Every four years I wonder at how unfit the summer Olympic games make me. I sit for hours in front of the TV, eating snacks and trying hard not to drink too much beer. I stay up late and rumble through the next day tired and bloated. After a week and a half, I feel anything but athletic, but season after season I continue the habit. I love the games and, besides, it's only 10 or so days every four years, right? (Winter Olympics are somewhat less intense for me, and they're in winter anyway, so who cares?).
The Olympics make me dream. I am far too old to have any hopes myself, even in the rifle target competition, but that doesn't stop me from dreaming. At night after a long 4 hours on the couch, I think: what if I could reverse aging and be there at the games myself? What if I could somehow make myself of Olympian stature, physically capable of winning gold? What, I usual end up dreaming, if I could alter my DNA?
Now the science of my dream begins. I'll keep the aging thing off the list (it starts another topic), so I'll just pretend I'm young again. First, I must eliminate genetic defects. Gone is the propensity for back pain, for tooth decay (why not?), ear aches, for weak arches and whatever. Who could argue with that? In fact, the main reason I have read for horror at this type of mild physical genetic engineering has come from an odd activist type that worries that too many people would select blond hair and blue eyes for their children. The horrors! Imagine if we all looked like Denmark! They should understand that as soon as everyone was blond and blue, the fashion lines would trend the other way, as usual. In no time, we'd all look like Iran - before the fashion changed again.
But then my dream moves on. Now, I have to select for better formed legs for running, or arms and chest for swimming or gymnastics. Now it gets complex. Would we then create a world of physical specialists, where one segment would look like gorillas, and another like kangaroos (or, for all I know, like dolphins)? Still, what really is the harm? As much as our current world rails about the differences of race, these are only physical differences. What might be disconcerting is that some traits that are now seen as unfavorable might have benefits down the line, like the famous trait for sickle cell anemia: get only one gene for it and you're good to go AND have some immunity to malaria. Now we are entering a world that requires a little thought. Still, couldn't it be done if done right?
Olympiads, though, are not only flesh and blood but mind - steely mind. Might I then trust the boys in the lab coats to alter my brain - just a bit - to take away my nervousness, my self-reflective fears? Might I ask them to make me a warrior, conscious only of winning? Now it gets scary - for wouldn't such minds be great for an army?
So, on quick second thought, I eliminate that, but still, I'd love to be smarter and less quirky, less prone to wander on aimlessly in daydreams while the physics professor speaks of a math I cannot understand. I want to understand that math. In fact, I want to understand everything better than I can now, and better than most everybody else. I want to be a polymath, a Leonardo DaVinci, a towering genius. What possibly could be wrong with that?
Then I have to think - how do we get new ideas? I believe, from experience and readings, that all knowledge is available in a type of cosmic library. Brains limit or direct our attention to segments of that library. Now, in this world of genetic miracles, the smart and upwardly mobile people would have their children tweaked to be these polymaths, capable of swallowing down all the knowledge available at our universities. But I see two main problems: that some things require specialization, and also that many things are currently unknown. In the first, as we create a supposed polymath, we might eliminate the "freak" who lives almost exclusively in the world of music or math or whatever, causing him to tower over those in his field who might score far higher on an IQ test. The second is tangential to this: we might also eliminate the "freak" whose differences seem to us to be nothing but bad, but in the right circumstances just might turn up the idea or invention that we need, something so different that the manufactured Leonardo would never think of it - our Leonardo would be too deeply immersed in the known to ever encounter the unknown. Even if one does not believe in the cosmic library, the results would be the same - different brains will get or form different information.
And so we go back to the beginning - eliminating faults. I admit that I would go with some, like tooth decay - what possible good could come from that? Or childhood leukemia, for that matter. But as I was about to add "spinal scoliosis" I recalled the tortured figure of Steven Hawkins. Although he probably had the smarts to begin with, we cannot rule out the possibility that his disease - which is not scoliosis, but rendered him similarly in a wheelchair - was what made him, forced him, to think so much. Like sickle cell anemia, there might be benefits for certain people with certain diseases - benefits that perhaps they would gladly give up for a normal life, but which help humanity far more.
We must admit that we don't know. Minor adjustments to the DNA might be all-around good, but even then, we have to think really hard and long about each and every one. Greater ones - ones that enhance already-good bodies and brains, should bring even further caution. Consequences might even go beyond simple genetics. In the Star Trek series, there is a famous villain (played by Ricardo Montelban) named Kan who was genetically enhanced to be all-around superior. But it went to his head, making him a megalomaniac intent on galactic domination (the REAL superman of Hitler's dreams). Bad move for the boys in the lab.
In any case, there is too much at stake for god-playing in genetics beyond immediate cures of diseases and problems. To be a good god, one must first know everything, all ways and outcomes and reasons why things are as they are. This will never be for us. As Adam and Eve learned in the garden, and Nimrod learned from the Tower of Babel, there is great danger in playing god, when all one can do is play at it, like a child fiddling with the mythical nuclear button. Better to do our small part now with a certain humility and let the rest come, all answers and knowledge, in their own infinite time. FK
The Olympics make me dream. I am far too old to have any hopes myself, even in the rifle target competition, but that doesn't stop me from dreaming. At night after a long 4 hours on the couch, I think: what if I could reverse aging and be there at the games myself? What if I could somehow make myself of Olympian stature, physically capable of winning gold? What, I usual end up dreaming, if I could alter my DNA?
Now the science of my dream begins. I'll keep the aging thing off the list (it starts another topic), so I'll just pretend I'm young again. First, I must eliminate genetic defects. Gone is the propensity for back pain, for tooth decay (why not?), ear aches, for weak arches and whatever. Who could argue with that? In fact, the main reason I have read for horror at this type of mild physical genetic engineering has come from an odd activist type that worries that too many people would select blond hair and blue eyes for their children. The horrors! Imagine if we all looked like Denmark! They should understand that as soon as everyone was blond and blue, the fashion lines would trend the other way, as usual. In no time, we'd all look like Iran - before the fashion changed again.
But then my dream moves on. Now, I have to select for better formed legs for running, or arms and chest for swimming or gymnastics. Now it gets complex. Would we then create a world of physical specialists, where one segment would look like gorillas, and another like kangaroos (or, for all I know, like dolphins)? Still, what really is the harm? As much as our current world rails about the differences of race, these are only physical differences. What might be disconcerting is that some traits that are now seen as unfavorable might have benefits down the line, like the famous trait for sickle cell anemia: get only one gene for it and you're good to go AND have some immunity to malaria. Now we are entering a world that requires a little thought. Still, couldn't it be done if done right?
Olympiads, though, are not only flesh and blood but mind - steely mind. Might I then trust the boys in the lab coats to alter my brain - just a bit - to take away my nervousness, my self-reflective fears? Might I ask them to make me a warrior, conscious only of winning? Now it gets scary - for wouldn't such minds be great for an army?
So, on quick second thought, I eliminate that, but still, I'd love to be smarter and less quirky, less prone to wander on aimlessly in daydreams while the physics professor speaks of a math I cannot understand. I want to understand that math. In fact, I want to understand everything better than I can now, and better than most everybody else. I want to be a polymath, a Leonardo DaVinci, a towering genius. What possibly could be wrong with that?
Then I have to think - how do we get new ideas? I believe, from experience and readings, that all knowledge is available in a type of cosmic library. Brains limit or direct our attention to segments of that library. Now, in this world of genetic miracles, the smart and upwardly mobile people would have their children tweaked to be these polymaths, capable of swallowing down all the knowledge available at our universities. But I see two main problems: that some things require specialization, and also that many things are currently unknown. In the first, as we create a supposed polymath, we might eliminate the "freak" who lives almost exclusively in the world of music or math or whatever, causing him to tower over those in his field who might score far higher on an IQ test. The second is tangential to this: we might also eliminate the "freak" whose differences seem to us to be nothing but bad, but in the right circumstances just might turn up the idea or invention that we need, something so different that the manufactured Leonardo would never think of it - our Leonardo would be too deeply immersed in the known to ever encounter the unknown. Even if one does not believe in the cosmic library, the results would be the same - different brains will get or form different information.
And so we go back to the beginning - eliminating faults. I admit that I would go with some, like tooth decay - what possible good could come from that? Or childhood leukemia, for that matter. But as I was about to add "spinal scoliosis" I recalled the tortured figure of Steven Hawkins. Although he probably had the smarts to begin with, we cannot rule out the possibility that his disease - which is not scoliosis, but rendered him similarly in a wheelchair - was what made him, forced him, to think so much. Like sickle cell anemia, there might be benefits for certain people with certain diseases - benefits that perhaps they would gladly give up for a normal life, but which help humanity far more.
We must admit that we don't know. Minor adjustments to the DNA might be all-around good, but even then, we have to think really hard and long about each and every one. Greater ones - ones that enhance already-good bodies and brains, should bring even further caution. Consequences might even go beyond simple genetics. In the Star Trek series, there is a famous villain (played by Ricardo Montelban) named Kan who was genetically enhanced to be all-around superior. But it went to his head, making him a megalomaniac intent on galactic domination (the REAL superman of Hitler's dreams). Bad move for the boys in the lab.
In any case, there is too much at stake for god-playing in genetics beyond immediate cures of diseases and problems. To be a good god, one must first know everything, all ways and outcomes and reasons why things are as they are. This will never be for us. As Adam and Eve learned in the garden, and Nimrod learned from the Tower of Babel, there is great danger in playing god, when all one can do is play at it, like a child fiddling with the mythical nuclear button. Better to do our small part now with a certain humility and let the rest come, all answers and knowledge, in their own infinite time. FK
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