Two news stories merged together in my mind as I drove home from work.
I was listening to NPR on Monday night and I heard about a embryo bank that was open in San Antonio. The woman who runs it was describing how she buys eggs from women, and harvests them, as it's now called. Then she buys sperm from sperm-banks over the internet. Then she sends them to NY where a clinic puts them together in a petri dish and they mate and form an embryo, which, if handled correctly can turn into a baby.
The purpose of all this is to sell the embryos to couple who cannot conceive a child, but who, I guess can carry the embryo, for find someone who can. They implant it, and nine months later a child is born.
All kinds of questions that arise here, about who owns what and when? What to do when it doesn't work? Who are the real parents? Who can have the baby? Who can have the baby for whom? There is all that vague kind of ethical stuff that will remain five to ten years behind the technology. By the time the courts decide what they think is legal these babies could be in high school.
That's all fine with me. Have a baby if you want to. If a couple wants it that much I hope they take good care of the child. There is no guarantee of that, but the chances are no worse than they way things are done now.
But, the night before this I was reading an article in the NY Times Magazine about using drugs to help athletes, and how many athletes will and do take anything they can to give them an edge, especially if many many dollars are riding on it. A throw-away point in the article is that the military is helping to develop these drugs so that they can develop an uber-soldier. On researcher said they were working on a "metabolically enhanced dominant soldier. who could run at Olympic speeds for 15 minutes on one breath, or develop a pain vaccine that would block pain and inflammation for 30 days, or a drug that will allow a soldier to fight for a week without sleep."
The big fear, and there are probably already novels about this, is that these two ideas will merge, and that the army will get their own embryos and breed there own soldiers from birth. They will be specially bred and enhanced, and probably psychologically programed in unquestioned loyalty, and fascist thinking. They will protect "us" from "them" which would be fine, maybe, if I was sure I would be one of the "us", but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be.
The really scary part is that this idea is quite old. Plato favored such a scheme to protect Athens, and wrote about it in The Republic. But now we have the technology.
If I have thought of this, you can be sure the people who are looking for soldiers to go to Iraq have already made plans. Maybe some of the kids are already five years old.
If the war ends they could all go to the NFL (or maybe they have).
4 comments:
I would like the stay awake thing for myself, but it sounds kind of scary!
Ah yes, the novel would be Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", a society where most people are bred from petri dish. Some to be at the top of the social scale, others to be maintained at the bottom. I am taking the optimistic attitude that human nature is unpredictale and that, should such thing happen, we will also find a way around it.
I love the way you write. (esp. your previous posts on patients) :) Always wondered what went on in the therapist's head. Makes me laugh every time.
It's certainly not outside the realm of possibilities & in a sick way, I wonder if it is not inevitable to some degree.
Wasn't there a child born out in California under such circumstances back in the early 90's?
Finally, I have to weary of anyone who is ordering sperm over the internet. For all anyone would know, it could be a single man show & that could lead to all kinds of problems.
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