Genetics: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Jocelyn Huffman

Comp II

Professor James Schlatter

April 28, 2015

Genetics: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

A couple sits in the waiting room of a doctor's office.  They share the space with other couples, all waiting with the same thoughts in their minds.  Where one would normally find fashion and health magazines strewn across the tables, this office provides catalogs labeled: eye color, hair color, athletic ability and even IQ.  The nurse calls the couple in from the waiting room, asking them “Have you made your choices?”.  The couple look nervously at each other.  Had they made the right choices? There were so many options.  Is this the right path for them to take?  This office represents the fertility office of the future.  A future in which babies are not made the old-fashioned way, they are created in a laboratory.  There is no romance involved, only scientific sounding processes, like: gene splicing, population scale genetic engineering, endonucleases (or “self-perpetuating genes” as referred to by NOVA Now’s Tim Dechant) and natural selection.  This future does not allow for the surprise of is it a boy or a girl, will the child look like one parent or the other.  Each genetic detail is planned out to the chromosome.  While this technology holds some advantages in the possible elimination of life-threatening genetic disease, is the idea of babies being created in a lab to a specific order, “parents” picking and choosing which genetic traits are acceptable for their child to have worth the benefits?  Modern day eugenics and genetic engineering offer the potential to prevent or even eliminate many genetic disorders, but it also has the ability to do a great deal of harm and change what we know of the creation of human life and ability as we know it.  Regulations need to be set on the use and availability of this scientific technology.

History of the Gene

Genetic engineering, according to the Merriam Webster dictionary, is “the science of making changes to the genes of a plant or animal to produce a desired result”.   It began with Gregor Mendel and his pea plant experiments in the 1800s.  In these experiments, Mendel attempted to breed certain varieties of plants by controlling how they were pollinated, choosing specific characteristics of two different plants and cross pollinating to get the desired characteristics in the offspring plants.  Mendel was using only phenotype or physical characteristics in his research.  He did not understand the science behind it. Fast forward almost one hundred years and scientists have discovered the gene and its importance in scripting the make-up of every living thing.  The first DNA sequencing technology is developed in 1977 by scientist Fred Sanger.  DNA sequencing determines the detailed order of nucleotides in a DNA molecule, allowing scientists to understand how genes work.  DNA sequencing further allows for the gene to be broken down and reconfigured to create something with the exact genetic factors that one would want.  In the 1990’s scientists found a way to do exactly this, using DNA fingerprinting and gene therapy.  DNA fingerprinting allows any living thing to be identified by its precise configuration of genetic characters, or nucleotides.    Scottish scientists openly recreated a precise genetic copy of this code, that of a sheep.  Cloning became real in 1997 with the introduction of Dolly the sheep, the genetic duplicate of the sheep whose DNA was used to create her.  Almost two hundred years after Mendel’s research was published, the human genome was complete.  As of 2001, scientists have mapped the entire sequence of genes that make up a human being. (Hales)  With this information, the possibilities for genetic engineering are endless.  Some of these possibilities have the potential to end great suffering caused by life threatening genetic disease, while others may appear to create more suffering.

The Eugenic Effect

        Eugenics is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “the science that deals with the improvement of hereditary qualities of a race or breed”.  The practice of eugenics is an antiquated method of ridding the world of what some consider undesirable traits.  The idea of eugenics began in the post-World War I era, when social classes were becoming more widely recognized.  At that time Social Darwinism was the prominent idea for promoting the stronger classes, taking Darwin’s theory of natural selection and applying it to social classes.  The idea being that the wealthy were more likely to survive the difficult economy and the population would grow as the poor population would diminish.  Ultimately this was not the way that things played out.  The poor population was growing much faster than the wealthy.  The popularity of what is now eugenics came from these results.  This idea grew to be internationally recognized during World War II.  Originally the theories of eugenics began in the United States with the creation of the American Eugenics Society, based in New Haven, CT.  The group’s main purpose was to promote “racial betterment, eugenic health and genetic education”( American Eugenics).  Adolf Hitler adopted the ideas of the American Eugenics movement, using the science established in the United States to justify his  plans to eliminate all who he felt did not fit his Master Race.  According to award-winning New York Times investigative author, Edwin Black “the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn’t originate with Hitler.  The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California…”  (Black). In America, eugenics was used to pass laws requiring the sterilization of people who were deemed to be carrying specific undesirable traits.  Approximately sixty thousand American’s were sterilized as a result of these laws.  This does not include the number of citizens who were not allowed to marry or were segregated from the population for the same reasons. (Black)

Modern Day Eugenics

 Genetic Engineering is simply modern day eugenics.  With the advancement of science technology that allows scientists to isolate specific genes that produce a certain trait comes the potential for this technology to be abused.  Much as eugenics was used in the early to mid-twentieth century, genetic engineering can be used today and into the future.  The advancement in genetic studies is happening so rapidly that genetically altering an entire human does not seem to be that far in the future.  Scientists are now looking at what they call “population-scale genetic engineering projects” (Dechant).  Population scale genetics involves introducing what are called selfish genes, genes that seem to occur more frequently in offspring, seemingly dominant genes, into a gene pool and as the generations amass, the “desired trait” is more and more evident in the population until the less desired trait is gone.  NOVA’s Tim Dechant explains that population –scale genetic projects “essentially let us exploit evolution to force a desired gene into every individual of a species”.   These projects put humans in the position to “play God”, to eliminate what some may consider undesirable traits in order to create a Master Race.  Right now population scale genetic projects are being looked at in mosquitos.  The idea is to edit the mosquito’s genetic make-up in reverse of eugenics.  By inserting an undesirable gene that is lethal to the mosquito eventually the population will all carry this gene and the mosquito will disappear from existence.  The hope being that on the broader scale this would lead to stopping the transmission of malaria and possibly eliminating the disease altogether.  The idea then presents itself as Dechant writes “If it lets us do this for mosquitos, what is to stop us from potentially doing it for almost anything that is sexually reproducing?”  This is the dilemma that is generated from this type of research.  If this type of technology is effective with mosquitos, how much longer before we have a way to make it work in humans?  If and when a time comes that humans are eligible for this type of procedure, who will set the guidelines for its use?  Who decides what the unsuitable traits are and which are worthy of continuing on?  Strict regulations need to be looked into at this time to avoid disasters later on.