I am not sure that human genome edition is something I would consider "exciting". It adds a lot of ethical questions, I am thinking about the kind of uses "I want my child to have blue eyes" in particular.
People are just having sex without thinking twice.
I'm married and in the appropriate age and i have thought about having kids a ton.
I'm not sure if i'm even allowed to create a new thinking human being only for the motivation of having a kid.
The crispr thing takes all our medical advantages just an additional level up.
You see people argue about if you should do a gen test for down syndrome (don't get me wrong here! A human being is a human being. But yes there is a consensus in our society that you become a human after a period of 3 month, at least in germany) and other complications but would never think about denying a doctor to use a incubator for a baby which would never ever be alive today without the medical advances.
There is an unbelievable huge hypocritical thinking in this. Yes tons of human beings would not be alive today without medicine but on the other hand the responsibility coming from all this knowledge doesn't matter?
I believe that in a moral/ethical right way you would need to do your BEST for your kid and this means making sure that by using crispr you do that.
I have no idea where this journey will bring us and yes there is tons of things to figure out but we will be able to overtake natures randomness for future live. And we have to.
Randomness already has nothing to do with (western) society. Modern healthcare and society in general allow for the survival and reproduction of individuals who would have simply died a few thousand years ago. The whole concept of "survival of the fittest" no longer applies to our species.
There is nothing wrong with this - as you said, everyone wants the best for their child. The big question is, what exactly _is_ the best? From my point of view, it seems that if designer babies were to become easily available, the average parent would just look on Facebook as to what the latest "influencers" fancy this week - and that would make the world an awful lot worse.
If someone has a blood cancer (i.e. they are damaged at a DNA level) and can only currently be cured by a danagerous stem cell transplant and then the ability comes along to fix their DNA back to what it previously was at the genetic level wouldnt you agree it would be more unethical to not allow them access to that treatment?
You don't think ridding ourselves of genetic diseases is an extremely large good? Millions of humans have incurable genetic diseases which vastly limit their quality of life and even lifespan itself. To me, this ALONE would be exciting. But when you add on the benefits to editing crops, livestock, microbes, and human traits not tied to disease, the ramifications become downright mind-boggling. I don't think it's exciting in a purely positive way, I honestly don't know if it's going to be good or bad on the whole. I'd wager that it starts off very good and slowly becomes less good, since the best use cases will all be targeted first.
People are just having sex without thinking twice.
I'm married and in the appropriate age and i have thought about having kids a ton.
I'm not sure if i'm even allowed to create a new thinking human being only for the motivation of having a kid.
The crispr thing takes all our medical advantages just an additional level up.
You see people argue about if you should do a gen test for down syndrome (don't get me wrong here! A human being is a human being. But yes there is a consensus in our society that you become a human after a period of 3 month, at least in germany) and other complications but would never think about denying a doctor to use a incubator for a baby which would never ever be alive today without the medical advances.
There is an unbelievable huge hypocritical thinking in this. Yes tons of human beings would not be alive today without medicine but on the other hand the responsibility coming from all this knowledge doesn't matter?
I believe that in a moral/ethical right way you would need to do your BEST for your kid and this means making sure that by using crispr you do that.
I have no idea where this journey will bring us and yes there is tons of things to figure out but we will be able to overtake natures randomness for future live. And we have to.