Scientists playing God? Good!
June 26, 2006
A good article in The Times about the amazing abilities of scientists to detect genetic disorders in embryos:
Scientists playing God? We should rejoice
Minette Marrin
"What a piece of work is a man!" as Hamlet says. "How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! . . . In apprehension how like a god!" Usually I think rather less enthusiastically than that about humankind, but sometimes I am reminded of the nobility of man and of woman and it is often by scientists.
Last week British scientists announced a revolutionary screening process for inherited diseases in embryos. It will be quicker and more accurate than the existing method and it will detect thousands more genetic defects than previously possible.
About 200 heritable conditions can be detected by pre-implantation diagnosis in IVF treatment so that only healthy embryos are implanted in the mother or frozen; the new technique - pre-implantation genetic haplotyping - will be able to detect nearly 6,000 diseases and conditions. As one of the British pioneers said, this changes everything. One could almost call it godlike.
...
Nature is astonishingly cruel. Science, by contrast, has the power of mercy.
Read the rest here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-2242171,00.html
Scientists playing God? We should rejoice
Minette Marrin
"What a piece of work is a man!" as Hamlet says. "How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! . . . In apprehension how like a god!" Usually I think rather less enthusiastically than that about humankind, but sometimes I am reminded of the nobility of man and of woman and it is often by scientists.
Last week British scientists announced a revolutionary screening process for inherited diseases in embryos. It will be quicker and more accurate than the existing method and it will detect thousands more genetic defects than previously possible.
About 200 heritable conditions can be detected by pre-implantation diagnosis in IVF treatment so that only healthy embryos are implanted in the mother or frozen; the new technique - pre-implantation genetic haplotyping - will be able to detect nearly 6,000 diseases and conditions. As one of the British pioneers said, this changes everything. One could almost call it godlike.
...
Nature is astonishingly cruel. Science, by contrast, has the power of mercy.
Read the rest here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-2242171,00.html