By creating mice using gametes obtained from somatic cells removed from the tail of adult mice (see “Reproducing mice without using eggs and Reproducing mice in eggs: an announcement to be tempered”), Japanese scientists have just broken an age-old premise put forward by biologists: “The unavoidable separation of reproduction cells from all other cells in the body“.
Jacques Testart is sounding the alarm because it will only take a few years to apply this methodology to humans: ” In the future, children will be conceived in a laboratory and sex will just be for pleasure“.
Since a single skin sample “will provide thousands of cells to be transformed into eggs, then embryos“, an unlimited number of “embryos” could be produced. The higher the number of embryos for analysis, the more effective pre-implantation diagnosis (PID) will be. The genome of each embryo will be fully analysed by computer in order “to select ‘the best’ of all potential offspring a couple could have“.
In future, human selection will inevitably lead to the stigmatisation of disabled people (see the subversive power of disability in the light of increasingly prevalent birth selection). As far as Jacques Testart is concerned, in terms of embryo selection, “it would only take a few generations of virtually generalised embryo selection to change the genome of our species without altering a single genome!”
Jacques Testart is concerned whereas transhumanists like Henry T Greeley, who want to change our species, are not. They prefer “to give couples the choice“.
Blog Jacques Testart (28/02/2017)