From: Brian D Williams (talon57@well.com)
Date: Wed Aug 11 1999 - 13:11:21 MDT
From: "Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@www.aeiveos.com>
>A few years ago I went to an ethics conference about gene therapy.
>The comments there, Paul's comments and Greg Stock's & John
>Campbell's work (presented by J. C. @ Extro4) regarding adding a
>Human Artificial Chromosome (HAC) to embyros to allow "activation"
>and/or insertion of genes at later life-points leads me to raise
>the following point.
HAC, what a great idea!!! Wish I had one.......
>The *sticky* point in my mind is we are entering the time when
>treatments that are entirely "enhancements", rather than
>"necessities" are available. If the Extropian principles are those
>which should encourage diversity, minimize tyranny,
>manipulation/control by power bodies/majorities (including parents
>or medical authorities), etc., then it would seem to me that --
>Extropians should be fundamentally opposed to all germline or
>childhood gene therapies that are not essential for the survival
>of the individual (to a time where they an give "informed
>consent").
>Greg & John's work tries to balance on the edge of this by making
>the enhancements "selectable" or "enable-able", but they are still
>making a modification that the child would prefer not to have,
>should they, for whatever reason, grow up to be a human
>"naturalist",
Great points as usual Robert, I would tend to agree, maybe the HAC
could have an autodestruct feature that could be triggered to
eliminate itself in case the individual chooses to do so?
Of course we know what the fundamentalists would say...
"fundamentalists are people who've only read one book"
Brian
Member, Extropy Institute
www.extropy.org
Member, Life Extension Foundation
www.lef.org
Member, National Rifle Association
www.nra.org
1.800.672.3888
Ameritech Data Center Chicago, IL
Member, Local 134 I.B.E.W
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:04:43 MST