Are designer babies the future? These days everything can be customized from vehicles to homes and now even babies. In November of 2018, Dr. He announced the birth of a pair of twins who were genetically modified using CRISPR-Cas9, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. CRISPR-Cas9 was used to genetically modify the two girls’ genes so that the embryos of the fetuses would not be able to contract HIV. CRISPR-Cas9 is a technology that scientists in the medical field use to edit–remove and add–parts of genomes to improve them or customize them to the parents liking.
The technology seems to have really positive effects on their consumer, however, the question is: is CRISPR-Cas9 is ethical? In class, we have debated over numerous occasions that as technology is changing at a rapid rate, humans, being unable to evolve at the same pace, just accept technology without completely understanding the long term side-effects of the device and also how they can impact our society. We follow these new devices blindly until we find a reason not to, rather than doing all the research related to the tools and analyzing the short and long term consequences. This, however, should not be the case, especially for something as serious as CRISPR-Cas9.
There are two aspects to the story of CRISPR-Cas9: it can be used to fix life-threatening issues however, it can also be used for parents to customize their babies and have designer babies. Where do we draw the line? What is ethical and what isn’t? There is a lot of grey areas with CRISPR-Cas9 and it needs to be discussed rather than used blindly. I personally believe that the use of CRISPR-Cas9 should only be utilized to fix life-threatening diseases and mutations in the genes of embryos. CRISPR-Ca9 should not be allowed for parents who want to make their children taller or smarter or parents who want their children to have black hair and fair skin. If parents are able to do this, people will no longer be unique as everyone will want their children to be tall, beautiful, and smart. They will also be able to choose the gender of their babies along with many other traits. I find this to be unethical and unnatural!
This technology seems to be getting bigger in the health science field; it could be possible that in the next 20 to 30 years CRISPR will be used in every birth in the United States. However, before it gets more common we need to know where we draw the ethical line and what we allow to be normal and what we don’t. As a global community, everyone one of us needs to discuss their opinions on CRISPR and explain what they find to be ethical and what they don’t. We must navigate around technology rather than technology navigating around our life.
Source: https://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/2019/07000/Genetically_Modified_Babies_and_a_First.23.aspx