I’m going to get slammed for this….. but if there was a way that I could know for certain that my embryo/ early fetus had a fatal or severely debilitating disease, I would want to know. If I could prevent a child being born that would have nothing but suffering from birth to death, I would.

But, I think that we’re starting to go too far in some senses with these “designer babies”….. Bizzarre….

I also believe that euthanasia is ok. Until you’re a healthcare professional watching people suffer on a daily basis, I don’t think that you should judge people who support it. If people do NOT want to live any longer because their pain from cancer is incomprehensible, then they should have the right to die in a safe and painless manner (and not from a self inflicted bullet wound)…..

You find something interesting and it happens to lead to a new discovery. Some screening test will be found to work on embryos. Why? Because people are working on something closely related to early life

Idea stop aging. People think it’s stupid, but to fully understand the cycle researchers are learning about aging. So they are learning what processes are important and thus they “stop” processes to see if the cells still age.

It just falls in that guys lap. I think saying focus on diseases is too easy. And it’s not how work is done. This is not business where you say this is the plan let’s execute.

In science you say I’m going to look at this, then get a cool data point and say let’s take it here. And it goes in a new direction completely.

How do you think radiation therapy for cancer was discovered? Curies were doing chemistry and discovered it. They died from their research no less, but it’s not a straight line and discoveries wouldn’t be made if it were.

But what’s tricky is what types of studies should the government ctively fund/subsidize? I’m against my tax dollars going to pay for this type of research, mainly because it’s not that beneficial to anyone or very cost effective.

Also, the “we might fall behind” argument doesn’t really get to me in this case. If Russia wants to spend billions developing this technology, then the handful of parents who want to pay for it can buy the products/services from them (and/or our scientists can copy their research, which happens quickly no matter who invents what anyway). Who cares? This isn’t a cure for cancer or the invention of the flying car! How exactly is America at a disadvantage if we don’t do this first?

In sum, let’s focus on curing a few more diseases first, mmmkay?

That’s the thing about ethics. It’s not black and white, it’s grey.

If you know that you can give your child a 20/20 vision, will you? My vision is a lot worse than 20/20. I would gladly pay to save my children from having to go through the same thing.

The truth is, we are already wired by nature to do this. Why are we attracted to healthy, attractive, talented people? Because we subconsciously know that our offspring with those people will probably have better genes.

Also, like the author said, this is no different from choosing egg or sperm donors. We are already wired to want to produce offsprings that will do the best in surviving.

What we have now is a way to carry out our genetic imperative… in a more precise way than the genetic lottery that we’ve had to bear with since the beginning of mankind.

Definitely good news in my book. Even if I probably can’t afford it