What´s Gene Therapy Ethical?

The question of whether or not it is ethical to change the genes of a child before they are born, to rid them of a family disease or just simply to be able to pick their traits, has been going on for years now. Every year humans as a whole are getting closer and closer to minimizing the major health concerns, so gene therapy can be done safely. It has been done on people in the past, but very few have received an effective treatment. But this doesn’t mean gene therapy is impossible, it just means more research needs to be done. Gene therapy was first proven possible in humans in 1990 on a four year old girl named Ashanthi, who was suffering from a rare disease. In 1998, author Sharon Begley published her article, “Designer Babies”, where she
Many people believe the idea of “designer babies”, altering the genes of an unborn baby for parent’s desired traits, to be unethical. The main reason for this is that because it would create massive decrease diversity, because of the fact parents would be choosing their children’s traits. In Bonnie Steinbock’s article, “The art of medicine: Designer babies: choosing our children's genes”, published in 2008, Steinbock explains how he believes designing your children is morally wrong because children wouldn’t be able to express themselves. Steinbock says, “Perhaps the objection is to the fact that the child’s genes were chosen for him by his parents, thus forcing the child to have certain talents and not others” (Steinbock). He believed that the child would have no input into what they want to pursue in their life. Part of being a child means trying different things to find the one thing they really desire. If parents genetically engineered their child to be good a musician, that would be the only talent they would have. At this time in history, people, including Steinbock viewed the procedure of designing babies to be very wrong and that it should not be
CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which is basically the bacterial defense system in the body. CRISPR can be programmed to target specific genetic codes and edit specific DNA in the body. This enables researchers to permanently modify genes in organisms and living cells, with hopes in the future to be able to modify mutations in human genes to treat genetic diseases (“Project Spotlight CRISPR”). In 1993, Francisco Mojica discovered CRISPR. He worked on it throughout the late 90’s and 2000’s. In 2013, CRISPR set our for genome editing. Feng Zhang, a Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, was the first to successfully adapt the gene editing in human and mouse cells (“CRISPR Timeline”). With CRISPR, scientists can create mouse models of human diseases much quicker than before, study single genes much faster, and easily change multiple genes in cells at once. Blake Wiedenheft, a biochemist at Montana State University in Bozeman stated, “I don’t think there’s any example of any field moving this fast” (Pennisi). In 2016, scientists recently got approval from the UK Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority to edit genes in embryos. In 1998, when Sharon Begley published her article, “Designer Babies”, this procedure was considered a dream. Now, it is a reality. Dr. Kathy Niakan of the Francis Crick Institute in London, also the American