X-Message-Number: 28157
From: "Mark Plus" <>
Subject: Times (UK) article: "Scientists playing God? We should rejoice"
Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2006 11:03:45 -0700

But as Mike Perry says of cryonicists, "We're not 'playing'!"

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-2242171,00.html

The Sunday Times  	June 25, 2006

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.

What it means is that thousands of parents who are at known risk of passing 
on terrible disabilities and diseases will now be able to have only healthy 
babies. This is the best news I have heard for years.

Those who don't know about it can perhaps hardly imagine the drawn out 
suffering of Huntington's disease or Duchenne muscular dystrophy or 
Prader-Willi syndrome or Fragile X, both for the people affected and for 
their families, until death puts an end to it.

Nature is astonishingly cruel. Science, by contrast, has the power of mercy. 
One can only be dazzled by the inventiveness and compassion of the 
scientists involved in this screening breakthrough    in action , as Hamlet 
said,  how like an angel!  Admittedly genetic screening means that embryos 
carrying disabilities and diseases will be discarded. It is a stretch, 
however, to use the word destroyed, or even killed, as the test is done on 
embryos that are only three days old. And what is appealing about this early 
screening is that it offers the hope that, in the foreseeable future, 
abortion and late abortion will be less frequently used in dealing with 
serious defects and disabilities.

It will be easier and better in every way to get rid of a tiny collection of 
cells. This is indeed playing God, as all the usual campaigners were quick 
to point out last week. But what on earth is wrong with humans playing God? 
I am all for it, especially as God doesn't seem to be doing it. Besides, 
whatever we may think about playing God and defying nature, we are doing it 
already and even though we don't necessarily recognise it, we approve of it.

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