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For health and legal professionals with an interest in bioethics
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A world of perfect girls by Michael Cook Herald Sun (Melbourne), 10 July 2003 DANCING girls are a funny way to open a scientific conference, but this week's XIX International Congress of Genetics has plenty to celebrate. The good news comes from men like Dr Francis Collins, one of the principal speakers. Collins is the director of the Human Genome Project, the research group that achieved one of the major scientific feats of the last century -- mapping the entire human genome. Now that the 30,000 or so genes which make us human have been identified, he predicts treatments and cures for scores of genetic diseases. Collins is a pioneer himself. In 1989 he and a colleague discovered the mutation causing 70 per cent of cystic fibrosis cases. This could lead to a cure for a condition that afflicts one in every 2500 Australian babies. This is the promise of the genetics revolution: health for kids who'd otherwise be doomed to awful illnesses and early deaths and for adults with high blood pressure, diabetes, and breast cancer. But there is bad news, too, and its representative is the very man who sparked the revolution by discovering the structure of DNA 50 years ago -- James Watson. He was to have been the star of the Melbourne congress, but he had stay home to care for a sick son. Watson has used the 50th anniversary to promote the notion that eugenics, or refurbishing the human genome, isn't such a bad idea. He told a British documentary this year, for instance, ``If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease . . . so I'd like to get rid of that''. He also suggested that beauty could be genetically engineered. ``People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it'd be great.'' High-minded colleagues may say that Watson is daft, but other US scientists predict that genetically engineered humans are inevitable. Take Professor Lee Silver, a colleague of Peter Singer, the Australian bioethicist, at Princeton University in the US. He foresees a new kind of human being, the ``GenRich'', who have synthetic genes for health, intelligence, longevity and athletic ability. ``The GenRich class and the Natural class will become . . . entirely separate species with no ability to cross-breed, and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee,'' he says. T HE genetic marvels celebrated at this week's congress are wonderful, but they also threaten to push us down the slippery slope to eugenics. The initiative will come from the commercial possibilities of genetic enhancements. Sooner or later, scientists will discover, or claim they have discovered, the genetic link for IQ, or athletic ability, or the perfect nose, or the cause of obesity, or alcoholism, or homosexuality. And they will be willing to sell you the key for creating your idea of a perfect child. How will parents be able to resist the temptation? Today they are desperate to send their kids to the best schools; tomorrow they could be desperate to give them the best genes money can buy. In the words of Gregory Stock, another prominent US scientist spruiking a DIY humanity, ``they'll want to give their child the latest gene cassettes and artificial chromosomes. ``It's not so different from upgraded software; they'd want the new release.'' These developments are years away, but both public tolerance of eugenics and the technology that will make it a reality are already in place. Screening for genetic defects and diseases is now commonplace because imperfect children are routinely aborted. How many Down's syndrome children are born nowadays? Tay-Sachs disease, a rare disorder which afflicts mostly Ashkenazi Jews, has nearly been eliminated in the US by eliminating the next generation of carriers. But there is something Australia can do to stop genetic engineering in its tracks. A MAJOR hurdle remains before yuppie eugenics can become a reality -- therapeutic cloning. ``Without cloning, genetic engineering is simply science fiction,'' says Professor Silver. In three years, federal Parliament will be reviewing its temporary ban on therapeutic cloning. James Watson's warped vision of a world with lots of pretty girls and no stupid people is a very good reason to make it permanent. michael.cook@australasianbioethics.org
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