Re: Nanotech control systems (was Re: Transhuman Beach Party)

Joseph C Fineman (jcf@world.std.com)
Fri, 10 Sep 1999 15:00:01 -0400 (EDT)

On Fri, 10 Sep 1999, Bryan Moss wrote:

> This all reminds me of a program I once watched... a blind man was
> arguing that research into a 'cure' for blindness should be stopped
> because it would mean the end of the blind community. As funny as
> this sounds, why is it any different from 'curing' homosexuality or
> skin colour?

A few years ago I read about a pregnant woman who was deaf for hereditary reasons. She wanted to find out, by amniocentesis, whether the fetus carried the gene, so that she could abort it if it was _not_ deaf.

H. G. Wells wrote a story called "The Country of the Blind", in which a traveler happened on an isolated valley that was inhabited entirely by blind people. He settled among them, but eventually they discovered that he was suffering from delusions that, on investigation, turned out to be connected with his eyes. That discovery allowed them to effect a cure.

As one of the characters in _Distress_ sagely observed, the definition of health is a political question.

||: None of us is getting any younger, and few of us are getting :|| 

||:  any soberer.                                                  :||