We're Getting Sicker

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Go back a few hundred years before modern medicine, life-saving medical procedures, and medical technology. If a person had a genetic anomaly that resulted in a sickness or disease, they would often die. Sad, but this also means that the dangerous genetic anomaly would die with the person, and not get passed on to his or her offspring, assuming the person had died before he or she had a chance to procreate. But thanks to modern medicine, life-saving medical procedures, and medical technology, those of us who are here are more likely than ever to have inherited health issues that we will likely pass on to our offspring.

Uncomfortable Idea: In our efforts to save the sick, we are creating generations of people who are more likely to have genetically health-related issues.

Perhaps the most common example where we can see this trend in action is with allergies. Allergies affect as many as 30 percent of adults and 40 percent of children in the United States (Gupta et al., 2011). Researchers understand that allergies are heritable (i.e., passed on from parents to offspring; “Why is Allergy Increasing? - Allergy UK,” n.d.) although they rarely focus on this as a problem perhaps because the recent increase has been too rapid for genetics to adequately explain the observed increase. But perhaps this uncomfortable idea also appears to be dangerously close to eugenics, or the idea that only healthy people (or people with desired traits) should procreate.

Without accounting for many factors such as built-up resistances, different environmental factors that don't trigger the traits that lead to sickness, and many other unknowns, the genes that would have killed us are passed on to our offspring—and this is in addition to any genetic anomalies they may have originated with our offspring. This means that each generation will be less healthy or require more drugs and life-saving medical procedures to maintain an adequate level of health. But we are not doomed. New medical technologies can also save us from this fate, such as genetic modification, or "fixing" our genes so we can pass on "clean copies" to our offspring. Although many people don't like to mess with nature, we need to realize that we have already been doing it for centuries. In fact, there is a good chance that you exist because either you or one of your ancestors benefited from a life-saving treatment. We fear technology we don't understand, and that's okay. Just don't allow your fear of the possibility that something might go wrong to result in the certain and unnecessary suffering of future generations.

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