UR TV CAST

These worries do not outweigh the obvious, incalculable benefits of biotechnology. And we should be honest enough to call this attempt to improve the genetic lot of humanity by its name – liberal eugenics. It has nothing to do with the evil of Nazi eugenics, which was imposed by the state and concerned not with producing healthier babies but with deranged race-theories. The solution to unequal access to biotech cannot be the Stalin-style levelling down proposed by the biotech-banners.

We did not react to the invention of medicine – which similarly benefited only the rich at first – by banning it We reacted by creating the NHS so everyone could access it. The first is that there are already inequalities thrown up by nature. I am nowhere near as clever as Amartya Sen, nor as good-looking as, say, the average tub of lard. Does that mean human equality is a nonsense? No – my belief in it is strong enough to cope with smarter, fitter people. Since amniocentesis was introduced, people with Down syndrome are, if anything, treated better. The only criticism that really lingers in the mind comes from egalitarian critics. They warn that human biotechnology may create a world divided between the rich, with their “Genetically Modified Babies”, and the poor, who are lumbered with the random flaws of nature.

The idea of human equality will, they say, melt in the biotech labs But there are already inequalities thrown up by nature. The idea of human equality will, they say, melt in the biotech labs But there are two answers to this. It is a disability nobody would voluntarily choose, and that you are better off without. Nor does the evidence suggest greater screening and treatment will lead to the remaining disabled people being treated worse. By ensuring that the number of able-bodied babies are maximised, we are simply acknowledging that – however harsh it might seem to say it – lacking an ability to hear or see or walk is not simply a difference. But is this true? By making sure that no more mothers take thalidomide during pregnancy, are we implicitly saying that thalidomide people have worthless lives and should be killed? Of course not.

We are simply saying that a person is more likely to be able to live the kind of life they want to with fully formed arms and legs. The brilliant science writer Ronald Bailey has picked numerous holes in the Vatican position. Using their logic, if there was a fire in an embryo lab and you had a choice between saving a petri dish of ten near-invisible embryos or Steven Hawking, you would snatch the petri dish and run And there? a bigger hole. Eight in every ten embryos are flushed out in women? menstrual flows, so why aren? the Catholics trying to prevent this global holocaust of human beings? Why aren? they trying to collect and implant them? The answer is obvious – even they cannot take the Pope? position seriously.