The Science and Politics of Genetically Modified Humans
By Richard Hayes,
Worldwatch
| 07. 01. 2002
July/August 2002
The new human genetic technologies are arguably the most consequential technologies ever developed. Many applications have great potential to prevent disease and alleviate suffering, but others would open the door to a new, high-tech eugenics that could destabilize human biology and undermine the foundations of civil society.
Humanity needs a crash course in the science and politics of the new human genetic technologies. We need to distinguish benign applications from pernicious ones, and we need to adopt policies affirming the former and proscribing the latter. We need to repudiate eugenic political ideologies and deepen our commitment to the integrity of the human species and the dignity of all people. We need to do this on a global scale and within less than a decade.
Two new technologies are of critical concern: reproductive cloning and inheritable genetic modification. Reproductive cloning is the creation of a genetic near-duplicate of an existing person. If I cloned myself, would the child be my son or my twin brother? In truth, he would be neither. He would be a new category of biological...
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
By Abby McCloskey, The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
By Kaitlin Sullivan, NBC News | 10.15.2025
Two months after she was born, Eliana Nachem got a cough that wouldn’t go away. Three weeks later, she also started having runny stool, prompting a visit to her pediatrician.
Eliana didn’t have allergies or a gastrointestinal condition; instead, tests...