I was more thinking like Gattaca where they take the part out of the DNA that causes heart disease and other stuff to give kids the best start at life. Then why can’t we use the gene for sickle cell to create a cure for malaria?
Comment on Does the net positive of Eugenics out weigh the negative? How so?
riskable@programming.dev 1 day ago
Who decides what genes are best?
People who have the genetics for sickle cell anemia have a greater chance of surviving malaria.
Forget the ethics for a moment: Eugenics is flawed from the very premise that putting all our (genetic) eggs in one basket is somehow a good idea.
Patnou@lemmy.world 1 day ago
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 1 day ago
If you watched Gattaca and thought, “This is a good blueprint for the future”, you missed the point the movie was making.
Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s the thing about sci-fi, it’s a warning about potential horrors but that doesn’t mean horrifying things can’t have a positive.
I wholly understand that the point of gataca is oppression that comes from giving humans another metric to oppress. It’s spelt out plainly. Unfortunately, like the main character, I’m also the product of people who didn’t think about what they’d be passing on. Now in my thirties, I’m in the early stages of arthritis, my eyes are failing, and if family tradition holds I’ll have less than a decade before a sudden and undetectable heart condition kills me. If that doesn’t get me I have early dementia waiting in line.
I’m three quarters through the life I was given and I knew the name of my killer before I was ten. To me, Gataca is a world where some forethought on my parents would mean never having to do weekly injections so that my flesh does not consume itself. A long and ordinary life without pills every morning or regulating my diet for inflammation.
SciFi isn’t about the dangers of science, it’s about the dangers of science misused. The moral of gataca is that people are more then the sum of their parts and to value them on such is cruel and unjust. It’s that parents have a responsibility to their children, regardless of their own feelings on it. But it’s moral isn’t that correcting bad genetics is wrong. No one deserves to be born broken.
Patnou@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Ok lets say you have a child. And they tell you he or she won’t last past 25 years old, but they can make an “adjustment” so he or she can live a full and happy life.?
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s not eugenics, it’s gene therapy. Eugenics is when the policy is compelled by the state, for its supposed benefit to society instead of the affected individuals.
ViatorOmnium@piefed.social 1 day ago
Because the mutation that causes anemia is the one that prevents malaria. You can’t have one without the other.
JustPlainDave@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
You didn’t finish that movie, did you?
cattywampas@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I think a big problem is it becomes a slippery slope. We can all agree that heart disease and cancer are bad. What about asthma? Ok, probably bad, let’s get rid of that. Near-signtedness? Hmm. Being short? Not having a strong jawline? Male pattern baldness? The “wrong” skin color?
Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 1 day ago
Watch better films.
Do not believe all that they tell you.
the_q@piefed.social 1 day ago
Technically evolution decides what genes are best… Eventually.
kbobabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Shouldn’t this be constantly instead of eventually? Genetic changes are happening all the time
riskable@programming.dev 1 day ago
Most mutations are irrelevant or don’t impact anything until they’re duplicated enough times to matter.
For example, every human has 6 to 24 copies of the genes that let us digest wheat: AMY1 (salivary) AMY2A / AMY2B (pancreatic).
If any one or two of those mutate in the next generation, it won’t be noticeable or make any sort of impactful change.
This is why changes from one species to another take hundreds of thousands of years (many generations). A whole lot of people will need to accumulate the same mutations and survive (or just reproduce) with those changes (when others don’t) for speciation to occur.
About 70,000 years ago, nearly all humans on earth died, leaving behind just a few tens of thousands (maybe up to 200,000) that had just the right combinations of genes to survive. When that happened, humanity lost nearly all of its genetic diversity. It’ll be a long time before we diversify again (if we ever make it that far).