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Martin Amando English 4 Professor Schneider 18 March 2014 Obsession with perfection In the pursuit of health, witch doctors, alchemists, and scientists alike throughout history have created a plethora of techniques and medicines to combat disease and death. As technology advances at its most rapid pace in these modern times, so does our understanding of the world and the way we fit into it. Through the advent of modern medicine, scientists have given birth to a new potential type of medicine: genetic engineering. Though the idea of selectively splicing, adding, and removing certain sequences of a living beings genes as if it were an easy to read book or simple machine sounds out of a science fiction novel, it is quickly becoming a potential future and new direction for humanity. Scientists have already demonstrated competence in modifying the genes of plants or livestock to yield a higher crop or be resistant to a certain bacteria. While taking the same ideas and applying them to humans to eliminate or treat diseases and conditions like autism, cancer, and even likeliness towards obesity may sound like the perfect solution, scientists really have no idea about the potential socioeconomic and dystopian futures they could unleash. Some of the effects of creating a type of perfect human are overpopulating the world, creating a genetic depression which is essentially inbreeding the entire human race, and losing the control of genetic engineering for medical reasons to engineering for cosmetic reasons.

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The effects of overpopulation are serious. Major problems in overpopulation exist today, and modifying the human genome to create humans that live even longer and healthier than before, will wreak havoc on the economy and collective welfare of humanity. Why is it bad though, for people to live longer and healthier lives? The answer is simple: people require food and shelter, and to produce all this extra food requires the use of fertilizers and raising livestock. To produce this extra shelter, people will be forced to live in favelas and cheap housing just to have enough room for everyone. All it takes is one look at the living conditions of India and China. China, for example, has already realized that it needed to slow down its population growth, so they currently enforce a One-Child policy per couple (Associated Press). To enforce this same policy on America and other countries founded with the ideal of freedom to offset the growing number of healthy people is ludicrous; this kind of policy would only work in communist China, where its citizens are afraid to speak out against its government. Also, as a result of producing more food for more people, growing all of the livestock will increase the global methane emission and nitrogen fertilizers used on crops, which are harmful to mother earth and its inhabitants. Already, there are problems with global methane emissions contributing to global warming and nitrogen fertilizers contaminating vegetables, which easily accumulate nitrate, a chemical used in fertilizers. When consumed, nitrate can react with stomach acid and turn into nitrite, which is a known mutagen and carcinogen (Wang, 2). Also, livestock farts are contributing to 14% of the global methane, with another main source being landfills, which will increase as a result of having more people and their trash. All ecological effects aside, the world mainly has problems with overpopulation in Africa and Asia. According to the Population

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Reference Bureau, Africas population is predicted to double from the year 2013 to 2050, which is not too far ahead of the statistics for Asia (2013 World Population Data Sheet). There is just not enough food in some places of the world and too much fighting goes on to control scarce resources. What makes it okay to bring even more people into the world than we can handle? A very possible result of engineering the human genome is erasing all genetic diversity and defects until scientists create a standard of health under which humans can now be considered as perfect. To make everybody perfect and healthy, with the same healthy genes is to erase all genetic diversity. It is proven in nature that genetic diversity is the key to the healthiness and longevity of a species. The success and longevity of male and female deer is negatively correlated with inbreeding and positively correlated with outbreeding and producing offspring with various genes (Price). But what exactly about inbreeding is bad? When two organisms that carry recessive traits for a disease, for example, have offspring, then the offspring will express this disease. In the case of humans, this is why mating with immediate relatives is advised against. To give every human similar traits is to essentially inbreed the entire human race. This would only be a problem, however, if scientists are only able to eliminate dominant traits and not recessive ones, which is more likely because eliminating the recessive traits is theoretically be more difficult. Another condition upon which this is a significant problem is if the genetic engineering of fetuses is only limited to specific diseases, which is a likely scenario when we examine our current medical system where many people cannot afford health insurance. Likewise, some people will only be able to afford the

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removal of certain diseases from their fetus, but not other diseases which may or may not be dormant. All economic and scientific speculation aside, genetic engineering may lead to a whole slew of issues that would have been impossible to envision in a laboratory setting. At first glance, the idea of altering the human genome to get rid of all disease and prohibiting genetic alteration for the sake of cosmetics sounds like a good one, but it does not take into account the imaginary social disparities of which humans excel at making. It is inevitable that those who have been born as the perfect baby will carry an elitist mindset and discriminate against those who have not been genetically altered or have some kind of birth defect, no matter how insignificant. Likewise, those who have not been genetically altered will resent those who have been and humanity will have to add genetic discrimination to the list of racial and sexual discrimination, of which there are already enough problems with today. Though genetic discrimination over who is healthier may not be as likely as other scenarios, this emerging field of medicine is on a slippery slope. To allow the splicing of genes only for medical use will surely lead to the splicing of genes for cosmetic use and realize the idea of a designer baby. Much like parents frowned upon their children for listening to Elvis Presley, new generations will push the envelope and take genetic engineering to new levels. The changes will start gradually, with the first goal being to eliminate all major diseases like autism, cancer, and even the tendency for obesity. Soon after all major diseases are a thing of the past and humanity attains a standard of health that it has never reached before, more and more mundane traits will be

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considered imperfect, like skin color, eye color, height, and even lisps, for example. Continuing on this path will inevitably give us an obsession with perfection. To conclude, its only a matter of time before humanity will be able to rise to the scientific demands of the people and there will be a choice to make. Will genetic engineering be stopped in its tracks or will science be taken to its limits as consequences are realized? The negative consequences of this new field of medical science are very real. At first glance, nothing may seem wrong with saving lives and preventing disease, but as a result of more and more healthy people than ever before, there will be competition over resources and deadly waste products of the extra people. This problem aside, in the hunt for a picture of perfect health, humanity will gradually change its definition of disease and imperfection and become forever driven towards a more specific standard than the one before it. Humanity may engineer itself to extinction in this scenario of a dystopian future.

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Work Cited 2013 World Population Data Sheet Population Reference Bureau Web. 14 March 2014. Zhou, Ze-Yi, Ming-Jian Wang, and Ju-Si Wang. Nitrate And Nitrite Contamination In Vegetables in China. Food Reviews International 16.1 (2000):61. Academic Search Premier. Web. 14 Mar. 2014 Harrison, Nick. "Cows Farts and Fuel." Appropriate Technology 32.4 (2005): 44. ProQuest. Web. 17 Mar. 2014. Press, Associated. "Boy Boom in China, but Baby Limit Still 1." Journal - Gazette: 0. Jan 24 2007. ProQuest. Web. 17 Mar. 2014 . Price, Edward O. Animal Domestication and Behavior. Cambridge, Massachusetts: CABI Publishing, 2003. Serial Solutions 360 Link. 16 Mar. 2014.