Would you choose specific traits for your children?

[Kylonicus]

True, which is in reality much easier, all I have to do is do something during the prenatal stage that upregulates a particular gene, and the chromatin structure will be altered for the rest of the child's life.

 

Man I enjoy epigenetics.

[Hades]

i would do it regardless of cost. the goal of a parent is to give the children the best life they can have. if your son or daughter came home from school upset that their classmates were making fun of them because they had an enormous nose that squeeked with each inhalation, and u saw how devastated your child was, u would do anything to fix their nose. realistically now, confronting the problem at school, with other parents, counseling; all short term solutions which will never ultimately give resolve to the matter.

I would want for my children to have certain genetics that i carry; my intelligence, reasoning, and disposition. I would like for them to be free of disease, and i would like to prevent other things, such as balding, and suffice it to say, sexual characteristics not to be ashamed of. Self-esteem is lowered with inadequate ... size.

[Kleptin]

There should be limits...Many lives can be saved just by fiddling with one or two genes. Health care ONLY.

[Guest Monet's Iris]

I will never support such thing as i dun think a perfect person will be happy. If only he is perfect , than he is abnormal and everyone can imagine how he will be treated by the others；if everyone is perfect, the world will be so horrible!

[AzurePhoenix]

Do you mean perfect physically, or mentally? I could deal with the first, but the second would doom us. We need variety in the minds of the people.

 

As for abnormalities, sometimes they just happen to make life interesting. I'm abnormal in... certain ways..... but I'm happy in my eccentricity and youthful senility, and after retirement, I would like to be a hermit up in the red wood forest.

[RhenMyster]

I voted "No, on other grounds." Lets say the technology was built just to cure babies of deformed physical features or weak immune systems, but the science wouldn't stop with just those options. You would be able to do so much more, even if the former ideas were in mind at first. But it's like the speed limit on a car. Yeah, the law wants you to stay under thirty-five, but you know your car can do so much more, so you let it. That's what would happen to the technology. They would see their child and say, "I know I'm only suppose to use it like this, but could we add some intelligence into him?" If this were to happen, you would most certainly crash your car terribly. So I vote No.

[ifm2181]

Partly, it would be interesting to be able to have your child be exactly what you want, but it's unfair to the child and I just don't think it's proper to be screwing with genetics on a whim.

Besides, if we thought we had problems with stupid parents now, think about how many people would be having kids so they could make them look like people. All of those Elvis Sighting Societies would be more pointless! World Records would become contests of who can outdo the other on making a superior child without having to train them. And we'd have people making anime-based children. I couldn't deal with Inuyasha clones covorting about. And think about the defects. "Oops, we botched your kid. Just go make another. We'll dispose of this one."

[Flareon]

But it's like the speed limit on a car. Yeah, the law wants you to stay under thirty-five, but you know your car can do so much more, so you let it. That's what would happen to the technology. They would see their child and say, "I know I'm only suppose to use it like this, but could we add some intelligence into him?" If this were to happen, you would most certainly crash your car terribly. So I vote No.

 

I fail to see the logic of analogy between increasing intelligence and crashing one's car.

[ifm2181]

It went a bit off, but his point was that people will end up abusing the ability to alter children, beyond what they decided on, or what's really legitimate.

An analogy I'd make for that is like cheating in a video game. You know you can do it, but you set some limits to still have some challenge. But you ultimately end up sneaking in a couple helpful additions now and then when you know you shouldn't. So, the power has just been abused, for whatever reason.

[Ndi]

(No, other reason) - this does not include desease/defect prevention.

 

What we are, the way we respond is most of the time an EXACT combination of many qualities and defects, combined with life experience. It is more than possible that some of us make the right decision by "feel", by stupidity, chance, anger, you name it. Same decision in the hands of a better human could be the wrong one.

 

Lemme tell you what I mean. Assume i reached 90% of what i wanted to be by 28, then stalled. So i think to myself: "If i make my kid just like me, but with more ambition, he/she will go further just that inch i couldn't". So i pump more desire to win into the kid.

 

The kid grows, but the ambition is pushing more than it did me. Hets standards higher, fails to achieve them, gets depressed, loses desire to fight, and, in the end, fails. The key to my success was NOT being so ambitious, but moderated.

 

Another possibility is the kid keeps pushing until one day a tire explodes. Game over.

 

And a third and rather true possibility is that the kid simply fails completly. If ME (same genome, same year, same parents) would start over again, ME could have gone for a completly different option, different life, perhaps one of faliure.

 

So it is not assumable that if I was successful I should be again, let alone better myself.

 

And finally, we define "successful" by getting in -say- the top 10%. Genetically engineer 100 people to perfection and 90 will fail because they have to. They WILL fail. Perfect people. Beter genetic material has nothing to do with success. A one-legged determined and trained human will outrun a fat coutch potato given enough time. And a lifetime is a long race.

[AzurePhoenix]

Perfection is in the eye of the beholder, thereby impossible to realistically engineer no matter what. And yeah, people will always fail, no matter what, but that's for the best. Without failure, there is no success. The constant threat of failure is perhaps the greatest motivator there is. And if these kids are engineered with just a little extra edge, then maybe their successes will be just that much more notable, even if their failures are jsut as hard, or harder.

 

Anyway, part of what makes you you is who raises you, and how so, your experiences, etc. I was raised to fail, or at the best, seek mediocrity, but I strained against my training because of my natural drive and ambition. As a result, I'm doing okay, a little better than I must to get by. That little extra boost of inherant ambition might be a good plus for other kids with lousy folks.

[lepidoptera]

I would support the idea on the grounds that maybe it would be possible to stop children from developing alzheimer's (don't know the spelling) or shcitzophrenia (also don't know the spelling) or cancer. But as far as making their eyes blue and hair pink, that's just stupid. Mothers should experience the miracle of life. Part of that is seeing your baby for the first time and realizing, "Wow! This baby is part me, and part my signifigant other!" Making the baby bright purple and such would destroy that. That is not the baby's genetics, and therefore, cannot really be considered your child.

[ifm2181]

Anyway, part of what makes you you is who raises you, and how so, your experiences, etc. I was raised to fail, or at the best, seek mediocrity, but I strained against my training because of my natural drive and ambition. As a result, I'm doing okay, a little better than I must to get by. That little extra boost of inherant ambition might be a good plus for other kids with lousy folks.

I wasn't raised to fail... actually, I wish I was. Because being raised to do your absolute best at everything when you actually can't/don't care is a serious pain. I was raised to do things that I now have no beliefs in, so a boost of my own ambition will change that. I'll lose respect from my parents, but maybe they'll understand at some point.

Ambition is usually a good thing to have. It can even allow you to differenciate from what you've been taught all your life.

[TheGeek]

I am not sure. I do want my children to be perfect but i dont want them to be same as others.

here is how i would decide:

If other parents were doing it then i would do it too because i dont want my kids to be average and other kids being perfect at everything because then my kids would not be able to join any sports or anything since all the "good" kids would be on the team.

[danny8522003]

Yes, but only if it involves engineering an OFF or a MUTE button.