erict@flatline.UUCP (eric townsend) (04/30/88)
I'm not really sure if this is phrased the right way, or if I'm using the right words, but here goes: I saw a story on the wire the other day about a civil liberties group lobbying in Congress against sequencing the human genome. I think those were the words used. Their argument against this was something along the line of 'if we figure out dna, then we can single out people who are "unfit"'. "Unfit" is the word used by the group's spokesman. Unfortunately, biology was a ways back, and it's hard for me to remember what I learned in class, and what I read in Neuromancer/Blood Music/etc. :-) 1. Am I correct in thinking this would be the equivalent of getting a "raw dump" of the data stored by the chromosomes in a usable format? A template of some sort, perhaps? 2. So what? All we'd have is a set of pointers to genes that decided various parts of the body. We can tell what color hair a person has by looking, usually... Since there're already laws against discrimination against just about anybody (maybe not left-handed celibate lithuanian serbs :-), would it matter if we were able to tell, genetically, that what we were seeing, an oriental let's say, was really an oriental? My limited knowledge of this subject leads me to understand that it's just a way of confirming what we already know. I can see it being usefull to *correct* defects. If gene (x) should be one thing, and it isn't, then we could fix it and fix whatever was wrong... Oh well. Thx in advance. -- Just another journalist with too many spare MIPS... "The truth of an opinion is part of its utility." -- John Stuart Mill J. Eric Townsend ->uunet!nuchat!flatline!erict smail:511Parker#2,Hstn,Tx,77007