Dear President,

I want to discuss genetic engineering with you. This topic has come to my mind alot lately as it has been a very hot topic. Genetic engineering is the alteration of a genome, which is known as a germline gene therapy, and it alters the gene or trait that the patient had at birth. This has been highly discussed in the medical field because this could help rid people of diseases or abnormalities. This procedure is best done when the child is still in the womb and the geneticists can alter the genes by placing a normal gene in by the abnormal gene so it alters the abnormal one. When this is done, the alteration can save generations to come from this disease or abnormality. I bet your concluding from this information that this is a great procedure and can save many lives. Well my concern is not that it saves lives but with how people are going to treat this.

My concern is that there are no laws in place about who receives this procedure. There are no restrictions, so anybody can receive this procedure. I do not agree with this conclusion. I believe there should be restrictions because anybody who has money could easily buy their way into having this procedure done to their future child. They could decide that they wanted to change the baby's eye color and hair color just for the fun of it. This procedure is not to build your own baby but for the benefit of others health; yet, there is no law on who receives it. Imagine a couple who just had their first child and find out their baby has a disease that was passed down from a couple generations back. They would do anything to correct this, so they look into gene therapy but figure out it would be months possibly years before they could be seen; not including the cost.

How would you feel if your child was denied what could clearly save their lives because there wasn't room for them. Their place was taken by somebody that just wanted to change their baby's eye color. I hope that you can help me in making sure this does not happen. I hope restrictions will be put in place to only allow people with health problem to have this procedure. I believe it's morally wrong and taking an advantage of a procedure that could help cure a person from a life threatening disease and keep generations to come safe from this happening to them. I hope you consider this and make this a priority.

Sincerely,

Hanna