• Question: Do you believe that eventually we may end up with designer humans that would genetically modified to not have any diseases/disorders

    Asked by Samthescientist to Paul on 16 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Paul McKeegan

      Paul McKeegan answered on 16 Nov 2017:


      I believe that we might have the technology to prevent certain specific diseases but I don’t believe we will ever be disease-free, or that we will ever think it is a good idea to make ‘designer humans’. Our genetic diversity is far more important than having a race of identical super-human types. One new disease could wipe everyone out if that happened!
      The technology to edit individual genes is being researched at the moment, and we could one day remove disease-causing genes and replace them with ‘healthy’ copies. This could prevent individual diseases that have one single genetic cause. Unfortunately, most diseases are more complicated than that. Cancers, heart disease and many others have many risk factors and often several genes are linked to such diseases, so changing one or two might not help much. But I don’t think we will be trying to give humans wings or gills, those structures are far too different and complicated to add to our biology.
      Cool name by the way!

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