Regarding your organization, TEEL.

Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Tue, 05 Oct 1999 01:23:38 -0400

Dear Ms. Darnovsky,

Its come to my attention that you:

> > support biotechnology in the public interest. We oppose
> > policies and biotechnologies--including human germline
> > engineering and human cloning--that foster inequality,
> > discrimination, objectification, and the commodification
> > of human genes and tissues.

Question: Who gets to decide what the public interest is? You? And who is the public?
Is it that family that cannot conceive a child normally due to high risk of inheritance of genetic diseases or malformities? Is it those people who will die because some heavy handed, unelected group of individuals thinks that technologies to clone human organs should be destroyed, like some 19th century Luddites would have? Is it those parents who want, and have the right, to give their children all of the advantages in life that they can give them? Is the public made up of those people, who with their own hard earned money, wish to either modify themselves or their offspring to posess other capabilities, like the ultraviolet vision of the deer, or the underwater breathing ability of the fish? The truth is that we all have the genetic information for these features already in our own DNA, but they are not expressed. Banning the right of the individual to improve themselves or their offspring is a direct violation of one's first and ninth amendment rights to free expression, privacy, and choice, and flies in the face of our national values that puts the priority on the right of the individual to pursue life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

We were created equal in the rights each of us has, but not in how our DNA is expressed. Genetic research and medecine can not only make us all as truly equal as we want to be, but can also encourage us to take personal responsibility to guide our own evolution, our improvement into the future, which is where the challenges exist to which we can put those improvements to good use. I hope that you are not as much of a techno-phobe as your initial public announcements seem to be.

Mike Lorrey