Gene Therapy Argumentative Essay

The opportunity to decide which genes will be passed on to future generations certainly would be tempting for many people. A method by which we could prevent genetic diseases and customize our offspring’s gender, physical traits and the intelligence is not as impossible as it may seem at first. The debate over the designer children revived recently with the discovery of the new technique allowing scientists to alter DNA.

Genetic engineering was originally designated for medical purposes to correct the mistakes in DNA that condition certain diseases, and therefore prevent them. The first approved trial of gene therapy was conducted in 1990 by Anderson and colleagues on a disease called adenosine deaminase deficiency, in which the loss of a

With a technique called CRISPR, scientists are able to “…target a specific area of a gene, working like the search-and-replace function in Microsoft Word, to remove a section and insert the ‘correct’ sequence” (Berg). Although this method has previously been used on human somatic cells, scientists claim there are intentions to use it on human reproductive cells in the future. Besides preventing diseases, such as Tay-Sachs disease that gradually destroys nerve cells in the central nervous system and leads to death at an early age, it would also enable altering DNA to obtain desired physical features, such as eye, skin, hair color and height (Comfort). The ethical concerns arise when it comes to changing germline cells resulting from the fact that changes made in the germ cells or in the genes of an embryo could be passed to future

We cannot be sure about the outcomes of the genetic modifications because preventing one disease may also lead to another genetic abnormality. It may also lead to choosing certain traits over the others and therefore create selective breeding of the human race. Opponents express a concern “that genetic modification will destroy genetic diversity and will lead to a ‘neo-eugenic,’ or new eugenics, movement, homogenizing the population over time in a discriminatory manner” (Ossareh 764). In the pursuit of perfection, we may erase some genes from the human genome and favor only certain