Blinded by Science

The idea that science is going to save us from all of our troubles is a flat out myth, and perhaps a dangerous one at that.  There is a point where knowledge ceases to avail and technology will not always come riding to the rescue.
But that doesn't mean we should just give up on the pursuit of knowledge or just stall our advancing technology for fear that we might cross some invisible boundary.  As of right now, there are not only very smart people at work in laboratories and workshops thinking up new ideas and advancing old ones, there are also equally intelligent sorts thinking about the ethical implications of those developments.
We perhaps have believed the lie of certain movies and other fictions that really groundbreaking science is always impeded by ethical considerations. The idea that the technical ability of humankind might somehow go too far is a major theme of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which was originally published in 1818.  So, yeah, not exactly a new idea.  Oppenheimer famously had some second thoughts when the Manhattan Project finally made the bomb, and that has been, I think the rather dramatic test case for humans doing science-type things they probably would have been better off not doing.  It is unfortunate that so many of our greatest advancements in knowledge come in the pursuit of killing people.  The ability to split the atom was a major jump forward in many areas of scientific exploration, most of which had nothing to do with vaporizing cities.
We just had to go back and do a little reverse engineering ethics-wise.
Now you find ethics considerations on the front lines of scientific exploration, sometimes even ahead of them.  Cloning, stem cell research, genetic engineering, things we're not entirely proficient in actually doing yet, all have had the ethical brakes applied at some point or another, and this is not a problem for science, rather it is an important discipline in order for science to do it's best work.
The problem is that large numbers of people do not understand ethics any better than they understand science, and people tend to fear that which they do not understand (A+ again Mary Shelley).
So we have anti-vaccine people, who have imbibed a cocktail of pseudo-science and fear, and have allowed the measles to be a thing we have to worry about again.  All things considered, I am fairly grateful to have grown up in a world where smallpox and polio are no longer things that happen to kids, and I'm a little offended as a human being that people have chosen to open the door for those things to make a comeback.  I heard yesterday that they have started clinical trials on an Ebola vaccine in Liberia, it's a live virus vaccine, where they take a weakened and inert strain of the virus and inject it into a person and it teaches their immune system how to fight it.  It sounds really dangerous right?  Injecting a deadly virus into yourself?  But it's not, one of the doctors said there was zero chance that the vaccinated individuals would contract Ebola (from the vaccine, they still live in the middle of an active outbreak).
The long term prognosis of vaccination programs is total eradication of certain diseases.  In other words a world where zero people die of Ebola, or Smallpox, or encephalitis caused by the Measles.  Unless people are too afraid to get vaccinated.
In the UK today they are voting on a technique that will allow people with a family history of mitochondrial diseases to use a form of in-vitro fertilization that will weed out the genetic defect.  Mitochondrial diseases are passed from mother to child, and can afflict carrier families with all sorts of things from diabetes to MS, cause deafness, blindness, early death, reproductive failure, and a long list of other rather unpleasant things. And there is a way that these inter-generational afflictions can be removed from the gene pool.  It's a little more complicated than just getting a shot, to be sure, and it involves messing around with human embryos and basically "creating" for lack of a better word, people with genetic material from three parents.
There are a few arguments against such monkey business, however, as someone who has to live with borderline diabetes, if I could not worry about that because of just a smidgen of some genetic material from another mother, I would be in favor of it.  I am inspired by people who make the most of disabilities, who live with MS or other such incurable diseases, who get around despite being blind or deaf, that's great, but you know what else would be great?  If they didn't have to deal with that stuff in the first place.
The neat thing about this is that it doesn't involve selecting out "undesirable" embryos, it involves making the embryos healthier.  It's not aborting a baby with a genetic defect, it is creating babies without that one particular defect, and once you break the genetic chain you don't have to keep doing it generation after generation.
Other objections seem to sound like the rather strange question of whether a clone has a soul, which is not really a scientific problem, but a pseudo-religious question.  I say pseudo-religious because it's not something I really have many worries about.  I guess the God I believe in doesn't have a shortage of unique souls to give to living creatures, even if they were made in a test tube.
But see that is where this line between ethical considerations and aesthetic and superstitious considerations gets a little blurry.  If someone considers a clone, or a baby with three genetic parents an abomination against God's will, well I suppose they're going to prefer the possibility of someone and their children and their children's children living with MS, though I suspect if it was in their family the abomination line would move considerably.
And that's the real spiritual sickness, it's called "not my problem" syndrome, and the only vaccine for it is called empathy, which is something we seem to lack in the modern world, and it is something that science really can't give us.