:
Originally posted by Dragadon:
With all the advances in science and medicine...those who normally would not survive on there own are...you see what I am getting at? Our own intelligence is a double edged sword...on the one hand with are living longer healthier lives...on the other...those that wouldn't have survived if those advances didn't exist are surviving as well...degrading the gene pool with offspring that normal would not have been born.
|
By this way of thinking, we should do away with vaccines so that people will develop immunities to diseases via standard evolutionary pressures. If we have medical technology (short of making people for spare parts) that makes a genetic "weakness" a non-issue, then there is no need to "weed out" these genetic weaknesses.
As pointed out by others above, genetic weaknesses only get weeded out when they are of such character as to cause death (or other inability to reproduce) before reproduction is accomplished. Most diseases that are the object of stem-cell research affect people in adulthood. And even for childhood diseases like cystic fibrosis, to illustrate my first point, what is the damage to the gene pool if we can cure the disease, even if the underlying genetic defect causing the disease remains?
Cloning living human beings is another matter altogether, and I cannot see a reason to do it. These would not be some kind of science fiction cybernetic organisms; they would be real people that just happened to have the same genetic makeup as an existing person. There are several other solutions for infertile couples, and if you think you're so great [rhetoric, not you, Drag] that you think the world will be a peachier place with another you in it, you need to get over yourself.
I think cloning is different than the case of a Florida couple that decided to have a baby several years ago because their daughter needed a bone marrow donor and there was no existing match. The couple had a one in four chance of having a baby that would match; the baby was a match and the bone marrow transplant was successful. Many people thought that it was wrong to have a baby under such circumstances, but I think it was different because the couple knew that they would love the new child just as much whether it could have been a donor or not. The older daughter survived and they remain a happy family.
So, are we cloning ourselves to make new family members, or just to make spare parts (I realize that some of this stem-cell research is intended to create organs without creating real people, which is fine by me)? If we are going to create clones of ourselves for spare parts, when your second kidney fails, are you going to insist that your clone give up the other one? What if his/her kidneys fail first?
Sorry . . . lost my head. I'll shut up now.
