What Will Science Do Next?

Last week, my mom sent me a link to an interesting article. It’s called Is it OK to make babies from 3 parents' DNA?  In a nutshell, it talks about how the UK is debating on whether or not to approve cytoplasmic transfer. Explaining this briefly, cytoplasmic transfer is the method of transferring mitochondria from a donor egg into the egg of a woman who is unable to conceive.

I talk about this topic in my book, Undead Obsessed: Finding Meaning in Zombies. It is a controversial topic because no one knows exactly what kind of effect it will have on the offspring. Female children born from this method have three different sets of DNA: one from the mother, one from the father, and one from the donor. And there’s questions on whether or not it will be passed down to the next generation and beyond and what types of effects it will have.

What I find interesting about this debate is the fact that the UK has some of the strictest regulations on GMOs (foods that have been genetically modified). It boggles my mind to think that they would allow humans to be modified.  What kinds of labels will they require for them?  I’m interested to see how this turns out.

What this debate does is raises a lot of questions about ethics and science. Just because science is capable of doing something, does that really mean it should. And that is exactly the question horror films try to tackle.

Science is often portrayed poorly in horror films. Scientists are often portrayed as mad, obsessed with fame and fortune, and uncaring about the well-being of others. More often than not, something going wrong in science leads to the creation of monsters. In the case of Undead Obsessed, I look at how it leads to the creation of zombies.

I’m still not exactly sure how I feel about this process. There will be people on both sides of the fence. There will be those who oppose it, and those who will be for it. In reality, only time will tell what kind of consequences it will have for humanity. We can only hope it won’t lead to our downfall or the dead rising from the grave.