Discussion: Will eugenics be part of our future? ?

It is already possible to edit-out 'faulty' genes of a foetus before birth. It raises serious moral issues but I can see that becoming more prevalent and the anti-abortion movement embracing it as the elimination of one major reason for abortion. Once established, it is a small step to 'designer babies' with the right looks, right skin colour, right hair, right skeletal structure, right athletic abilities, right intellectual aptitudes and right mental health profile.

The Nazis (and others since on a smaller scale) have sought to 'purify' a gene pool by the killing of those seen as having undesirable traits. Modern eugenics could simply ensure such people are never born.

The elimination of disease and avoidable human suffering is a good thing but needs to be balanced against the dangers of diluting the gene pool. All biological models show that genetic diversity is the key to long term survival and continued evolution.

There is a danger that the sorts people who reject evolution and who are against diversity will look favourably on Eugenics via in-utero genetic manipulation. Eugenics and Nazism would just get a new name.

Eugenics is NOT science. We don't know enough about our own genome to start screwing around with it

I expect it will soon be possible and acceptable to fix specific defects that cause known diseases. 

It's not *scientific* anymore. We probably/hopefully are not going to tell people who they should make babies with.  The Nazis tried it ("Lebensborn") but the program failed to produce superior babies. After the war we figured out why: You have no influence on which 23 of your 46 chromosomes you will pass on to a baby, and every chromosome has hundreds of alleles on it. The only way to "eliminate" a faulty gene was to not reproduce at all if you have it, and very often you would eliminate a few alleles that you do want alongside with it.

Nowadays we have CRISPR-CAS and IVF, but those require that a women undergoes a horrible hormone-treatment and it bypasses the normal sperm-selection. Crispr-cas enables us to repair a single zygote. IVF alone enables us to select zygotes that don't have the faulty allele. Both  cost a lot of money.

Another complication is that many alleles are only "good" or "bad" in certain circumstances. What is considered a handicap here and now may be a life-saver when circumstances change