The Commited MAY 2015 | Page 81

TED EDİRNE COLLEGE / 8-A Money Trap for Society Toros YILMAZ Should we edit our children’s genomes? Actually, it depends. I mean from an ethical perspective, its nature’s will, you could say, or if you are a religious person you could say it’s a sin but in reality it always comes to one end. Let me start with one simple fact, genome engineering is expensive, really expensive, so it’s a thing that only rich people or politicians can do, but is it bad or good? Well that’s why I said “it depends”. If you or your wife is pregnant and if the baby that you’re going to have is sick because of a broken gene, and of course if you have enough money you can and you should edit your child’s genomes. But, there is a really big problem that is going in our planet right now, it’s called “physical genome editing”, let me tell you why this thing is a really big problem. It is killing the naturally born healthy genomes with other genomes, and when the child grows up that genomes are causing a lot of health issues for the person, and it’s not ethical. But of course, as everything in the world, this has money on its tail too, when these kind of operations were not even an issue I wonder how people lived. I mean they were born sick but, at least, they lived somehow and if you’re asking my opinion on this, I got to say, in my opinion, it’s just another money trap for society.