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Like cosmetic surgery, genetic enhancement employs medical means for nonmedical ends–ends unrelated to curing or preventing disease or repairing injury. But unlike cosmetic surgery, genetic enhancement is more than skin-deep. In order to grapple with the ethics of enhancement, one need to confront questions largely lost from view–questions about the moral status of nature, and about the proper stance of human beings toward the given world. Human memory is more complicated, but biotech companies, including Memory Pharmaceuticals, are in hot pursuit of memory-enhancing drugs, or “cognition enhancers,” for human beings. The obvious market for such drugs consists of those who suffer from Alzheimer’s and other serious memory disorders. Pediatricians already struggle with the ethics of enhancement when confronted by parents who want to make their children taller. Since the 1980s human growth hormone has been approved for children with a hormone deficiency that makes them much shorter than average.
Michael J. Sandel (Fri,) studied this question.