When does genomics become eugenics?
By Eben Kirksey,
Financial Review
| 12. 11. 2020
As the tools to identify human traits and manipulate them become more refined, ideas about normalcy and deviancy, fitness and disability, are subtly changing.
Simply Google “BGI NIFTY” and you will find a slick website from China’s premier genomics company offering new options in the quest for quality children. This screening technology has already been used in more than 62 countries in Asia, Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East.
The NIFTY webpage has a “decision calculator” to see if you should mitigate the risks of your pregnancy. An embedded YouTube video offers a perspective from a young white couple. They talk in British accents about the importance of accuracy, saying that they are willing to pay for the best prenatal care on the market. An older single woman says that this will be her first and perhaps only baby, and she wants to make sure that nothing is wrong.
Previously in China, under the controversial one-child policy, couples were encouraged to make the most of their only shot. Amniocentesis – the insertion of a needle through the abdominal skin into the uterus to extract amniotic fluid which is then tested – was promoted by government experts as part of the practice...
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...
