Thursday, July 06, 2006

To test or not to test...that is the question!

When/If you are having a baby, would you want to perform PIGD (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis)? Would you do it only to test for genetic diseases or also to select for certain traits? Share your thoughts.

1 comment:

Darren Kuropatwa said...

Hi,

I'm a friend of Mr. C's. You'll see my name listed with yours in the contributors list for the biotrek blog. I'm also a teacher and I found your comments on this post captivating.

Scotty Dog, you echoed my thoughts exactly.

Many of you have commented that PIGD should only be used for preventing disease. Your writing also has an underlying message of "let's not mess with mother nature." After all, we've come this far without things like PIGD, we'll continue to get by without it.

Two thoughts:

(1) "We've come this far ..."

Yes we have. We discovered that mold on bread (penicillin) can cure many diseases and it's now accepted as a standard (natural?) medical treatment.

The ancients chewed willow bark when they were in pain. They said it made the pain go away. We've distilled that into acetylsalicylic acid (ASA); commercially known as aspirin. That's natural too; we've just refined the process to make it more effective.

Throughout human history we have evolved our technology to improve our lives and give ourselves greater choice about how we will live those lives. Isn't PIGD technology just another step in that evolution? And if it is, shouldn't we use it to further expand the variety of "choice" we have in our lives? Is it possible that some day this technology will be so common place (like penicillin) that we'll see it as "natural?" Imagine yourself in such a future world. Do you think people will still be debating whether or not we should choose the eye colour of our children?

(2) "let's not mess with mother nature."

Hmmm ... aren't we, as a species, part of "nature?" Didn't we evolve naturally in our environment and learn to make tools out of the materials we found in the world around us?

Monkeys use sticks to get ants out of their holes to eat them. They adapt things in their environment and use them as tools (the stick). I think we'd all agree that's natural behaviour for a monkey. Well, as a species we've also adapted things in our environment to use as tools, like the computer you're sitting in front of. The thing is though, maybe we're too smart for our own good. Maybe we've begun to make tools we're not yet mature enough to use. Things like nuclear bombs and PIGD.

What do you think? Are questions of using PIGD technology really questions about our maturity as a species?