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.
We can do it. For Minette Marrin this means that we should, obviously:
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.
That is a case that can be made, and it may even be a strong case. But she doesn't make it. Instead she makes the common mistake of assuming that technological change is completely uncontrollable and cannot be shaped by ethical concerns; that ethics is ultimately irrelevant to science.
Nature is astonishingly cruel. Science, by contrast, has the power of mercy.
Not really. Science is nature amplified; it can be astonishingly cruel. It can also be the instrument of mercy. And knowing which it will be in a particular case is not always simple.
1 comment:
"Science is nature amplified"
This and your other comments are simply spot on.
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