of genes of certain traits. It's highly hyped right now. I haven't read up on it but the procedure is very expensive and the only thing they can really engineer for sure is the sex and the elimination of a well-known hereditary disease.