The genetic manipulation of plants, animals and microbes : the social and ethical issues for consumers : a discussion paper / by Roger Straughan.

  • Straughan, Roger.
Date:
1989
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The genetic manipulation of plants, animals and microbes : the social and ethical issues for consumers : a discussion paper / by Roger Straughan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Genetic manipulation of plants, animals and microbes produced by genetic manipulation, while press and television publicity has recently been given to pigs injected with human growth hormone who were crippled by arthritis. Psychologically, what does the loss of species integrity do to the psyche of an animal? And if hunnan genes are transferred to animals, what human attributes, potentialities and rights might go with them? 6. Genetic manipulation could represent the first step on a slippery slope that leads inexorably to a nightmare programme of universal eugenics: In laboratories all across the globe, njolecular biologists are making daily decisions about what genes to alter, insert and delete from the hereditary code of an organism. These are eugenic decisions. Every time a genetic change of this kind is made, the scientist, the corporation or the state is tacitly, if not explicitly, making decisions about what are the good genes that should be inserted and presen/ed and what are the bad genes that should be altered or deleted. This is exactly what eugenics is all about (8). By continuing along this road, we could end up reducing the human species to a technologically designed product (9). To examine the above arguments and their underlying assumptions fully would require a full-scale thesis. All that is offered here is a brief list of comments and considerations, some general and some specific, which may help us in judging the relative validity of some of the above claims. (a) There are obvious and notorious difficulties involved in trying to define what counts as natural and unnatural. How do we decide whether or not it is natural, for example, for women to prefer child-rearing to a career, for boys to play with dolls, for huskies to live as household pets, or for roses to be blue? How can we ever be sure what, if anything, Nature prescribes? Moreover, even if we could be sure about this, it would not have any direct ethical relevance - something is not made automatically good or right just because it is natural. Some of the most likely examples of natural human characteristics would include such dispositions as jealousy, aggression, insecurity, possessiveness and self-centredness, but 29