Many of us are concerned that by identifying or isolating the genes that make you gay/straight or trans/cis that it will encourage people to think not about acceptance, but about correction.

Think about this, Gwen: how would you feel if you grew into a strapping man, only to learn later on in life that you only became such because that was what your parents chose for you?

It's part of the same reason that people were riled up when scientists began trying to figure out how to choose whether an embryo would become a male or female child. It's central to the issue of ethics in what people have a right to choose for others.

If you could choose your child's gender, what's to stop you from wanting to choose their intelligence? The color of their hair? Their height, tendency to obesity, even what skills they'll be naturally inclined toward?

Where would a parents' rights to choose their child's future end?

And, if every generation were tailor made by the last, what would that mean for diversity of the human species as a whole?

It really is a very, VERY scary concept, Gwen, and the first step to realizing the eugenics dream that was so popular in the early 1900s and is seen as such an atrocity now. If it's wrong to kill people for how they feel, think, or believe, then how is it any less wrong to prevent those people from being born in the first place?

Or, look at it this way: it's been argued that, if people in China had the technology to choose what sex their children would be born as, within a handful of generations there would be no female native Chinese left due to the cultural preference for male children. Apply that to the worldwide preference for gender-binary children who fit their body's physical mold, or even the desire of many parents to have grandchildren one day. In such cases, it's doing your children a FAVOR by tweaking them, just a little, to fit your idea of normal, right? It's only right to make sure they fit in with mainstream society in every way they can, right? And if that includes making their skin lighter, or their hair straighter, or their eyes blue instead of green, or even making them like girls instead of boys or boys instead of girls....

This is the kind of knowledge that people can't be trusted to do the right thing -- AKA next to nothing -- with. They'll abuse it, and I'm only glad there's little to no chance I'll be alive to see it when they figure out how to.

Melanie E.

All you have to do is look at the world between Saudi Arabia and West Asia for your daily horror story about religious fanaticism. "Honor" killings, gays, lesbians hung by the neck until dead, or burned to death, not to mention "you don't believe the way I believe" I KILL YOU!

I find very little hope that mankind is going to survive it's inbred stupidity.