Question

There are techniques in biotechnology that can create genetically engineered babies.

This technology can cure genetic diseases, such as Multiple Sclerosis, Hodgkin’s Disease, Cystic Fibrosis, Alzheimer’s, or Sickle Cell Anemia. However, it can also be used to give cosmetic characteristics or traits that would result in an unfair advantage, such as creating better athletes by giving them incredible strength. Write a 250-word Essay on how this technology should be used in the future. Should limits be placed on what can be done with this technology? How can such regulations be enforced?

OUTLINE

1) How should this technology be used in the future? - To prevent genetic diseases and assist the child in living a healthy life.

2) Should limits be placed on what can be done with this technology? - YES. This technology should not be used for superficial purposes, such as appearance concerns, building better athletes, and selecting the sex of the child.

3)How can such regulations be enforced? - By setting laws that require the procedures to only be used for health concerns and the prevention of genetic diseases.

Answer 1

The sky is the limit. Currently it is revolutionizing industries one after another with agriculture and medicine being two of its most important roles today. Some heavy inroads being made in the energy sector via (gmo) corn ethanol and microbes that produce fuel as well, along with textiles (gmo cotton). This trend will continue.

SOME FUTURE STUFF:
The cost of sequencing and synthesizing genes is decreasing at a ridiculous rate. It would not be an overstatement to say that it's like computers in the 80's right now. Soon (as in, it's starting now) entrepreneurs will be able to make biotech startups with little funding the same way many tech companies did.

Organs will be cloned from your tissues and grown in either a factory or perhaps inside pigs bloated full of a backup of all your organs in a farm for harvest in case of emergencies.

Gene therapy will develop further and allow us to safely cure genetic diseases. With this knowledge and the cheap access to these technologies, some of us will decide to extend the utility of technology designed for... say... curing colorblindness to adding a fourth photoreceptor to increase human capabilities beyond their original state.

This will open the door to "gene doping" in sports and create a dilemma.

Services will allow you to design your pet the same way you can customize a car.

Babies will be "debugged" of genetic diseases prior to birth (or immediately after) which is only a stone throw away from "improved" physiologically/intellectually or even "designed" cosmetically with the same technology used to create your perfect pet. Problems will arise when someone decides they want to make their kid born with autism.

DNA has useful properties for computation in and of itself. We may be able to create living, multiplying, interconnected computers.

Microbes are essentially tiny machines as well as tiny chemical refineries. We will combine this ability with computers to make new materials and chemicals for a variety of purposes.

This will allow the creation of nanomachines (which is essentially what cell organelles ARE)

...Along with new weapons that potential to kill individual targets or even ethnic groups and open the door to new forms of bioterrorism.

The fusion of computer facilitated bioengineering will usher in the creation of NEW organisms with novel traits that never existed in nature that would straddle the boundary between "biological machine" and "synthetic animal".

----deeper into the future----

As with the above technologies, some will apply it to themselves, perhaps radically changing society (not necessarily negatively) and make new subcultures of body experimenters. New generations will be born that aren't afraid of biological diversity, leading to definition of human that is unlike anything we are familiar with today. Soldiers, along with people of other professions might be given an injection that improve their efficiency. Humans aren't made for zero gravity (it's really, really, unhealthy) something we could fix.The

Genetic experiments on humans are out of ethics but are happening anyway in top secret or illegally. Genetic engineering can be applied for good and bad reasons. So it is possible to Engineer something out of ordinary. But achieving something like Marvel universe super hero's :) is not something possible but that is only a matter of speculation.

Genetic engineering helps in achieving better quality of human life than our current situation but to see that coming to true is in hands of researchers

genetic disorders are the only one cateogry of disorders which cant be avoided. Once a person is born with a mutation leading to defect in gene u cant change it.

So when it comes to treating genetic disorders we probably look into the fact of manipulating genes and thats the aspect dealt by genetic engineers.
Limits -

There is no single correct answer to this question. Different people, based on their religions and other biases will give very different answers. Is it moral, at all, ever, to alter the Human genetic code? Some will say that we are God’s work and leave it alone, people have no right to manipulate their own DNA, under any circumstances.

Others will say that if we can use our incredible genetic tools to fight the causes of thousands of genetic diseases then by all means we should do it. Genetic disease can be incredibly horrible. Consider Huntington’s disease, where a single gene is altered from normal, causing certain regions of the brain to begin to die during middle age, resulting in an inexorable progression ultimately involving dementia and death. Consider cystic fibrosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, bubble boy disease, hemophilia, Tay-Sachs, and sickle cell disease. Consider Lesch-Nyhan, again the result of a coding change in a single gene, resulting in self mutilating behavior, that can include biting off your own lips and fingers. And thousands more genetic diseases. We have the tools now to eliminate these diseases.

But some argue, where will it stop? People like to choose the traits of their children. In parts of Asia there are 30% more boys being born than girls, because they like boys, and there are now ways (sonogram and abortion) to choose. What if we could use more sophisticated genetic tools to choose intelligent, good looking, athletic children?? Right now we do not understand the genetics of these traits, but in time we will.
MORALS NEVER STOPPED ANYTHING.