Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/1161
1 2 3 head of the Genesis Genetics Institute in Detroit, has called the practice "ridiculous and irresponsible". more bluntly, George Annas, a bioethicist with Boston university, has said "modern genetics is eugenics", while on a visit to the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC. The falling costs of gene sequencing is enabling PGD trait selection and lowering the barrier to entry. In the last few years, the cost of sequencing a base pair has fallen so low that even the optimists have been surprised. The first human genome that was sequenced, by the federally financed Human Genome Project in 2003, cost a few hundred million dollars. In 2007, sequencing James Watson's genome cost about $2 million. In march 2008, Applied Biosystems, based in California, sequenced a genome in two weeks for $50,000. In October 2008, Complete Genomics, another California-based company and a veritable who's who of genomics expertise, announced that it would be offering $5,000 genomes in mid-2009, with the goal of sequencing 1,000 genomes by the end of the year. some observers, such as George Church, a professor of genetics and director of the center for computational genetics at Harvard medical school, predict a $1,000 genome by the end of this year. The requisite technologies for trait selection are on the way, but the battle lines have not yet been entirely drawn. Prompted by a Wall street Journal article on the Fertility Institutes and trait selection, Kathryn Hinsch of the Women's Bioethics Project argued that thinking about issue carefully is important, and refrained from taking a hard stance on either side. she said that trait selection should be considered because, "1) It's a hive of ethical issues, 2) The technology isn't here yet, 3) We all have a stake in the issue, and 4) Questions raised go beyond designer babies." According to Hinsch, the key questions that need to be addressed are: "should we ban it? should we regulate the technology to allow only certain applications? should we promote the widespread use of this technology?" his status through the course of his ambition to become an astronaut. Theoretically, the 2008 law would make this type of discrimination illegal, at least in the united states. But what about Gattaca? The film was invoked so frequently in negative responses to the Fertility Institutes' announcement that it is hard to find a comments thread on the topic that doesn't mention it. In his 2004 book Citizen Cyborg, Dr. James Hughes, a transhumanist bioethicist and director of the Institute for ethics and emerging Technologies, pointed out a few quibbles with the movie: Astronaut-training programs are entirely justified in attempting to screen out people with heart problems for safety reasons; In the united states, people are already discriminated against by insurance companies on the basis of their propensities to disease despite the fact that genetic enhancement is not yet available; rather than banning genetic testing or genetic enhancement, society needs genetic information privacy laws that allow justified forms of genetic testing and data aggregation, but forbid those that are judged to result in genetic discrimination (such as the previously mentioned u.s. Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act). Citizens should then be able to make a complaint to the appropriate authority if they believe they have been discriminated against because of their genotype. Those on the other side of the divide are numerous. At a 2008 meeting of the American society of Human Genetics, William Kearns, a leading medical geneticist, when prompted about trait selection, said "I'm totally against this. my goal is to screen embryos to help couples have healthy babies free of genetic diseases. Traits are not diseases." mark Hughes, the