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Ethical Complications of Genetic Engineering and Eugenics Essay

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Genetic engineering is currently the fastest growing and perhaps most controversial field of science. Genetic engineering is decoding and manipulating DNA to use for scientific and medical purposes. "The discovery that human cells can be grown in a petri dish has opened up breathtaking possibilities for curing disease - and a morass of ethical complications" (Allen 9).

Genetic engineering has already started to be most helpful in the field of medicine. The map of the human genome offers many cures and potentially successful medical procedures. By creating artificial chromosomes, scientists may be able to replace diseased inherited traits with functional ones. Determining the genetic make up of viruses such as the HIV virus that …show more content…

Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. In this book, he explained his theory of natural selection which is that members of species with the most desired ("best-fit") traits will survive and reproduce. Eugenicists took Darwin's ideas of natural selection and applied them to society and the human race. Some American and German scientists agreed the human race could be "cleansed" by means of artificial selection and sterilization (Proctor 10-15).

In Germany, eugenics became focused on racial hygiene and was transformed into genocide. In the beginning, Nazis targeted people with handicaps or mental illnesses, those who they felt had real, medical justifications to be killed. In Grafeneck, Germany in 1940 approximately 10,000 mentally handicapped people or people with mental diseases were killed with toxic gas in the course of the Nazi "euthanasia" program (Wunder 1). After this they moved on to other groups that they believed tainted their Aryan race. The Nazis fabricated "scientific" reasons for killing gypsies, Jews, blacks, and Jehovah's witnesses along with the handicapped, saying that their brains were smaller and that they were inferior.

The Holocaust was the extreme case of a group

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