(Download) "Biotechnology and the Reconstruction of Humanity (Essay)" by Modern Age ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Biotechnology and the Reconstruction of Humanity (Essay)
- Author : Modern Age
- Release Date : January 22, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 195 KB
Description
Consider the following (at present still hypothetical) scenarios: 1) You are diagnosed with end-stage heart failure and told that your only options are to wait and hope that a sufficiently compatible donor will be found before you die or to receive an artificial heart until scientists produce a new heart from the stem cells in an embryo that will be your clone; 2) You and your spouse very much want a child of your own but because various physical conditions render both of you incurably infertile, even by in vitro fertilization, you must decide between adoption and having a biologically related child by cloning one of you; 3) You and your spouse are fertile and plan to have a child. The only question is whether you want to have whatever child you will conceive through sexual intercourse or whether you want to go to a clinic where the most advanced technology will enable you to have much more control over the child's genetic identity, which will include the most sophisticated genetic enhancements on his (you have decided to have a son) forty-seventh and forty-eighth chromosomes. (1) These are not simply choices between two different medical procedures, like deciding whether or not to have chemotherapy or radiation after cancer surgery, but are courses of action that, even before some of them are technologically feasible, have already come to be representative of two profoundly opposed worldviews with irreconcilable differences in their assumptions about "what it means to be human, ... our vision of the human future," (2) and about the contribution that biotechnology can make to the sum of human happiness. For many bioethicists the primary consideration is biotechnology's enormous power to increase choice and improve human life, but those more influenced by the ethical tradition reject as dehumanizing, not the end of benefiting humanity, but some of the once unimaginable means now presented as serious possibilities and even future inevitabilities.
 "Biotechnology and the Reconstruction of Humanity (Essay)" by Modern Age ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}