A science or a set of beliefs and practices that aims at improving the quality of a human population by controlled breeding, selecting the most desirable individuals, enhancing their natural capabilities or altering their genome, in order to make those individuals more adapted, economically effective or morally suitable, or in order to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics.
Published in Chapter:
Tailoring Humans: The Ethics of Genetic Engineering
Alexandra Huidu (University of Oradea, Romania & LUMEN Research Center in Social and Humanistic Sciences, Romania)
Copyright: © 2019
|Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-6310-5.ch014
Abstract
What began as an attempt to eradicate serious illnesses seems to have become, in some cases, under the impetus of human imagination and technological evolution, an exercise by which scientists come to compete with the attributes of divinity: augmenting human beings at a basic level that affects the identity of the species. Genetic engineering for medical purposes has created the premises for the existence of technologies that can be used for other agendas, without medical purpose, in order to bioenhance the characteristics of the human individual. The genetic inheritance we leave to future generations is now under our control, because we are able to manipulate our germinal line. Hybrid embryos and chimeric embryos, although still in the experimental stage, can become a reality in relatively short time. But just because we can, do we have the right to do it? Do we need all of this and, if so, to what extent? What are the limits and who or what sets the standards? These are the questions that this chapter addresses from an ethical perspective.