← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · friedrich braun
Thread ID: 10260 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2003-10-05
2003-10-05 06:49 | User Profile
A question for a geneticist.
How far are we from (White -- caucasian) parents being able to "engineer" their offspring in terms of hair and eye pigmentation?
For e.g., we have a White couple who would like for their prospective child to have a specific phenotype: light skin, brow hair and blue eyes (I don't know...whatever). While using the genetic material of the parents in question.
Could something like this be feasable, i.e., designer babies, etc. (I mean is the technology far way into the future or just around the corner?)
For e.g., my aunt was very upset when my little cousin's eyes turned hazel (from light blue -- just like hers) -- I'm sure that if she could have decided on the matter, she would have liked for my cousin to have her eye colour. It was a big deal for her. My cousin is blond and has hazel eyes -- almost everyone else in my immediate family is blond and blue-eyed, so he kind of sticks out.
2003-10-05 06:55 | User Profile
I know basically nothing about genetic science.
I was told by one knowledgeable in such things that the film "Gattaca" is not far from current science.
In that film, prospective parents conceive a few hundred zygotes in a test tube, and a full DNA analysis is run on them all. They then select the zygote they want, based on physical health, intelligence, musical talent, and whatever.
As the doctor in that film told these parents "it's you, but it's the best of you."
In the film, the consequence of this was a society divided between those fortunate to have been so planned, and so-called "God's children" who were conceived the good old fashioned way.
It was a sci-fi "B" movie, but well worth a look.
Walter
2003-10-05 07:21 | User Profile
It would be great if we could genetically engineer an all out break with humanity, or homo sapiens, itself. It would thus follow that the ridiculous argument "we are all humans" could no longer be used against us. This is one of our principle problems in my view, this universalism. Creating a European species would wreck this universalism by inserting a fine line in between "us" and "them."
2003-10-05 10:01 | User Profile
[QUOTE=FadeTheButcher]It would be great if we could genetically engineer an all out break with humanity, or homo sapiens, itself. It would thus follow that the ridiculous argument "we are all humans" could no longer be used against us. This is one of our principle problems in my view, this universalism. Creating a European species would wreck this universalism by inserting a fine line in between "us" and "them."[/QUOTE]
Yeah, but the problem is that "we" would no longer be "us", so then what's the point?
It's all about saving the white race QUA the white race, as far as I'm concerned.
We should be very reluctant to meddle too much with genetics. I think that we can, and indeed should, undertake reasonable measures to ensure that bright and healthy young white people marry each other and have lots of babies, but much beyond those sorts of incentives probably runs the risk of major unintended consequences.
As an aside, your proposal is "transhumanism", is it not? I've read something about this, and would like to hear more.
Walter
2003-10-05 18:27 | User Profile
You can do all that now, it would just be horribly expensive, not to mention the ethics of what happens to all the zygotes you don't want.
Certainly eye color, hair color and markers for various genetic diseases can all be selected for. You can do fun things with immune system markers, too. I'd be interested in finding out what genes are responsible for cancer development. I'm not sure about genes for intelligence or musical ability, though. The intelligence gene is an interesting concept, but work on it is probably not being done openly, for the obvious PC reasons.
It is possible to take a random zygote and introduce the genes you want, but it's a very iffy proposition that the genes you want will "take" and be expressed. Also, your offspring might be a chimera, in that some cells will express the desired gene(s) and some won't. Your hope there would be that the gene would be passed through gametes to the following generation, so if you want to engineer some grandkids, better start planning now!