clipped crow said:
..., we suppose that we grant the power to customize a baby to the parents. To support such a fundamental shift in they way that we, as a species, move forward you would have to agree that you would rather allow the influence of emotion, social trends, future hopes and crushed dreams govern the course of the species rather than the cold, pitiless gauntlet of life itself. This is not a question of morality. It is simply asking if you believe we, as a species, can do a better job than the systems that have seen life go from a single cell to complex organisms in the face of disaster, catastrophe, calamity and, recently, good old fashioned human intervention.
I say allow improvements of already human qualities if you can successfully do them. Intelligence, appearance, vision, immune system, that sort of thing. For things that do not already exist in humans, like the ability to digest cellulose or a third arm in the middle of your chest, I say restrict that to animal research or something.
In any case, I doubt parents will subject their children to this sort of thing until it is well tested and completely safe. I don't think we'll have a good understanding of what every bit of the human genome does in even the next 50 years. It will be a long time before people consider it a viable option.
Futurists predict that the next hundred years will be for biology/genetics what the last hundred years were for computing, with the culmination of that century being the synthetic construction of a multicellular creature purely from scratch. Once we have THAT level of understanding of genetics, THEN I think that we will really start tinkering with ourselves in earnest.
Of course, by then we'll probably have awesomely sophisticated AI and probably the first AI more intelligent than any human. At that point I think we'll be augmenting ourselves with computer tech more than biological tech. You know, to keep up.
