On the paper by Harris, “Pro: Research on Gene Editing in Humans Must Continue”, one of the arguments he brings up is about the consent of future generations. This argument on its own has both exciting yet frightening aspects once you think about it. Harris states, “we have literally no choice but to make decisions for future people without considering their consent. All parents do this all the time, either because the children are too young to consent, or because they do not yet exist” (Harris. paragraph 6). This sounds almost like we shouldn’t care about the future generations and do just do whatever we want to do, almost like the mining companies have done in the past. But he does also say that parents and scientists both should think responsibly about how their decisions will affect future generations. What is exciting about this is that some people think gene editing should move forward without worrying about how the future will look back at our decisions, but also makes it scary to think of future generations could be affected. Trying to cure a disease now, could potentially lead to a much worse problem in the future.
I believe that human gene editing should be done. Harris states in his paper a couple of arguments for human gene editing but the one that really spoke the loudest and help the most weight where the objection that embryo modification is unnatural. he explains that this thinking means that natural is inherently good. “But diseases are natural, and humans by the millions fall ill and die prematurely—all perfectly naturally” (Harris, paragraph 4). This means that modern medicine is bad since it goes against what is natural, and viruses and diseases are good since they are natural. I never really understood people who think that human made automatically means bad, we are from nature and do what other species do, survive. This technology would allow humans survive, as a whole, better and safer.Currently people want to edit genes to prevent diseases in people and there is nothing bad about that.