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chapter nine Preserving Societal Cohesion It is possible that access to advantageous evolutionary engineering only by those who already enjoyed wealth and social privilege could fracture society into warring classes and provoke a rebellion by the unengineered who felt that they no longer had an equal opportunity to obtain social rewards. As Sharon Beder writes in Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR, “America’s reputation as a land of opportunity rested on its claim that the destruction of hereditary obstacles to advancement had created conditions in which social mobility depended on individual initiative alone.”1 Parents whose children had not been genetically modified might insist on outing children who had and depriving them of any societal benefits that they might have been able to acquire through the use of their superior abilities. Such a witch hunt would resemble the campaign against athletes who use performance-enhancing drugs, which is fueled in large part by the conviction that these athletes do not deserve to benefit from their accomplishments . For example, President George W. Bush’s bioethics advisory council, headed by Leon Kass, accused athletes who used steroids of “getting their achievements ‘on the cheap,’ performing deeds that appear to be, but that are not in truth, wholly their own.”2 When Bush’s attorney general John Ashcroft brought federal indictments in 2004 against a coach, a trainer, and two executives of a company named BALCO for distributing illegal steroids, he blamed steroids for “foster[ing] the lie that excellence can be bought rather than earned.”3 And in his 2004 State of the Union address, Bush branded steroids as “shortcuts to accomplishment .”4 (The irony, of course, is that Yale would never have admitted George Bush as an undergraduate on the basis of his own accomplishments . As Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel writes, while Bush had attended Phillips Academy, an exclusive prep school, he “had never made the honor roll and his verbal score on the SAT was a mediocre 566. Although popular among his classmates, he was neither an exceptional athlete nor did he possess any particularly outstanding extracurricular 192 Preserving Societal Cohesion 193 talents. . . . [But] as the son of a prominent Texas oilman then running for the United States Senate—and the grandson of a United States senator from Connecticut who had recently served as a member of the Yale Corporation, George W. Bush was no ordinary applicant.”5 ) How might the genetic underclass wage a campaign to clip the wings of persons who had been genetically modified? They might try to ban genetic engineering, much as professional sports organizations have tried to block the use of performance-enhancing drugs. But as discussed earlier, it would not be easy to stop people from obtaining illegal technologies on the black market, or traveling abroad and securing them in countries that were more hospitable to the genetic engineering industry or simply more desperate for foreign exchange. An alternative to prohibiting genetic engineering would be to try to level the playing field. Taking a lesson from athletics, for example, competitions might be forbidden between engineered and normal people. This already happens to some extent in sports: boxers and wrestlers typically compete only with others in the same weight range. Or, enhanced individuals could be allowed to compete against unenhanced persons, but only after being handicapped so that they lost their advantage. This also takes place today in sports: in “handicapped” horse races, jockeys who weigh too little must carry weights in their saddles, and strokes are subtracted from the scores of golfers who aren’t as good as the other players in their group. Any effort to create a level playing field, however, would necessitate being able to tell who had been genetically engineered. Since the engineered themselves would have no incentive to volunteer this information , there would have to be tests that enabled them to be discovered. One approach would be to require altered or added DNA to be tagged in some way that could be detected by a simple scan. But the benefits of being able to thwart the scanner would be so great that parents would seek out U.S. or foreign physicians or geneticists who, at the right price, might be willing to leave off the tag when they engineered embryonic DNA. Another option would be to obtain DNA samples from newborns and compare them with DNA taken from their parents to find differences that could only occur as a...

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