Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Designing babies?

Today MSN covered the American Society for Reproductive Medicine's conference in Washington D.C. At the same time there has been a conference here in Europe called R.E.S.C.U.E.S that was organized by The European Stem Cell Science and Eucation Society.
The ASRM conference focused on designing babies, while RESCUES focused on non-embryonic reproductive developments as well as same-sex reproduction.
I'm not sure if all of you are interested in stem cell research,but I read absolutely everything I can get a hold of in this topic. Perhaps therefore I found it a bit disappointing when I discovered that ASRM covered the topic of "designing babies". However, it makes for good conversation for us "designers".

I wasn't able to copy the video link so here is a link to the website:
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/HomeMortgageSavings/designing-the-100000-baby.aspx

2 comments:

melissa tioleco-cheng said...

Wow, this is fascinating. Please keep us updated on this topic, Maria.

I would assume that all donations are screened to be disease-free, without genetic defects. But, I never even thought of the specification of physical features! It's quite a social commentary. I wonder if there will be any repercussions for trying to mess with nature...

Maria Johansson said...

I think for biased reasons MSN presented the conference in this way. I presume to scare ppl away from stem cell reproductive research and stem cell research in general. American traditionalist has established a sort of universal vocabulary that works and has programmed most ppl to automatically being against stem cell research.
Some of these traditionalist live what they teach, but if they would be truly consequent to their argument I suppose they could not use medicine, accept blood transfusions, have any operations and the list goes on...