Excellent post, thank you. It's just when people start delving into designer genetic features of their artifically derived families, I get nervous.
I love the part about the boy who tracked down his biological father. Either it scared the socks off him(dad), or he was indeed proud. Wouldn't it have been wonderful for both of them to know each other under normal conditions? My bf is out for the day, so I couldn't ask him about Rabbinical approval for marriages, but in an Orthodox sect, I don't doubt that happening.
Thanks again for a very informative post : )
You're most welcome :-)
I tend to think of fear of change as a tendency best left to the loony leftists. They panic about every tenth of a degree of change in average global temperatures, lament the extinction of so much as a single insect species, and blame what most of us would call "progress" for practically every problem in the world. My all time favorite was the little crew of Western envirowackos who showed up at a global conference on environmental issues in Africa a couple of years ago, to press their campaign to stop the third world (before it's too late!) from pursuing Western menaces such as flush toilets -- never mind that they had flown to the conference on fuel-guzzling jumbo jets equipped with flush toilets! But alas, some "conservatives" are really no different, just picking a different list of things to panic (and sow panic) about.
As for me, I look forward to stuff like germ-line genetic engineering. Imagine when (not far off, in all likelihood) a young woman who carries one of the genes that virtually guarantees breast cancer, and watched her mother die young from it, can simply choose not to pass it on to her daughters and granddaughters, by having the single defective gene in her eggs swapped for a healthy one. In previous generations, there were plenty of people who felt we shouldn't develop airplanes, since "if God had meant for us to fly, he would have given us wings", and people who decried the use of antibiotics and other medical advances as interfering with God's plans for people to die. And of course much of the Arab world is presently convinced that civilization would collapse if women stopped hiding themselves under black tents. I don't buy any of it. Human history is one long march of progress, with just a few hiccups along the way, and I don't see any reason to think that the particular changes going on now will result in a U-turn.
Relax and enjoy the ride! Life is good, and will be even better for your children, and better still for your grandchildren!