A future of genetic testing.
I’ve said many times before, I’m a science fiction writer. My biggest question in life is “What happens if…?”
I read an article earlier this week that gave the suggestion of a mommy gene, and the physical possibility of it. She had an interesting line in it.
“More Mommy genes!” the headlines raved. Mice and humans share many of the same genes, so these genes may influence women’s nurturing instincts, too. Perhaps we can test every wannabe mom to see if she has working copies of FosB, Peg1/ Mest, and Peg3. [The mommy genes identified in mice.] Then we’ll know who can soothe babies into submission and who thinks it’s a good idea to leave them to cry under the stars.
So, this started me thinking, What if a place did test women to see if they were able to be nurturing or not? What if they started tying this into the adoption process? What if they didn’t let anyone have a baby who didn’t have this gene?
So there’s a thought for you. You can find out more about mommy genes here.
2 responses to “A future of genetic testing.”
Leave a Reply
Abigail
always a writer 
“What happens if…?”
and that is where the best science fiction comes from!!
with genetic markers and genetic testing (choose the sex of your baby!) all the rage these days, and a mostly unregulated industry, there’s no end to how you could play with the idea of Mommy genes and if a woman could or could be allowed to have a child based on her genes. Would such women be banned from online dating sites? Shunned from the marriage pool? allowed or not allowed to adopt? would we end up with genetic antidiscrimination laws? Would she be pushed towards corner office careers, as there would never be a child in the way? what age would she be tested? infancy? adulthood? very fun idea to play with!!
all this aside, you might want to track down a book called The World Inside, by Robert Silverberg. I did a quickie review on my site, but the premise of the book is this: in the 60s and 70s, eveyone was concerned about the population boom. How would we feed and house all these people, we’d all starve if we didn’t stop having babies!! Silverberg’s response was “what if we thought the absolute opposite and tried to make our population as large as possible?”
That sounds really awesome and I will look into reading that when the semester is over.