Re: It's better for peculiar people never to have lived, I guess

From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Fri Jan 03 2003 - 05:24:06 MST


On Fri, 3 Jan 2003, Lee Corbin wrote:

> But the life that you'd charge them with "recklessly
> endangering" didn't even exist before their actions!

Would you have a baby if you knew she would be morbidly obese, have
hypertrophied organs, possibly other defects and a shortened life span
because of something you did deliberately, and caused the genome activity
got reset improperly? A poster on wta-talk said yesterday he would go
ahead with making a human version of Doogie mice. He thought higher
chronical pain sensitivity would be a tolerable tradeoff to the
(undemonstrated in people) somewhat higher smarts. What?

I frankly fail to see any palpable gains here, only risks. If it is to be
done the effects of an insert needs to be tested on chimps, including
developing a technique for embryo screening with improper inserts,
knocking out a gene or two.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:35:50 MST