Forget the Genetic Supermarket, I Want Precautionary Genetic Engineering!

It is often argued that the illegitimacies of active genetic engineering of the human genome are manifest in its unethical ability to create "superhumans." These fictional characters would be the result of two parents making a trip to the genetic supermarket (the doctor) and hand picking the traits of their offspring ("2%, or skim, honey?"). It is the opinion of this thinker, however, that the line between "improving" the genetic pool with traits like "fitter" or "smarter," and "precautionary repairing" the genetic pool with traits like immune to disease X, is thicker than most might think.

Active genetic engineering refers to the direct manipulation of the DNA of a human being. Passive engineering would be something like a eugenics program, where those possessed traits x, y, and z were taken out of the gene pool, removing these traits from future generations. This passive engineering goes on every day all over the globe in our manipulation of food sources (breed the bigger corn with the bigger corn and presto! All of your corn is bigger).

The jump to active engineering is something that makes most people's moral compasses cringe, and I'd like to discuss that a bit. When we get sick, we fight off the problem with an array of actions ranging from direct drug administration to more passive acts like exercise, sleep, and lots of water. Back in the day (evolutionary psychologists call it the Era of Evolutionary Adaptation, or EEA), those who couldn't fight off the sickness died, perhaps having failed to have kids and pass on their genes. At this point, this person's (or humanoid's) genes have left the world's gene pool, and the likelihood of future humans dieing of sickness is slimmer. This is the process of (micro) evolution, but also the process of a natural passive genetic engineering of the future. Perhaps those who possessed a certain ability to fight off sickness were able to do so because of a mutation in their genetic code. In the words of Jonothan Glover[1], "if natural mutations can be beneficial without a compensating loss, why should artificially induced ones not be so too?"