From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Mon Oct 04 1999 - 23:23:38 MDT
Dear Ms. Darnovsky,
Its come to my attention that you:
> > support biotechnology in the public interest. We oppose
> > policies and biotechnologies--including human germline
> > engineering and human cloning--that foster inequality,
> > discrimination, objectification, and the commodification
> > of human genes and tissues.
Question: Who gets to decide what the public interest is? You? And who
is the public?
Is it that family that cannot conceive a child normally due to high risk
of inheritance of genetic diseases or malformities? Is it those people
who will die because some heavy handed, unelected group of individuals
thinks that technologies to clone human organs should be destroyed, like
some 19th century Luddites would have? Is it those parents who want, and
have the right, to give their children all of the advantages in life
that they can give them? Is the public made up of those people, who with
their own hard earned money, wish to either modify themselves or their
offspring to posess other capabilities, like the ultraviolet vision of
the deer, or the underwater breathing ability of the fish? The truth is
that we all have the genetic information for these features already in
our own DNA, but they are not expressed. Banning the right of the
individual to improve themselves or their offspring is a direct
violation of one's first and ninth amendment rights to free expression,
privacy, and choice, and flies in the face of our national values that
puts the priority on the right of the individual to pursue life liberty
and the pursuit of happiness.
We were created equal in the rights each of us has, but not in how our
DNA is expressed. Genetic research and medecine can not only make us all
as truly equal as we want to be, but can also encourage us to take
personal responsibility to guide our own evolution, our improvement into
the future, which is where the challenges exist to which we can put
those improvements to good use. I hope that you are not as much of a
techno-phobe as your initial public announcements seem to be.
Mike Lorrey
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