Comment by willmorrison
5 years ago
Seems completely unethical to me. This would be more of an advancement for eugenics than anything else. Would people be scared of giving blood at blood drives? Could celebrities who don’t want to have children have cells taken from them and put through this process?
it’s kind of disturbing, what about pair bonding? imprinting stuff like that at a young age, also will people grow cold towards these people or treat them as subhuman one day? i know this sounds negative but i worry that this will lead to some type of genetic war eventually.
it sounds sci-fi’ish/black mirror but honestly this seems like it will eventually happen, given how terrible some people treat others purely based on their eye color, height, skin tone etc. or what’s more, will this create people so perfect or beautiful that natural humans decide to worship them?
it already happens with celebrities. what if one of these people end up being extremely handsome and but extremely deceptive, like hilter meets [insert attractive person here], or add to that highly intelligent as well. people already have followed cult leaders for their charisma and honesty it doesn’t seem like society has changed enough to not do any of these things. for example this year/last year and the year prior was a already a good sample size of the madness that people are okay with being. anyways something for all of us to think about.
> Could celebrities who don’t want to have children have cells taken from them and put through this process?
Later, they will be sued for child support, of course.
Eugenics has obvious issues when applied to mature individuals or groups, but I'll need convincing that the same moral position is warranted if we're talking about cells.
science fiction reference for cells eugenics: gattaca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
I always felt like Gattaca was unrealistically pessimistic. I'm unconvinced that the "best possible person" (if you grant such a thing even exists) is that much different from an average person.
It seems more likely that we would just eliminate some genetic diseases and cancers, and vain/rich parents would select for taller children. Most other differences seem to be too weakly correlated with genes we've identified to result in such a stark change to society. It's less like taking a bunch of dials tuned to 5 and turning then all up to 11, and more like increasing some dials from 5 to 6, and arbitrarily spinning some others because they weren't labeled to begin with.
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> We want to help parents have kids when it otherwise wouldn’t be possible.
Sounds to me like those eggs are bound to become mature individuals.
I could have been more clear, the distinction is semantic. I was referring to culling/sterilization to prevent reproduction in the sexually mature. Unborn persons are not adults, even if they will be.
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