Is ANDi a miracle or a monster?

Readers will remember the dark eyes of ANDi, the world’s first
genetically modified monkey, gazing up at them from this
newspaper recently.

After several failed attempts to insert jellyfish genes into rhesus
monkeys, ANDi – “inserted DNA” in reverse – was created at the
Oregon Regional Primate Research Center in America. ANDi’s
case has attracted worldwide interest because of its implications
for the manufacture of “designer babies”: genetically modified
humans, created from a shopping list of desirable
characteristics. Other GM animals already exist, but the
modification of primates brings the possibility of similar
experiments on humans much closer.

Ever since Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World appeared nearly 70
years ago, thoughtful people have been haunted by his vision of
a dystopian society of laboratory-bred human robots. Until the
Nazis gave eugenics a bad name, many intellectuals in Britain and
America supported the idea. Now the genetic revolution has
made eugenics respectable again. Scientists at the cutting edge
of genetic research are often invited to defend their work, but
we hear less often from philosophers. Theirs, however, is the
task of assessing the meaning of such research.

The Telegraph asked seven of the world’s leading philosophers a
number of questions arising from the ANDi case.

The Telegraph