Another interesting new book: Human Genetic Engineering: A Guide for Activists, Skeptics, and the Very Perplexed by Pete Shanks. This looks like an excellent resource. The website for the book includes excerpts and links to many articles online. Here's an excerpt from the first chapter:
The public debate over human biotechnology is just beginning. Experts have been discussing the implications of genetic research for decades, but only in the last few years have these topics begun to reach the political agenda.
Cloning has hit the headlines, and so has the partly related question of embryonic stem cell research. We still don't have a federal law to regulate either of them, and research continues anyway. Meanwhile, some practitioners in the fertility industry are looking to expand the market for their services to include not only sex selection but "designer baby" options. Once again, the political issues remain: Who decides what is acceptable and how should those decisions be enforced?
These developments are occurring against a background of people forgetting — or misrepresenting — the terrible history of eugenics in the twentieth century. Eugenics was not primarily developed by the Nazis, although they used it to justify their prejudices. Eugenics was an appalling idea mostly advocated by well-meaning people. It's coming back, this time as a consumer option, in a high-tech form that has appropriately been dubbed "techno-eugenics."
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