On the same day that we read about “the mad science behind vegetable grafting” we also learned about Chinese scientists who claim to have altered the genome of a human embryo.
The two pieces seem unrelated, perhaps, except as a demonstration of man’s endless longing to tinker: long ago he learned how to make fire; slightly less than that long ago he learned how to burn people at the stake.
Apparently, you can now obtain, and online, a plant that will produce tomatoes on top and potatoes on the bottom. But you cannot, yet, produce on demand, not even in China, someone with Hillary Clinton’s maniacal ambition but without the shameless corruption.
Back in 1996, the year that President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, some scientists at the University of Edinburgh cloned a sheep, named Dolly, from an adult somatic cell. That was a front-page news event: the sheep was greeted with the predictable headlines of “Hello Dolly.”
Of course, the promise of all this, or at least the tantalizing possibility, is that man will now be able, not just to cure diseases, but to prevent them from developing in the first place by tinkering with the human embryo.
But what’s a disease? Hillary Clinton’s erasermania? Her sticky fingeritis? Please, we’re trying to be serious.
Well, then, let’s be serious. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders says, more or less, that kleptomania is an impulse control disorder characterized by the inability to resist the impulse to steal. We don’t want to get lost in the weeds, even if we can make them produce truffles on the bottom and strawberries on the top, but we should ask, for the sake of Ms. Clinton’s potential constituents (willing and unwilling), and the children, if there’s any way to cure kleptomania? Whether there is or isn’t, however, surely we can agree that kleptomania is a disease. Slow down.
First we have to decide what a disease is. Here’s one definition: “A disordered or incorrectly functioning organ, part, structure, or system of the body resulting from the effect of genetic or developmental errors, infection, poisons, nutritional deficiency or imbalance, toxicity, or unfavorable environmental factors.”
What about the several hundred thousand people who are born each year with a cleft palette? Do they have a disease?
What about a rare disorder known as congenital adrenal hyperplasia? That sure sounds like a disease, and not one you want the children to get. Nevertheless, each year, according to the Los Angeles Times, a few pregnant women learn they are carrying a baby “at risk” of having congenital adrenal hyperplasia.
Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH)—clinical description alert—“causes an accumulation of male hormones and can, in females, lead to genitals so masculinized that it can be difficult at birth to determine the baby’s gender.”
Not pleasant, but fortunately, the same ingenuity in man that produced fire and Dolly has produced a hormonal treatment for CAH.
But now it gets complicated. The treatment for CAH may reduce—repeat: reduce—the likelihood that a female baby who receives the treatment will be a lesbian. And so—you know where this is going—the “gay” community is outraged.
That community is outraged because the “rights” they have persuaded a majority of the Supreme Court to “recognize” depend on homosexuality’s being a genetic condition (you know, like being black), not an impulse control disorder. Justice Kennedy, whose untimely demise is no longer possible, has not, yet, led the court to protecting the kleptomania lifestyle.
But what happens in say, fifty years (a hundred?), when genetic conditions, like congenital adrenal hyperplasia, cleft palette, and homosexuality can be cured in the womb? Some people may say that it would be improper to tinker with nature and eliminate homosexuality: that nature created homosexuals for a purpose. Really? Is it that they are disproportionately artistic? Or disproportionately attracted to betraying their country, like the Oxford-Cambridge traitors whom Christopher Andrews calls the “Homintern.”
And what about people born with cleft palette? There are many more of them born each year than there are homosexuals. Is it just the paucity of our imagination that has prevented us from figuring out why nature vouchsafed them to us?
In fifty years or so, when a doctor tells expectant parents that their child will be a healthy boy, but a homosexual, how many of those parents are going to say, “Oh goodie?” And how many are going to ask the doctor to “cure” the genetic condition, even if they have to learn Chinese?
If homosexuality really is a genetic condition, not an impulse control disorder, homosexuals are slated for extinction, like Tyrannosaurus rex, and in the future will be seen only in science fiction movies—think Jurassic Park XXIII.
The same desire to tinker that led man to discover how to make fire will eliminate abnormalities like homosexuality—unless the desire to burn people at the stake intervenes.