Ethical Problems Caused By The Human Genome Project And Its Countermeasures

People's life is gorgeous, for the sake of having the knowledge of Human's body structure and the course of mankind's birth, being old and feeble, illness and death, The mankind has begun an innovation: The Human Genome Project (HGP). The intention of this project is to find out the position of 30 billion pairs of bases, and expound their hereditary meaning. With this project, the mankind can realize the healthy, macrobiotic dream. But like other science techniques gene technique is a blades sword — at the time of bounty mankind, the HGP also pours endless worries on human, and causes many ethical issues and social problems. If we ignore them, our society will fall into disaster and confusion. Therefore, how to form objective, fair opinion of the HGP and how to guide it for the sake of mankind are the purpose of this essay. At present, research on this problem is very limited; I want to have a try on it.In chapter 1,I make a brief introduction of "gene", "genome" and how the HGP has coming into being, and its scientific values and my statements coming next are based on these introductions. The functions of the HGP include as below: helping Human to recognize himself and illness in essence, Promoting the diagnosis and prevention of the genetic disease, Contributing to the extension of the human life span, have great meanings to biological development, promoting life sciences to combine with information science, stimulate the development of relevant disciplines.In order to appraise in an all-round way to the Human Genome Project, This text is affirming the Human Genome Project" Straight value " and then in the second part, has analyzed the social ethics problem caused by the Human Genome Project from five different sides separately, in the hope of enabling people to treat this scientific plan of life dialectically. (1) Gene discrimination question. Human genome research indicates that the disease is all caused by " pathogenic gene ", this is apt to make some employing units treat person with pathogenic gene inequitably, producing " gene discrimination ". (2) Gene personal secrets question. Hereditary information that the Human Genome Project announces is a person's most basic personal secrets, revealing of it will cause the serious social consequence. This part will probe into knowing the right question of gene information from the ethics visual angle. (3) Eugenic question of gene. Human genome research indicates that the hereditary disease results from congenital gene defect, and once the genetic disease could be cured completely through gene therapy, Human will have the hope of improving the later generation unavoidably, namely the eugenic question of gene, and this will cause the fierce value conflict and new social inequality. (4) Gene colonialism question. The mankind has only a set of genome, so the human gene is a kind of limited resource. People can monopolize the medicine correlated with this gene to produce and treat through the gene patent, obtaining the huge economic benefits. At present, the developed country has already begun " the living beings plunder " to...