[Article excerpts] We sit on the cusp of a new world in which the ability to genetically engineer our children, as well as reupholster our own organs, promises to become routine rather than exotic. Just as old definitions of life proved ethically problematic once medicine understood pregnancy better (would people fight over abortion if everyone agreed a child before birth is not conscious?), our traditional ideas of how we should control our bodies and those of our children look increasingly fragile in the face of “reprogenetics,” the new medical field that unites reproductive and genetic technology.

Among the smartest and best-equipped thinkers to address these issues – despite no known manipulation of either’s genes by their parents – are Ronald M. Green, director of Dartmouth College’s Ethics Institute and cofounder of the Office of Genome Ethics at the National Institutes of Health, and Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard government professor who served on President Bush’s Council on Bioethics that published the 2003 report “Beyond Therapy” (a document that opposed various uses of genetic intervention for human “enhancement”)…

We have, Green concludes, always tried to make ourselves healthier, better and better looking (largely succeeding over the centuries), and nothing’s going to stop us from doing so in the imminent age of the “$1,000 genome.” When genetic profiles come down far enough in price, everyone and his or her doctor will have to confront these choices. “The time to start talking about this challenge,” Green warns, “is now.”

By contrast, in The Case Against Perfection, Sandel argues against Western science’s bent since Francis Bacon to control nature whenever it can. Choosing our children’s qualities, he contends, may not only impair their autonomy and skew our desired egalitarian social landscape, but will – this is Sandel’s most distinctive point – deny us our sense of life as a “gift,” an “endowment” that should exceed our control…

Both, however, agree on one crucial truth: We all need much greater literacy in the ethical concepts and scientific information necessary to make informed decisions about these choices, especially given, as Green reports, “how fast the science is moving.” [full article] http://www.philly.com/inquirer/entertainment/books/20071216_Two_polar__persuasive_stands_on_reproductive_genetics.html