I was watching a preview for the new X-Men III movie. The major plot-line is about a new antigen that is supposed to reverse the mutant gene, in other words, a cure. Several of the mutants say that they don't need a cure. That there is nothing wrong with them; that this is the way they are supposed to be. Others disagreed.
This got me to thinking.
Since we don't live in a world where mutants are plentiful (except on Saturday nights at my favorite bar) (They don't call it the cantina scene for nothing. [Star Wars reference]), what if some do gooder decided to mess around with OUR gene pool? You know, they decide that mankind would be better off without certain traits or characteristics. What would that be like?
Now before you say "That could never happen", let me remind you of our dabbling in eugenics in the 40's and 50's. We actually had people proposing that we essentially breed out bad traits through sterilization. Criminal tendencies, retardation, anti-social behaviors, etc. We still have vestiges of this with our laws that allow castration of certain sexual predators.
We also, currently, have people who decide not to have children because if genetic anomalies found in the testing of fetuses of pregnant mothers. Down syndrome, the wrong sex and such.
And finally, I read this week that scientists have finally completed mapping the human genome.
Put it all together and mix in the same mind set that gives us political correctness and my What If does not seem all that implausible. So, what if, they decide to find the gene that permits addictions (drugs, cigarettes, alcohol), or ADD, or cancer, or (again) anti-social behaviors? And decide to fix them. It's not that far fetched.
So that got me to thinking.
What if they decided that superior traits were unacceptable? They already do it with junior soccer leagues. They don't even keep score because they don't want the other team's self-esteem to suffer. This is an idea that pervades a lot of child rearing theories.
So, what if they took this to the next level and decided Geniuses were a threat to the other 98% of the population? And decided to fix them.
I shared my musings with my wife and she told me to calm down. "They aren't coming for you." she said.
"Yeah, but What If?" I answered, my voice trembling.
"Besides," she continued, "they already have a cure for intelligence. It's called alcohol."
1 comment:
This goes back even further in history to the 1930's in Nazi Germany. While genetic codes were not known or understood back then the government sought to eliminate the "untermench", ethnic groups that they felt were either a threat (Jews) or inferior (Slavic)and have a totally Arian society. The proper blood line German women were arranged to have sexual encounters with SS men in order to give birth to the next Arian generation. To speed up this process, Dr. Joseph Mengele and others tried to find the secret of multiple births through experimentation at the concentration camps. So what you see as fantasy with the X-Men III movie already has a cruder version in the not too distant past.
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