What’s the difference between genetic engineering and eugenics?
By Robert Gebelhoff,
The Washington Post
| 02. 22. 2016
Untitled Document
For a half-century, the ethics of human genetic engineering have been discussed in the abstract. Because the tools to edit DNA didn’t exist, the question was more a thought experiment than a real concern.
Today, though, the conversation has completely changed. There has been a frenzy of excitement around the possibilities of CRISPR-Cas9. The technology, which allows scientists to design proteins that unzip and replace chunks of DNA as they please, makes it possible to edit genes quickly and cheaply. Investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the innovation, which seems to have endless possibilities: making crops more resilient to diseases, designing mosquitoes so they can’t carry malaria — maybe even eliminating diseases among humans by altering the genes we pass on.
Scientists are confident that the technology could one day eliminate genetic disorders in humans. However, the research is still very young, and there are major ethical questions attached to editing human DNA that the emergence of CRISPR makes even more pressing: Wouldn’t editing out inheritable traits from the human population simply amount to eugenics...
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 09.25.2025
In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.
The response to the...
Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
npg.org
Public Domain via Wikipedia
As has been discussed in recent issues of Biopolitical Times (1, 2), there are, increasingly, companies that claim to be selling parents better babies by selecting the “best” embryos. These services don’t come cheap – think $50,000, or even more, for embryo testing, plus perhaps as much again for IVF and concomitant services. To most of us, that is extremely expensive...
By Margaux MacColl, The San Francisco Standard | 09.17.2025
Designer babies are coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi in 2020, when he was just 20, got its start analyzing genomes to weigh a person’s risk of everything from cancer to ADHD...
By Marianne Lamers, NEMO Kennislink [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.23.2025
Een rijtje gespreide vulva’s gaapt de bezoeker aan. Zó ziet een bevalling eruit, en zó een baarmoeder met foetus. Een zwangerschap, maar dan zonder zwangere vrouw, gestript van zorgen, gêne en pijn. De zwangerschapsmodellen en oefenbekkens, te zien in de...