dahiyars
July 4th, 2006, 10:42 PM
A NEW EUGENIC PROGRAMME - GENETICS?
The danger of all this lies in the simple fact that having invested in this sunrise area of biotechnology, capital is desperately looking for paybacks. Just addressing a small percentage of cases of infertility or genetic abnormalities will not produce large returns. If a mass market is to be developed, mass screening of the population is required. This biotech lobby is joined by the insurance lobby that believes that all statistical correlation with disease should lead to aborting the foetus so that they have to pay out a lot less for medical treatment of the persons insured. They can then use the refusal of screening as a basis for refusing insurance. All this is driving genetic testing in a direction that would fit into a eugenic framework, a framework that was never rejected intellectually by many in the west. It became illegitimate only after Hitler’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of “inferior” races.
The problem with weeding out such variations leaves out the reason why such variation exists in the first place. Quite often, the additional burden of such variation arises from some other evolutionary advantage that exists. If we weed out some of these variations, we may also take out some advantages that this variation gives us. The less the variation in the gene pool, more vulnerable is the population in case there are large-scale environmental changes.
The brave new world of genetically designed future may still be some distance away, but the threat of its insidious arrival through selective abortion and consequent reducing heterogeneity of the gene pool still remains. The heart of this is the belief that all human characteristics are genetically determined –– from disease to obesity. If we press the right buttons and take out these genes, the human population would be better off: this is the new eugenics program. It is time that society wakes up to what is on offer and takes a reasoned stand on this. With large parts of today’s scientific community getting co-opted into this new genetic wisdom and with billions of dollars in profits from their patents, the scientific community cannot be the sole arbiter of such decisions.
There is an urgent need for an informed public debate on the pros and cons of techniques that biotech companies are seeking to market. We need to separate the good from the bad in biotechnology so that good science can proceed and the bad science, like bad money, does not drive out the good from circulation. We therefore also require a strong regulatory framework to address the scope of such techniques and to address the issues of risks and ethics. In India the risks are even more. India could become the happy hunting ground of dangerous clinical trials for this new technology with its people being offered as guinea pigs.
Read Somewhere
R.S.Dahiya
The danger of all this lies in the simple fact that having invested in this sunrise area of biotechnology, capital is desperately looking for paybacks. Just addressing a small percentage of cases of infertility or genetic abnormalities will not produce large returns. If a mass market is to be developed, mass screening of the population is required. This biotech lobby is joined by the insurance lobby that believes that all statistical correlation with disease should lead to aborting the foetus so that they have to pay out a lot less for medical treatment of the persons insured. They can then use the refusal of screening as a basis for refusing insurance. All this is driving genetic testing in a direction that would fit into a eugenic framework, a framework that was never rejected intellectually by many in the west. It became illegitimate only after Hitler’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of “inferior” races.
The problem with weeding out such variations leaves out the reason why such variation exists in the first place. Quite often, the additional burden of such variation arises from some other evolutionary advantage that exists. If we weed out some of these variations, we may also take out some advantages that this variation gives us. The less the variation in the gene pool, more vulnerable is the population in case there are large-scale environmental changes.
The brave new world of genetically designed future may still be some distance away, but the threat of its insidious arrival through selective abortion and consequent reducing heterogeneity of the gene pool still remains. The heart of this is the belief that all human characteristics are genetically determined –– from disease to obesity. If we press the right buttons and take out these genes, the human population would be better off: this is the new eugenics program. It is time that society wakes up to what is on offer and takes a reasoned stand on this. With large parts of today’s scientific community getting co-opted into this new genetic wisdom and with billions of dollars in profits from their patents, the scientific community cannot be the sole arbiter of such decisions.
There is an urgent need for an informed public debate on the pros and cons of techniques that biotech companies are seeking to market. We need to separate the good from the bad in biotechnology so that good science can proceed and the bad science, like bad money, does not drive out the good from circulation. We therefore also require a strong regulatory framework to address the scope of such techniques and to address the issues of risks and ethics. In India the risks are even more. India could become the happy hunting ground of dangerous clinical trials for this new technology with its people being offered as guinea pigs.
Read Somewhere
R.S.Dahiya