What seemed impossible over twenty years ago rears its ugly head today, and makes The Boys from Brazil not only an incredible film, but an important argument about cloning humans.

Honey, would you prefer our baby with blue eyes or brown?

Ah, glorious technology. Cloning, microbiology, genetic engineering. It makes the future of those Siamese twins – science and medicine – look bright and bleak at the same time. Oh, how far we’ve come… And how far we’ve fallen, too.

Here’s an example: Recently, I read an article relating that James Watson, one of the esteemed co-discoverers of DNA, James Watson, believes geneticists are duty-bound to devise genetic therapies to combat that greatest of all human afflictions…

STUPIDITY
Not cancer, not heart disease, not obesity – but garden-variety dim-wittedness!

So what’s wrong with wanting to find a cure for this, you ask? Oh, nothing much. Except maybe that the future advancement of human life itself – the very essence of all evolution, in fact – depends on the process of natural selection. That’s NATURAL selection, for those of you in the back row. Sound familiar?

It should, and the “curing” of stupidity through some hocus-pocus of genetic manipulation isn’t what Mr. Darwin meant when he coined the phrase – hence the word “natural.” And I, for one, think it’s the ultimate in arrogance for scientists like Watson to short-circuit nature and decide what’s best for the genetic makeup of our children – even if it makes them smarter. Let me make it clear that I am not endorsing Darwin’s totally unscientific evolution theory. Darwin was a little dimwitted himself. “Survival of the fittest” was obvious since the first whiz kid met the first dunce in a classroom. And the theory of evolution, as simple and childish as it is, did not originate with Charley.

And what’s really warped is that this crackpot philosopher also suggested that it would be great if “we made all girls pretty.” What’s that tell you?

It tells me that this mad “genius” and others of his stripe are so far removed from reality that they wouldn’t hesitate one second to alter us all forever just to more closely resemble their own vision of human perfection! If it were up to them, we probably wouldn’t even bear our own children anymore – we’d just order them out of a DNA catalog like any other piece of merchandise…

Chilling, like something out of a George Orwell novel – or the Third Reich.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for science helping to find cures. I’m just not sure that we need to “cure” the very traits – even the flaws – that make us uniquely human. And it’s also scary to think that such powerful science as genetic engineering may well be soon cast upon the winds of human whim – making us all “pretty” or “smart” instead of healthy and disease-free…

Originally published on DrKelley.info, January 3, 2004. Author unknown. Embedded links (if any) may no longer be active.(Ed. 12.30.10)

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