Correction of defects in-utero is not the same as sterilisation and selective breading but is still eugenics. Correcting congenital heart defects is eugenics, making sure organs are born inside the body is eugenics. Improvement doesn't require anything to be forced upon existing people, it's simply a matter of providing for the next generation.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Markhawkman correctly understood my meaning. I am surprised that anyone would think I meant "know everything" in a perfectly literal sense, but when you consider how some ostensibly capable scientists sometimes allow confirmation bias (essentially working backwards from what one thinks to be a foregone conclusion) to blind them to flaws in data and experimental design, then such an attitude can be a problem for real scientific advancement. Not to say it always happens, but it can.
Yeah, one way to look at it is that the approach in Star Trek is akin to assuming that natural evolution is the best way, no questions asked.
Except that natural evolution... kinda doesn't work with medicine. With natural evolution, people with hemophilia bleed to death, dumb people get eaten by tigers, and so on and so forth.... Medicine, especially the sort seen in Star Trek, means that undesirable traits do not get removed by natural means.
The very definition of "eugenics" requires that those deemed "inferior" be removed from the gene pool. The Final Solution differed from the older American version only in who exactly was included among the "inferior", and how exactly they were to be removed (the American solution favored forced sterilization rather than mass graves). However, eugenics is still the pseudoscience of "improving the breed", whether you want to do it by overwhelming force or by the lesser force of simply preventing the "unworthy" from having children.
And parts of this conversation are taking an ugly turn toward believing that I should have been among those sterilized, that my children (profoundly autistic daughter, mildly autistic/ADHD son) are among those genetically "flawed" who should not have been permitted to exist because their futures will never be typical. This is not to say that they have no futures - Iain in particular has horizons limited only by his own interests - but since they can't be mapped to the same arc as a neurotypical child, they are less "worthy" of life. Can't say I care for that tone. (And once one starts down that line, how long until I'm among the "unworthy"? I'm on the spectrum as well, and my path has hardly been what one might call "normal"...)
That was not the point which I posed. You appeared to be making the assertion, that, because some historical greats might have been on the autistic spectrum (a point which I questioned the validity of: of coincidentally comparable behaviour, over formal diagnosis) that should the responsible sequences be mapped and be screenable, that doing so might deny future generations of another potential Tesla, Einstein or Turing, to which I posed the hypothetical questions of; i) if such sequences could guarantee creating such brilliant if unorthodox minds, rather than the socially challenged individuals who are more frequently associated with conditions on the autistic spectrum, and ii) if the parents of such an individual could be held accountable for any anti-social behaviours their children may then commit if those sequences could be detected and screened for...
Parents can be, and are, held legally responsible for the behaviour of their children upto a certain age. My thought experiment posed, was, as illustrated in the example of Gattaca, in a future where a person's worth (and insurability) is measured and governed by their genetic fingerprint, would the parents of someone who they chose not to termintate or resequence (and please note my above comment on that subject, so do not think for one second that I am speaking from anything other than very personal experience of the issue) be held accountable for the actions of a child (even in adult-hood) who had been identified as having such genetic markers, or markers for more serious conditions such as a predisposition to addictive behaviours or violent behaviours... As you can see from my above response to gulberat, it's not nice when that spotlight falls on oneself and highlights issues, but please do not think that my comment was in any way aimed as a personal dig about you or your family, or anything other than a hypothetical discussion...
so how do we define how to improve and what to leave?
I suppose it depends on what you can categorise as a 'harmful' disorder as opposed to an 'inconveniencing but manageable' disorder.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
hearing loss is nothing more than an inconvenience
A bit of a personal question, but were you deaf from birth or did it happen later in life. Do you suffer from balance related issues, is the underlying cause something that effects your other senses? You don't need to answer, but hearing loss covers such a wide spectrum it doesn't really make sense to say 'hearing loss is nothing more than an inconvenience', unless you mean to you personally.
Even if it were, is it fair to birth a deaf Human who could have had their ears fixed genetically?
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
1. I was born Deaf
2. Yes, my balance sucks and apparently a little with my depth perception. It doesn't affect my driving though.
3. No, but I do find my sense of touch and smell heightened.
4. I can understand hearing parents having their child, before being born, be repaired of hearing loss defects. But if that child was to be born in a Deaf family, there is no harm as the child immediately can socalise.
1. I was born Deaf
2. Yes, my balance sucks and apparently a little with my depth perception. It doesn't affect my driving though.
3. No, but I do find my sense of touch and smell heightened.
4. I can understand hearing parents having their child, before being born, be repaired of hearing loss defects. But if that child was to be born in a Deaf family, there is no harm as the child immediately can socalise.
I could't imaging being deaf at all (totally anyway, my left ear doesn't work, but that's by the by) but an enormous amount of our world view comes to us by sound, after sight and arguably touch (temperature and pressure mainly) it's the most important sense. I have no doubt the child would be able to connect to their family quickly but it does limit them to the rest of the world.
Obviously if the hearing cannot be fixed then standard procedures apply and the rest of us should stop being lazy buggers and get round to learning sign language like we said we would a few years ago.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
actually, for communications, agreed the most important is hearing, but really? to function you don't need hearing.
Unconscious hearing is a really important survival technique. Your body hears and registers a car approaching out of your field of vision and your body may even start moving before your head has even swivelled round to see the car.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Okay, marc, first off I'm not in the business of providing diagnoses of dead people. However, if you can read the letters of Einstein, or Tesla's biography, and not see any symptoms of being on the spectrum, I respectfully suggest that you are employing selective reading. (Tesla seldom made notes; instead, he envisioned his inventions in his head fully, not committing anything to paper, or sand in the case of the first sketches of the AC generator, until it was nearly ready for production. He also had a very specific routine he had to follow in the mornings if anything was to be accomplished that day, had a horror of touching hair (the primary reason his biographers believe he probably died a virgin, as genital shaving was not fashionable at the time), hated anything spherical (he lost the opportunity to marry the daughter of J. P. Morgan because on their first date she wore a strand of pearls and his reaction was, ah, importunate), and he perseverated on pigeons to the extent that even during the periods when he was flat broke he still bought food for the pigeons in the park.)
Secondly, that's some impressive backstepping, but it's awfully hard to read that rant about some mother being "horribly selfish" for bringing her daughter into existence and not read that as yet another slam at my children's existence (although hardly the first such - I'll still not associate with Autism Speaks until they explicitly disavow the views of former president Alison Singer, for example). And it's also not the first time I've read your nonapologies to people in here (no, "I'm sorry you were offended" is not an apology), so you'll forgive me if I'm underimpressed with your sincerity in this case.
Thirdly, and this is directed to more than one previous respondent, the basic concept of "eugenics" requires that the current generation not be permitted to reproduced if they possess undesirable traits. It's baked into the underlying assumptions. And it's pseudoscientific because, as I've pointed out previously, there's no way to know if a given gene-complex will express until it does. You can provide in-utero surgery to correct some physical defects, and neonatal surgery for others, but you can't provide genetic surgery to prevent them from happening in the first place, because you don't know if they will.
And of course there's also the slippery slope shown in Gattaca - the protagonist was denied his future not because he had a heart problem, or would develop one, but because his genetic profile, unedited because his parents couldn't afford to do so, indicated that he had an increased probability of developing such a problem. That was the problem he was trying to cheat his way around - a societal assumption that even the outside chance of there being a problem was too much.
so how do we define how to improve and what to leave?
That is a hard question because it's subjective, AND the definition is fluid. It's a large part of why I favor the idea of leaving the final decision to the parents.
I could't imaging being deaf at all (totally anyway, my left ear doesn't work, but that's by the by) but an enormous amount of our world view comes to us by sound, after sight and arguably touch (temperature and pressure mainly) it's the most important sense. I have no doubt the child would be able to connect to their family quickly but it does limit them to the rest of the world.
Obviously if the hearing cannot be fixed then standard procedures apply and the rest of us should stop being lazy buggers and get round to learning sign language like we said we would a few years ago.
Hence my comment upthread that sign language should be taught from Day One in schools, so it is universally understood (I'm also all for the globalisation of Esperanto for the same reason)
Okay, marc, first off I'm not in the business of providing diagnoses of dead people. However, if you can read the letters of Einstein, or Tesla's biography, and not see any symptoms of being on the spectrum, I respectfully suggest that you are employing selective reading.
I haven't read those things, so I can't comment either way on them. What I am questioning, is that you appear to be suggesting that the remarkable achievements of those individuals, may be due to them having autistic traits. I was questioning that, and suggesting that perhaps they were remarkable in spite of those traits, rather than because of them, like the paralympians who still excel in their sports despite a missing limb(s) or other disabilities. That hinges the second point, of if the presence of the sequences which manifest in those autistic traits will produce someone with the potential to be the next Tesla or Turing, because many of the people seen who do have those traits, do have varying degrees of social difficulty, from the mild, to the severe. I appreciate that this is a sensitive issue for you, but no one is telling you personally to report for Carousel... I'm not even asking if you would have preferred it if your parents could have screened away those genetics in yourself, or if you would have done so in your own children (and I am sorry if you thought that I was) I am asking, as a hypothetical discussion, if those sequences definitely create brilliance, or if that brilliance was simply coincidental, and represented an overcoming of the other traits to fulfil that brilliance. For if that is the case, then screening those sequences would i) not be denying future generations another Incredible Mind, and ii) would be giving that child the potential to live a neurotypical life (a term I hate, but use instrad of the highly dubious 'normal') Again, those are intended solely as points to consider against the point you raised, not to be take an personal digs or to be necessarily answered on a personal basis.
Secondly, that's some impressive backstepping, but it's awfully hard to read that rant about some mother being "horribly selfish" for bringing her daughter into existence and not read that as yet another slam at my children's existence (although hardly the first such - I'll still not associate with Autism Speaks until they explicitly disavow the views of former president Alison Singer, for example).
I would prefer to say 'clarifying'... My friend is an extremely selfish person (in every area of her life). Immnnot going to put her on a pedestal of sainthood 'just because she's my friend'. She is someone who scorns any sympathy afforded her or her kids for their varied conditions when it suits her to do so, yet spends her days posting on facebook about, yes, you've guessed it, her children's conditions... How much it sucks, and how much it impacts on her entire family and their lives. Essentially courting and soliciting such sympathy... She is also, however, a very good friend, and one who can be trusted to give frank and honest advice when it is requested, so yes, she is selfish, but she's also a friend, so as is the way with worthwhile friendships, flaws are overlooked in favor of positive traits... I don't know if she would have considered terminating her daughter had her epilepsy been detected in-utero, but I do know that for all her bemoaning how much epilepsy ruins their lives, she is also adamant that she would not want her daughter 'fixed' (despite hating epilepsy and its impact) hence my raising her as an example of how some parents would adamantly reject any kind of intervention which might actually improve their child's quality of life (and that -- quality of life, or rather lack there of -- was the issue my wife and I decided upon) be it either voluntarily undertaken, 'societally preferred', or State Mandated...
And it's also not the first time I've read your nonapologies to people in here (no, "I'm sorry you were offended" is not an apology), so you'll forgive me if I'm underimpressed with your sincerity in this case.
I was not offering you an apology. I was clarifying and explaining the intent of my original post to you, which I believe you have not only misconstrued, but also failed to address the proposed points to. I am, however, entirely sincere in my statement that the points raised in my post were not aimed as slams at you or your children. Perhaps you would concede that you reacted personally to them, in the same way that I reacted personally to gulberat's comment about a 'stink of choosing who lives and dies', due to personal proximity to 'the issue'... So yes, I am sorry if you are or were offended by the points raised, but I would like to clarify that causing offence was not my intent.
Thirdly, and this is directed to more than one previous respondent, the basic concept of "eugenics" requires that the current generation not be permitted to reproduced if they possess undesirable traits. It's baked into the underlying assumptions. And it's pseudoscientific because, as I've pointed out previously, there's no way to know if a given gene-complex will express until it does. You can provide in-utero surgery to correct some physical defects, and neonatal surgery for others, but you can't provide genetic surgery to prevent them from happening in the first place, because you don't know if they will.
That's not something I've ever suggested or implied in this discussion... And I agree, at present, we do not know if they will. Even in Gattaca they did not know for sure if Vincent would develop heart problems. He did however, develop myopia... Which touches back to the point I raised a few times above, and that is: Who sets the bar, who determines what is to be considered 'the norm', and what happens, when 'they' decide to shift the goal-posts and demand different criteria (as is done with cholesterol levels or blood sugar levels for diabetics...) Those are my concerns...
And of course there's also the slippery slope shown in Gattaca - the protagonist was denied his future not because he had a heart problem, or would develop one, but because his genetic profile, unedited because his parents couldn't afford to do so, indicated that he had an increased probability of developing such a problem.
I don't believe that it was stated that Vincent's parents couldn't afford to have him sequenced (they clearly could afford to have his brother sequenced, indeed, choosing that they wanted him to have a brother, rather than a sister) but rather that their initial pregnancy was guided by 'ignorant faith' and 'hope', rather than 'the proper' genetic guidance...
That was the problem he was trying to cheat his way around - a societal assumption that even the outside chance of there being a problem was too much.
Absolutely, Vincent's crime was not murder, but of fraud -- of obtaining a position which realistically, he might (highly likely) have been rejected for. I base that on the following observation:
In the scene where Vincent is working out on the treadmill when Anton (as yet unidentified as his now-adult brother) does the rounds, Irene was allowed to finish early due to her heart condition (actual, not hypothetical, due to her observably taking medication) She was a Gattaca administrator, but would not have made the grade to actually be an astronaut. When Vincent's rigged ECG mic failed, his heartbeat was way above what was considered acceptable by the observers. When he went to the locker room, he literally collapsed onto the floor. While some may suggest that that was due to the shock of seeing Anton, I don't believe that that would create such an extreme reaction... That he might have walked round the corner and thrown up out of fear and surprise, sure, I can buy that. But that it would push his heart rate that far up, and make him literally collapse, I think not... That he was able to beat Anton while swimming is not surprising, as, heart condition or not, he was still a physically trained astronaut at the very peak of his health, rather than 'a regular guy' who just liked to work out... I don't think Vincent had enough of a heart condition to render him the fragile snowflake his parents and the prospective teacher saw him as, but I'd bet that realistically, it would have kept him as a ground-based administrator/flight programmer...
Comments
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Except that natural evolution... kinda doesn't work with medicine. With natural evolution, people with hemophilia bleed to death, dumb people get eaten by tigers, and so on and so forth.... Medicine, especially the sort seen in Star Trek, means that undesirable traits do not get removed by natural means.
My character Tsin'xing
Parents can be, and are, held legally responsible for the behaviour of their children upto a certain age. My thought experiment posed, was, as illustrated in the example of Gattaca, in a future where a person's worth (and insurability) is measured and governed by their genetic fingerprint, would the parents of someone who they chose not to termintate or resequence (and please note my above comment on that subject, so do not think for one second that I am speaking from anything other than very personal experience of the issue) be held accountable for the actions of a child (even in adult-hood) who had been identified as having such genetic markers, or markers for more serious conditions such as a predisposition to addictive behaviours or violent behaviours... As you can see from my above response to gulberat, it's not nice when that spotlight falls on oneself and highlights issues, but please do not think that my comment was in any way aimed as a personal dig about you or your family, or anything other than a hypothetical discussion...
I suppose it depends on what you can categorise as a 'harmful' disorder as opposed to an 'inconveniencing but manageable' disorder.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
hearing loss is nothing more than an inconvenience
A bit of a personal question, but were you deaf from birth or did it happen later in life. Do you suffer from balance related issues, is the underlying cause something that effects your other senses? You don't need to answer, but hearing loss covers such a wide spectrum it doesn't really make sense to say 'hearing loss is nothing more than an inconvenience', unless you mean to you personally.
Even if it were, is it fair to birth a deaf Human who could have had their ears fixed genetically?
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
1. I was born Deaf
2. Yes, my balance sucks and apparently a little with my depth perception. It doesn't affect my driving though.
3. No, but I do find my sense of touch and smell heightened.
4. I can understand hearing parents having their child, before being born, be repaired of hearing loss defects. But if that child was to be born in a Deaf family, there is no harm as the child immediately can socalise.
I could't imaging being deaf at all (totally anyway, my left ear doesn't work, but that's by the by) but an enormous amount of our world view comes to us by sound, after sight and arguably touch (temperature and pressure mainly) it's the most important sense. I have no doubt the child would be able to connect to their family quickly but it does limit them to the rest of the world.
Obviously if the hearing cannot be fixed then standard procedures apply and the rest of us should stop being lazy buggers and get round to learning sign language like we said we would a few years ago.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Unconscious hearing is a really important survival technique. Your body hears and registers a car approaching out of your field of vision and your body may even start moving before your head has even swivelled round to see the car.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Secondly, that's some impressive backstepping, but it's awfully hard to read that rant about some mother being "horribly selfish" for bringing her daughter into existence and not read that as yet another slam at my children's existence (although hardly the first such - I'll still not associate with Autism Speaks until they explicitly disavow the views of former president Alison Singer, for example). And it's also not the first time I've read your nonapologies to people in here (no, "I'm sorry you were offended" is not an apology), so you'll forgive me if I'm underimpressed with your sincerity in this case.
Thirdly, and this is directed to more than one previous respondent, the basic concept of "eugenics" requires that the current generation not be permitted to reproduced if they possess undesirable traits. It's baked into the underlying assumptions. And it's pseudoscientific because, as I've pointed out previously, there's no way to know if a given gene-complex will express until it does. You can provide in-utero surgery to correct some physical defects, and neonatal surgery for others, but you can't provide genetic surgery to prevent them from happening in the first place, because you don't know if they will.
And of course there's also the slippery slope shown in Gattaca - the protagonist was denied his future not because he had a heart problem, or would develop one, but because his genetic profile, unedited because his parents couldn't afford to do so, indicated that he had an increased probability of developing such a problem. That was the problem he was trying to cheat his way around - a societal assumption that even the outside chance of there being a problem was too much.
My character Tsin'xing
I would prefer to say 'clarifying'... My friend is an extremely selfish person (in every area of her life). Immnnot going to put her on a pedestal of sainthood 'just because she's my friend'. She is someone who scorns any sympathy afforded her or her kids for their varied conditions when it suits her to do so, yet spends her days posting on facebook about, yes, you've guessed it, her children's conditions... How much it sucks, and how much it impacts on her entire family and their lives. Essentially courting and soliciting such sympathy... She is also, however, a very good friend, and one who can be trusted to give frank and honest advice when it is requested, so yes, she is selfish, but she's also a friend, so as is the way with worthwhile friendships, flaws are overlooked in favor of positive traits... I don't know if she would have considered terminating her daughter had her epilepsy been detected in-utero, but I do know that for all her bemoaning how much epilepsy ruins their lives, she is also adamant that she would not want her daughter 'fixed' (despite hating epilepsy and its impact) hence my raising her as an example of how some parents would adamantly reject any kind of intervention which might actually improve their child's quality of life (and that -- quality of life, or rather lack there of -- was the issue my wife and I decided upon) be it either voluntarily undertaken, 'societally preferred', or State Mandated...
I was not offering you an apology. I was clarifying and explaining the intent of my original post to you, which I believe you have not only misconstrued, but also failed to address the proposed points to. I am, however, entirely sincere in my statement that the points raised in my post were not aimed as slams at you or your children. Perhaps you would concede that you reacted personally to them, in the same way that I reacted personally to gulberat's comment about a 'stink of choosing who lives and dies', due to personal proximity to 'the issue'... So yes, I am sorry if you are or were offended by the points raised, but I would like to clarify that causing offence was not my intent.
That's not something I've ever suggested or implied in this discussion... And I agree, at present, we do not know if they will. Even in Gattaca they did not know for sure if Vincent would develop heart problems. He did however, develop myopia... Which touches back to the point I raised a few times above, and that is: Who sets the bar, who determines what is to be considered 'the norm', and what happens, when 'they' decide to shift the goal-posts and demand different criteria (as is done with cholesterol levels or blood sugar levels for diabetics...) Those are my concerns...
I don't believe that it was stated that Vincent's parents couldn't afford to have him sequenced (they clearly could afford to have his brother sequenced, indeed, choosing that they wanted him to have a brother, rather than a sister) but rather that their initial pregnancy was guided by 'ignorant faith' and 'hope', rather than 'the proper' genetic guidance...
Absolutely, Vincent's crime was not murder, but of fraud -- of obtaining a position which realistically, he might (highly likely) have been rejected for. I base that on the following observation:
In the scene where Vincent is working out on the treadmill when Anton (as yet unidentified as his now-adult brother) does the rounds, Irene was allowed to finish early due to her heart condition (actual, not hypothetical, due to her observably taking medication) She was a Gattaca administrator, but would not have made the grade to actually be an astronaut. When Vincent's rigged ECG mic failed, his heartbeat was way above what was considered acceptable by the observers. When he went to the locker room, he literally collapsed onto the floor. While some may suggest that that was due to the shock of seeing Anton, I don't believe that that would create such an extreme reaction... That he might have walked round the corner and thrown up out of fear and surprise, sure, I can buy that. But that it would push his heart rate that far up, and make him literally collapse, I think not... That he was able to beat Anton while swimming is not surprising, as, heart condition or not, he was still a physically trained astronaut at the very peak of his health, rather than 'a regular guy' who just liked to work out... I don't think Vincent had enough of a heart condition to render him the fragile snowflake his parents and the prospective teacher saw him as, but I'd bet that realistically, it would have kept him as a ground-based administrator/flight programmer...