Genetic Destinies
Oxford University Press $29.95,, 2002 (hardcover) ISBN 0-19-850454-3 | ISBN: 0-19-850454-3
In setting out to make genetic research comprehensible to the non-specialist and allay the fears he or she believes it has engendered in the minds of the public—fear of knowing the future, fear of the loss of free will and individuality and fear of discrimination—Peter Little employs an interesting literary device. In his book Genetic Destinies, he sets up two divergent albeit intersecting scenarios that describe the lives of two women born on the same day in the year 2020. Jeanne Dream, the exemplar of what Little considers to be the benign influence of genes and genetics, was born in the small town of Prosperous and “lived and died in the future, where disease and suffering were an echo of the past.” She lives to the age of 120, having benefited from repeated predictive genetic testing followed by appropriate genetic and pharmacological interventions, replacement of an injured hand with an organ transplant grown from an embryo, and treatment with programmed anti-bacterial and immune-response enhancers. When she decides to have a baby, in vitro fertilization is used, and after the embryos are tested with a DNA chip that can detect 99% of all gene-related conditions, she picks the one with the fewest predicted problems. The potentially serious problems are treated by embryonic gene therapy and body size, and muscle bulk enhancing genes are inserted.
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