Relationship to Course Theme
We as humans make an attempt in our everyday experiences to make ourselves better. Americans in general have become greatly concerned with physical appearance, health, and overall levels of success. Children are pressed harder than ever before to be achieving in many possible respects. Many students often take on multiple extra-curricular activities due to cajoling from caring parents. It just seems natural that parents would want their children to have a variety of experiences growing up so that they will become well rounded individuals that understand their strengths and weaknesses. Wanting to improve ourselves as well as our children is a normal desire and often times we are willing to go to great lengths to see these things come to fruition. This correlates with one of the main ideas behind the course which is understanding human's pursuit of an ideal which is relatively mutable from person to person.
Genetic engineering and therapy can be seen to comply with the idea of people attempting to better themselves by garnering traits that constitute their concept of personal perfection. Genetic therapy offers solutions to debilitating disease that can severely impact a persons quest for the ideal. It offers hope for those who in the past would be resigned to the fact that there is no effective treatment and that those related to you would have to witness your suffering and wonder if it was going to happen to themselves or their children. Genetic engineering offers the potential to go further than therapy when manipulating human genetic information. Due to the fact that the genome has enormous control over physiological aspects of our body, this type of engineering realistically has the potential to enhance human capabilities in performance, appearance, and reliability. Movies such as GATTACA provide possible insight into what society would be produced if this knowledge and technology had free reign. Genetic engineering opens up any number of ways that could be monopolized to make human traits something more than what their biological parents supplied. Designer babies with pre-determined physical characteristics and capabilities and athletes receiving more fast twitch muscles with superior mitochondria for increased ATP production are both situations that would not be completely out of the question for the future.
Genetic engineering is remarkably similar to Mike Decaro's topic of gene doping in the fact that gene doping can be accomplished through genetic manipulation. They both provide a means for enhancing a human beyond normal therapeutic techniques. Though sports enhancement is the major concern with mike's page, the same method would be employed for genetic engineering of any type. Improvement from outside substances such as anabolic steroids and erythropoetin also allow enhancement for an individual to get an edge over the competition and better their performance. They difference is in the fact that gene therapy seeks to fix a departure from the norm within the genome while gene doping seeks to enhance an individuals capability beyond what they were able to obtain through training and hard work.
The course was designed to help understand these issues and debate how, when, and to what extent can this manipulation technology is used. This topic raises several key issues for ethical concerns and makes apparent how this sort of technology could be used in a detrimental fashion if unregulated.
This website was created for the course Honors 210:The Ideal at Monmouth College.