[SustainableTompkins] Engineering Children Closer to Reality

[Tony Del Plato]

We're One Step Closer to Creating Genetically Enhanced Humans

* By Marcy Darnovsky <http://www.alternet.org/authors/6100/>,
AlterNet<http://www.alternet.org/>.
Posted October 19,
2007<http://www.alternet.org/ts/archives/?date%5BF%5D=10&date%5BY%5D=2007&date%5Bd%5D=19&act=Go/>
.*

It's Nobel Prize season, and the Nobel scientists are very much in the news.
James Watson, awarded the laureate in 1962 for helping to deduce the
now-iconic double-helix structure of DNA, is currently embroiled in
controversy after making a series of blatantly racist remarks in the UK *Sunday
Times* this month.

But related views espoused by one of this year's laureates have gone
unnoticed. In early October, the Nobel Prize for biology went to three
scientists (one of whom, Mario Cappechi, worked with Watson) whose talent
and persistence gave us "knockout mice," the genetically engineered lab
animals widely used by researchers to model and study human diseases. In the
words of a Nobel committee member, these designer mice have "led to
penetrating new insights" in several biological fields.
But there's another aspect of Mario Capecchi's life that may sound more like
science fiction than fairy tale. The new Nobel laureate, like his former
mentor Watson, has spoken enthusiastically of using the genetic science he's
helped advance to engineer biologically enhanced children.

The prospect of a renewed, high-tech eugenics is extraordinarily
controversial, but it is not just a fantasy. It is coming ever closer to
technical plausibility, and for a disturbing number of influential
scientists and eccentric futurists, it is an agenda. At an infamous UCLA
conference in 1998, Watson, Capecchi, and other prominent scientists
gathered to strategize about how to make it "acceptable" to the public. The
event was titled *Engineering the Human Germline* -- a reference to what is
now more commonly called "inheritable genetic modification" -- and covered
on the front pages of the *New York Times* and *Washington Post *.

To read the entire story, go to the following link.

http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/65678

-- 
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason
for existing.
Albert Einstein

-- 
He, who by good deeds covers the evil he has done, illuminates this world
like the moon freed from clouds. - Buddha

-- 
He, who by good deeds covers the evil he has done, illuminates this world
like the moon freed from clouds. - Buddha