Who's Afraid of Human Enhancement?

A Reason debate on the promise, perils, and ethics of human biotechnology.

From the January 2006 issue

(Page 6 of 6)

And there are ethical questions involved here that mean we can't simply relax. Should we be using nascent human life as a tool to develop therapies [that will let us live longer]?

Ronald Bailey: I've suggested to my wife that we'll have children when we're younger. In any case, with regard to treasuring every embryo, nature certainly doesn't do that; 80 percent of all naturally conceived embryos, as far as we know, are not implanted and never become people or babies or anything else. In fact, the results of IVF are better than those of nature.

Questioner 3: In terms of consenting to genetic treatments, do embryos--or children, for that matter--have the ability to give their consent?

Ronald Bailey: I want to remind everybody in the audience that you did not give consent to be born. In fact, you did not give consent to be born with any of the genes that you have. So any embryos that parents decide to modify stand in exactly the same relation that all previous embryos have stood in.

If you think about what people are apt to do, this isn't really an issue. Would you want the person-to-be to be smarter? Well, yeah, that'd be good. Forty IQ points would be good too. Would they like to have a good immune system? Yeah, they'd like that. What about athletic ability? Yeah, OK. I think you can presume consent for most of the things that parents are going to do for their children because they're not going to try to make them worse. They're going to try to make them better.�