Is Genetic Engineering a Good Thing?

Or Does it Lead to Eugenics?

eugenics

I don’t just write on Substack. I read here, too. I currently have over one hundred free subscriptions to various publications here; everything to Science Fiction to politics to matters military. I could go on. For the most part, I read anything that I find interesting, simply because I can. Some of it hits me pretty hard. Some of it I can’t remember five seconds after I’ve finished reading it. It just depends on what it is and how what I’m reading interacts with anything from my learned experience to my mood that day.

Today I read separate posts from two different Substackers that have me more than just a little shaken up. Both dealt with Crispr, a gene editing technology, and it’s uses in altering the human genome in living organisms IE people. This makes me extremely nervous. That there may be some positive results that result from genetic engineering should go without saying. That the effects of genetic engineering could be horrendous is also worth mentioning though.

It’s weird because, in a world full of honestly well intentioned human beings, genetic engineering has the potential to be the single greatest scientific discovery in human history. I say that unironically. In a generation or two we could wipe out things like birth defects, Tay-Sachs disease, sickle-cell anemia, Down syndrome, and probably a lot of other things. I’m guessing that things like type 1 diabetes would not be far behind. We’re talking about not just millions, but possibly billions of lives saved over centuries. Genetic engineering has the the potential to completely revitalize human society. I mean that seriously.

The potential downside of genetic engineering is a eugenics program. Dictionary.com defines eugenics as follows:

1. the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, especially by such means as discouraging reproduction by people presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits negative eugenics or encouraging reproduction by people presumed to have inheritable desirable traits positive eugenics.

A belief in eugenics has led to terrible consequences at least twice in the history that I, personally, have studied. It is no exaggeration to say that millions of people have died to what is essentially a pseudo-scientific belief in improving the human race through genetics. Two of the most horrifying periods in human history have resulted from a belief in eugenics.

The first, and most obvious to people who know what they’re talking about, is the Holocaust. Many people equate the Holocaust with hate, and it must certainly be admitted that the Nazis hated themselves some Jews. But the Holocaust, and the concurrent massacre of both Roma (sometimes call Gypsies) and the Slavic peoples was carried out because of the Nazi belief that the human race could be improved by eliminating those with weak genes. Hitler was obsessed with the creation of Das Herrenvolk, the Master Race of humanity. Literal millions of people were slaughtered because of the fear that they would one day breed. The Nazis believed that the Aryan race was superior and all others must be eliminated. That is the true reason for the Holocaust. It wasn’t just hate.

Then there was the racial conflict between separate groups of black people in Rwanda. I’m old enough that I remember seeing this on TV as it was unfolding. Basically, the Belgians took the area over after Germany gave it up at the end of World War I. Prior to that the area’s native groups: primarily the Tutsis, and the Hutus had lived in relative peace, sharing the land’s bounty without man problems. When the Belgians took over, they introduced a system of eugenics, placing people in positions of power within their government based not on qualifications, but on things like skull size and shape, height, and skin tone. The Tutsis were, on average, closer to the ideal (defined as closer to what was normal for Whites) and were therefore declared to be the Tutsis to be of superior genes and breeding than the local Hutu population.

The Hutus began to resent the Tutsis. This built up over decades (I don’t have time to go over it all here. There are books on the subject if you’re interested.) and eventually led to a massacre that was terrifying in its scope. I don’t have the numbers ready. I haven’t studied the Rwandan Massacre as closely as I did The Holocaust. Suffice it to say a whole bunch of people (as in millions once again) were slaughtered in the name of racial justice by a group of people who looked just like them.

When you add social history to scientific possibility, the possibilities are both endlessly and potential lethal. The Leftist thing would be to worry about how only the children of the rich would have access to gene engineering, but I’m not in agreement with that theory. In many countries, medical treatments are free and if you can define gene engineering as a medical treatment as a medical procedure (and that’s not much of a stretch) you could probably get it for free, at least until your government went broke paying for it. No, my worry is for when something doesn’t come out quite right.

What happens when a doctor tweaks a gene and makes a child dumber instead of smarter? What happens if a mistake is made and instead of preventing cystic fibrosis, gene therapy makes it worse? What happens if…

You get the idea. But it gets worse from there.

What if someone decides to create a race of highly intelligent scientists and engineers to push the human race forward? Is that okay? I mean, if you’re reading this you’ve benefitted from the science and engineering it took to build your computer. What happens if someone decides to build a better athlete and alters genes to add things like height, strength, endurance, and bone density? An athlete that’s bigger, stronger and harder to break would be a benefit to any professional sports franchise, right?

But then what happens if someone notices that these big, strong people would make a great labor force? What if it’s decided that the big, strong people should be limited to jobs that only require physical acuity and not mental ability? What happens if its the super smart scientists that do it? Do we end up having a war? At that point, the strong people are probably better soldiers, but does that matter when the smarts can produce better weapons? How many people die while we’re trying to answer that question, and what happens to the losers of that war?

And what happens when someone decides that the non-genetically engineered shouldn’t have the right to have children and pass on their genetic inferiority? I just covered the Holocaust and that’s how it started. I don’t see how you end up with a group of gene-engineered human beings who don’t see themselves as superior to those who haven’t gone through the treatments. The potential for disaster is real.

Listen, I’m a Science Fiction fan. I have been for decades. I want to explain all those paranoid thoughts away as merely fantasies. I just don’t think I can. I’m not sure anyone else can either and I have no faith in the words “Adequate safeguards” that I keep hearing in my head spoken in the voices of many of the liberals I’ve known over the years. People are people and there are no safeguards adequate to prevent them from being such.

We need to slow down, evaluate what the benefits and the dangers are and think before we leap. That is something we’re not good at as a species, but it’s necessary this time. We should not be doing this just because we can. Down that path lies madness.