The government playing God...sorta scary

I was always reminded by my father while I was younger how much medicine has changed in the past 100 years. We went from a life expectancy of 37 years old at the end of the 19th century to now living an average of 78 years (this is the US average according to Wikipedia, and yeah, I know it's not that reputable). This is all due to modern medicine and the knowledge that has come from the unbelievable progress in medical science.

Now the US government is discussing expanding such things as stem cell research. Some people want to harvest stem cells from embryos and other body parts to try to cure diseases. We also have gene therapy...that's right, in case you haven't heard we are now injecting genes into brains to help reverse the effects of Parkinson's Disease.

I'm honestly torn on the issue until I start thinking of all of the apocalyptic applications of doing such things. When I was younger and I thought of having children, I most certainly wanted genetic engineering...I wanted boys, not girls and I wanted them to be good at sports and have full heads of hair and be ultra smart...etc. Later I realized how scary that proposition really is. We someday might actually have the opportunity to engineer our children...sorta takes the fun out of it doesn't it?

As far as stem cells go, I'm not for the embryonic ones, but if you want to harvest some umbilical cord blood...have at it. That's pretty much all I've got on that because one thing you'll never see me do on this website is talk about...shhhh...abortion.

Bottom line is that there are some things in life that you should just lay off and genetic engineering (which gene therapy is the precursor of) and testing on human embryos are two of them. If I could honestly say that the science will not go further than injecting genes into a brain or using umbilical cord blood to cure diseases than I would be all for these sciences, but I'm afraid I can't. Perhaps you and those like you feel the same way?