Postby Elessar » Sat Nov 03, 2007 5:20 pm
Well, there are plenty of things wrong with us (physically and anatomically speaking about performance). If there weren't anything wrong with us, nnobody would be talking about doing this... and there wouldn't be hundreds of diseases we're worried about curing. I'm just reading this book called "On Combat" and the particular chapter I'm reading is all about the various ways in which our bodies begin to fail at certain tasks above a heart rate of 145 BPM, and get successively worse as it goes up (such as in stressful or life-threatening situations).
I had my eyes fixed with laser surgery... which actually ended up giving me 20/10 instead of 20/20. Is that any different? I mean there are potential problems with this out the yin-yang, with people getting genetic enhancements who can afford it (Gattica), but I really think that's what's already happened with LASEK. People might say that LASEK isn't the same as gene therapy for performance gain because myopia is a defect in the human eye that is being restored to natural balance - but that's 20/20, and like I said, many LASEK patients including myself gain 20/10, which is a physiological abnormality in people naturally.
I respect that people fear (as do I) the concept of univerally available gene therapy for any ailment or weakness - but I do not think it's a principally different paradigm than medicine has already breached in the past 100 years. The difference, on the fundamental level, of giving someone medicine that cures a respiratory illness, and giving someone a shot that alters their DNA to make them immune to the flu is academic if you divorce it of the philosophical questions and look at only what is being done to the body. In the medicine case, you're just eradicating this instance of the illness. In the gene therapy case, you're innoculating against further outbreak. Doesn't it seem that the 2nd case is a lot smarter than just curing it this time and waiting for it to come back just to cure it again? I think the same reasoning could be applied to the differences between medicinal treatment and genetic treatment of any ailment; osteoperosis, diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, cancer, etc.
Performance enhancers is a bit of a different matter, but the real question with performance enhancers seems to be the ethics of allowing people who have had them to run around and compete with those who haven't under the same conditions and with nobody knowing that they have, right? I mean nobody would object to some guy getting surgery to give him a 60" vertical and then just using it to skateboard with his friends on the street, would they? It's if he skated in the X-Games and didn't tell anybody and took home a bunch of medals, right? In that case, those organizations would have to have controls and tests for those things. Just like they do for performance-enhancing drugs today.
I'm not saying I completely agree on a philosophical level with these things being done, I've just resolved myself to the belief that it's too late to stop it and that we might as well -- because there are ways to -- start now on ways to control and regulate it so that our societal worst fears and nightmares about it (Gattica) won't come true. I think that Pandora's Box has been open since we discovered DNA, and from that moment, to the moment we implant speech-recognition DNA cocktails into chimpanzees and put them on Ricki Lake, has always been a straight line from which we can't deviate, because human nature presupposes the exploration of every unknown to its furthest reaches. I'll freely admit that in the scientific ethic, nothing is sacred in and of itself beside knowledge. Where that ethic will lead us... who's to say. But we know it saves lives and improves quality of life, so it can't be all bad.
