Canuckistanis as Bad as the US Religious Right...

...for genetic science. Okay. Now that I have your blood up. Forbes has a very interesting article about the individuals that have recently worked their version of a bill that has repeatedly failed to pass here in the States banning genetic engineering.

At a business conference this summer in Toronto Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, told the Canadians again and again how wonderful they are--how open to new ideas, how tolerant, how diverse and therefore how potentially creative. Unlike the U.S., which is afflicted by divisiveness and the religious right, Canada is a model country. That was his story, at any rate.

A few hours later I picked up a newspaper and got a different view. On the op-ed page a scientist was pleading for Canada to repeal its law against cloning human embryos for research. In tolerant, open-minded, diverse and creative Canada therapeutic cloning--defined as creating an in vitro embryo with the same chromosomes as any other individual--is a crime punishable by ten years in prison.

In the divisive, religiously addled U.S. a similar measure has failed repeatedly to become federal law. (Some states ban therapeutic cloning.)

U.S. scientists and their supporters tend to assume biomedical research is threatened by know-nothings on religious crusades. But as the Canadian law illustrates, the long-term threat to genetic research comes less from the religious right than from the secular left. Canada's law forbids all sorts of genetic manipulations, many of them currently theoretical. It's a crime, for instance, to alter inheritable genes.

[...]

Genetic research also offends egalitarians. They fear that the rich will benefit first or that money for research will come from social programs. Social justice, argues Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics & Society in Oakland, Calif., "means not just ‘no designer babies,' but also ‘no designer medicine.'"

These intellectual influences are stronger in Europe (and Canada) than in the U.S. But two equally threatening ideas do crop up frequently among mainstream Democrats: that commerce taints medicine (those evil drug companies!) and that any activity that has social consequences ought to be centrally regulated.

The Center for Genetics & Society praises Canada, among other countries, for adopting a comprehensive law to "prohibit unacceptable activities, require public oversight of acceptable activities and establish socially accountable structures for revising policies or setting new ones."

Wow.

Let me reemphasize something from the article again:

Canada's law forbids all sorts of genetic manipulations, many of them currently theoretical. It's a crime, for instance, to alter inheritable genes.

Even though that it is something that will not be an option for my children, alas, genetic engineering to remove inheritable problems willbe an option for my grandchildren. Ridding us of this almost crippling myopia, the diabetes that is prolly in recessive still, and the potential problems of Alzheimers that look like they inhabit my wife's side of the family is going to be a pretty big prioirity for us in the end. Yes, there will prolly be the desire to get a lot of other things down as well that are not that important, the more aesthetic changes, but that isn't what I worry about. I worry about some jackoff denying us the right to rid our descendants of all the nasty little recessives that we've accumulated. Aggressive outbreeding is great for preventing the problems of recessives from coming to the top. However, there's prolly a lot of them - little genetic bugs - hiding in the code and we want to be rid of them. In fact, being rid of them would prolly reduce the medical costs to this country...