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A-Typical male's journal. |
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So, whack me with a stick. I've found that I get feedback from my other writing, and I don't from this very often. So this has gotten neglected and will probably go weekly, unless there's a great hue and cry. I'm going to be moving the site, and making some changes, so things will change. I'm not gone, I'm just not updating often. I am however, writing over 600 words a day on other things. I'm not unhappy. |
I heard on NPR this morning that they have isolated, or almost isolated the gene for Perfect Pitch. That is, the ability to tell exactly what a tone is without hearing any reference tones. I have relative pitch. If I hear a tone, then another tone, I can tell you if it was louder, higher, or longer than the first tone. I probably couldn't tell you what the tone was. In band, I learned to recognize certain tones, like my B-flat, which was my tuning tone on the trombone. But I can't do the "Perfect Pitch" thing. This was the first example that I ran into where researchers were searching for a gene that wasn't diseased related. We can all see the advantages of searching for the Cancer gene, or for genes that cause congenital diseases. In the short run, we can construct tests and scans and let people know about these things, so they can prepare and deal with it. But who is going to make a test to see if I have the Perfect Pitch gene? Who would care about that? I think the answer is obvious. They don't care if I have it, but rather, if they can give it to someone else. If, as a parent, or potential parent, you could keep you children from getting Cancer, would you do it? If your family had a high incidence of alcoholism, would you want to keep that from your children? How about autism, or epilepsy, or Multiple Sclerosis? Or Sickle-Cell disease? Or Hemophilia? Certainly there are other options: you could adopt, you could choose to not have kids. Or you could wait a few years. Between the gene-splicing, gene-isolation, and cloning technologies it will be possible in a few years (10, 20, or 50 it will happen) to keep your children from having any of these, and more. We could wipe out all or most of those diseases in a generation.
Hurray for Science!!!We could get rid of nearsightedness. And keep kids from having extreme overbites, like I did. While we're at it, make sure she's a girl.Oh, and I'd like her to have red hair. We're both blond, but we just love red hair. And green eyes of course. Make sure she's predisposed to thinness. Make her smart. Oh, yeah Uncle Sal was gay, get rid of that gene, too. Tall is good. Can we make her a great athlete? I know it's all potential, but I want my child to have every advantage I can giver her. After all, I'm her parent, it's my responsibility.
The real question is, what is a 'good' change and what is going to far? Can we uncork the genie to cure our diseases without opening the floodgates to all the other possibilities? And perhaps the most important question, "Is it already too late?" I think it might be, scary as that sounds. The technologies are almost there, and despite the legality of these things, they will still happen. They won't be illegal everywhere, that almost never happens. We've made human cloning illegal in this country. What happens when we discover that human cloning is necessary to cure a terrible ill? Will the public opinion sway, and allow it in that one case? Probably. And because we just 'made it illegal' we'll never think about the implications. We'll just head on out, and do it, and let our kids deal with the problems. And of course, the richer ones will all be smarter and more beautiful than us, anyway. Generic Joe's A Typical Male
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