A World with Flying Babies

By Sophie Daly

WRI 111: Writing Seminar

To read Student Editor Yushuo Wang’s comments on the writing moves found in this essay, click on or hover over the footnotes within the text.

The year is 2050 and you are blessed with your first kid, a healthy baby boy with all the latest genetic modifications. When he was born, the doctors said he had an IQ 20 points higher than the non-modified kids and would be able to do calculations at double their rate once fully mature. Your son is the best of the best. ¹ After five years with your beautiful baby boy, you are blessed with your second child! A healthy girl specifically designed to solve complex multivariable equations ten times faster than those before her. Not only that, but she also has the computing ability of a calculator, and her retention rate is 65% more efficient compared to the children of the preceding batch. The standard for “best of the best” has now increased tenfold and your daughter, along with this whole new herd of babies, is undeniably more capable than your son. How would you feel about your son? Do you love him the same as your daughter even though he is a less efficient product? And ultimately, how would your son feel about his new sister, the latest and more productive model? ²

The concept above is one of the many Bill McKibben explores in his piece “Designer Genes,” (McKibben) an article published in Orion Magazine in 2003 which provides an extensive reflection on the meaning of humanity in a world of germline genetic engineering. This specific form of genetic modification is defined as editing an individual’s genetic information such that the modifications are heritable. In order to impact heredity, the alterations would need to take place when the baby is still an embryo to ensure that all stages of development encompass the modifications. If injected at any later point, the modifications may not resonate in development, which would directly impact the strength of their expression. If the modifications are done too late, the changes might not have any effect on the child at all. This is all just part of the risk of genetic modification.

McKibben further explores the realities of germline genetic engineering by pushing the audience to consider different perspectives on the topic. This is an effort to create an army of educated people who are ready to take action and prevent this future from becoming a reality. To achieve this goal and appeal to the audience throughout the essay, McKibben uses three specific methods of rhetoric: employing hypothetical situations, storytelling, and posing rhetorical questions. Educating the audience through these methods is in the hope that they will read the closing call to action and be motivated to do something to prevent germline genetic engineering from taking over our society. ³

McKibben uses the technique of hypothetical situations to push the reader to consider the future of genetic modifications as a present circumstance. McKibben does this by introducing a situation in which two California artists open a small gallery specifically geared toward selling genetic modifications. This gallery works to promote the hypothetical situation in which germline genetic engineering would exist within our society, to further emphasize the intricacies that exist within the industry. The whole store was supposed to comment on the dangers of the alterations, but it was lost on “a culture so deeply consumer that this kind of manipulation seem[ed] like the obvious next step.” People were flocking to the store, dying to become “superior beings.” One man even insisted he wanted the survival ability of a cockroach just to get a leg up on those around him. What was supposed to be a comment on the dangers of an industry turned into a situation that emphasized the purely consumer-based society we live in. Through this, McKibeen instills a fear in the reader that this horrific dystopia isn’t unreasonable in the minds of people who are ignorant to the intricacies of the modifications that could be perpetuated if people were allowed to simply change the genetic composition of their children before birth. These intricacies could include everything from cosmetic changes to more complex genetic changes, such as athleticism or competency, which would completely change the narrative of the child’s life. But what if you are educated on the topic and want to stay as far away from the modifications as possible? Is that even realistic? Evidently not. As McKibben describes, once the ball starts rolling, it is almost impossible to stop. ⁴ Once everyone around you starts modifying their kids to be smarter, “your child will be the stupidest in the neighborhood” and left behind by society unless you adhere to the modifications. Forcing the reader to consider the future of their kids in this manic society enhances the fear of the audience and pushes them to take action. It pushes the scenario to directly pertain to their own livelihood.

Another effective element of the hypothetical situations is how McKibben works up to the presentation of the scenarios to create an immersive experience for the audience. He doesn’t force his opinions on the reader, but instead creates a situation where they are involved and can develop their own thoughts. With the example about the neighbor’s kids surpassing your own, McKibben built up the situation over the course of a paragraph and then concluded with the question, “How long could you hold off if all of your neighbors’ children seem to be more successful than your own?”, a clause that stands to force the reader to consider their position as if it were a current matter. Creating an immersive experience with hypothetical situations allows the reader to think for themselves when confronted with a scenario which, in turn, strengthens the power behind their beliefs. When the reader develops their own opinions by learning all the facts and employing empathy for their future selves, they become more passionate about the cause and will take the call to action McKibben offers at the end of the piece more seriously. ⁵

Another way the author appeals to the audience using rhetoric is through presenting personal experiences and other anecdotes to appeal to the reader’s emotions. One specific story the author uses is about his daughter. He says that he has “done everything in [his] power to try and mold her into a lover of the natural world.” Simply put, he took her on hikes, shared his own stories of the outdoors, and tried to instill in her what was so prevalent for him: a deep love of the beauty in the world. And although McKibben wants to shape his kid, he recognizes that ultimately, it is the child’s choice if they want to conform to the mold their parents have set. He says that, “as time goes on and she develops stronger opinions of her own, I yield more and more” because it is her life and not his. Will he be over the moon if she ends up moving to Manhattan to live out the city life? Absolutely not. But will he still remind her every day that she is his pride and joy? Of course. Because that’s what parenting is. Perpetual love for your children even if they aren’t exactly who you wanted them to be. This story highlights the idea that although parents think they know what is best for their children, it is ultimately up to the children to decide what lives they want to live. By showing his own personal relationship with the subject, McKibben grounds the ideas in the author’s humanity and gives the audience a new perspective on the subject matter, one of a parent’s view.

McKibben not only uses personal stories to give the audience an enhanced perspective of germline genetic engineering, but he also uses anecdotes. He understands that not all people will respond to the emotions associated with parenting, so he shifts the focus onto something more detached from feelings and concrete to appeal to a separate facet of his audience. ⁶ One anecdote he uses is about an Israeli researcher who managed to create a featherless chicken. In the researcher’s mind, genetically stripping chickens of their feathers is an improvement because the feathers are an obstacle for everyone. Plucking the chicken’s feathers off one by one before sending them to the grocery is a taxing and expensive process that could entirely be avoided if the chicken just didn’t have any feathers. What’s the harm? The chicken won’t know any better and it is for a greater good. Everyone wins! But do we really? Are these chickens really better off without the feathers? How can anyone dictate what is best? As time goes on and this technology advances, our children will be the new chickens. Just another product waiting for an engineer to improve, based upon their standard of what they think would be best for society. ⁷ In this, the individual is lost and we all become lab rats waiting to be used to better an agenda. McKibben even says, just substitute “an even temperament for feathers and you’ll know what the human engineers envision” for our future. They don’t care what they take away from humans; they just want to continue to grow the consumer society we live in. The way in which McKibben presents both stories, with the chicken and his daughter, is effective because he provides two different approaches to convey the same message: that people do not know what is best for others around them. Providing multiple perspectives to arrive at the same conclusion helps appeal to all audiences reading the piece through playing with emotion and logic. Ultimately, this personal story and anecdote are used to make the reader question where they stand by introducing new perspectives. In this, just as seen before with the hypothetical situations, McKibben makes an effort to educate the audience so that the call to action at the end of the piece is more thorough and effective. Just as he says, our combative arguments will need to “resonate on the same intuitive and cultural level” as those who support the modifications, and the best way to ensure the argument is powerful is for the reader to understand all perspectives of the topic.

But McKibben doesn’t stop there. He continues on and implicates the use of rhetorical questions to appeal to the audience in a nuanced way. These questions function in a similar way to the hypothetical situations, by involving the audience directly in the conversation to help introduce new perspectives. The author will explain a complicated topic, riddled with moral difficulties, and force the reader to directly confront what they would do in the situation. Imagine you had decided to genetically modify your child and it was a success! Her DNA absorbed every protein the scientists injected and now she is perfect! Right? In some ways yes, she is perfect. Statistically speaking, she will be at the top of her generation, but at what cost? McKibben comments and says, “What can she take pride in? Her good grades?… Her kindness to others?” Not really because, in reality, she is just doing everything she was programmed to do. She isn’t exceeding any sort of standard; she is just meeting the bar of being a “sweet-tempered, social, and smart” product.

And this tactic is not isolated. ⁸ McKibben then goes on to flip the narrative through imagining a failed genetic mutation. Instead of just being a product, your child would also be a defect. A malfunction in a pile of wild successes. “Do you still accept and love your child unconditionally? Why?” As with any defective product, wouldn’t you want to just return it or throw it away? McKibben remarks that, “If your new Jetta got thirty miles to the gallon instead of the forty it was designed to get, you’d take it back. You’d call it a lemon. If necessary, you’d sue.” What would make your child any different? McKibben’s use of parallel techniques to analyze the opposite situations of failed and successful modifications forces the audience to consider each angle deeply before passing judgment. At length, this technique helps further develop the audience’s knowledge of the subject, which will ultimately help them better serve the call to action.

Following the example McKibben set, it’s time to close with a call to action. Educating ourselves is only the first step towards change. McKibben used the techniques of hypothetical situations, storytelling, and rhetorical questions to help bring the issue of germline genetic engineering to the forefront of our minds. But now, it is our turn to take the reins. This discussion has up to this point only been between scientists and a select few who have an interest. But as McKibben shows us, we all need to have an interest. It is the balance of society and free will on the line, and without people speaking up, germline genetic engineering will take over. This is no longer something of the future; it is something that exists in the minds of many of our leading scientists today. The only thing that will stop their advancements is us. It is our turn to use what we know about germline genetic engineering to stop these scientists from completely destroying the society that we have worked so hard to build and perfect. Don’t stay silent because it could, in turn, be the end of real humanity as we know it.

Works Cited

McKibben, Bill. “Designer Genes.” Orion Magazine, https://orionmagazine.org/article/designer-genes/

A Word from Sophie

Photo of Sophie Daly Before this year, I’d never been told I was a good writer. Actually, no one even called me a writer because what I did wasn’t writing, it was putting down words on a page. And because of this, I was always in extra help, begging my teachers to tell me why they didn’t like my work. Sometimes they blamed the structure, other times the transitions, but it felt like every time I tried to fix the problems, I made them worse. But what I learned from hours of revisions and constantly meeting with my teachers was that my writing wasn’t the problem, it was my mindset. Because in reality, what makes a good writer? Their grammar? No. Their eloquent sentences? Nope. What about their expansive vocabulary? Absolutely not! A great writer is a person who approaches each piece in a unique way, through a lens that only they can create. My writing wasn’t good because I was writing with a mindset that built up four concrete walls to contain creativity, always ensuring my sentences didn’t start with “and” or “but.” But that’s no way to appeal to an audience! So, I had to make a change.

I won’t say it was easy to break free of the rigid writing I was used to. I constantly found myself falling back into what felt comfortable. But nothing worth reading has ever been comfortable. So, I had to write at least ten throw away drafts, meet with Elisabeth four different times, and take a million breaks to keep my sanity but eventually, it all paid off! I finally produced a piece I was proud of. For the first time ever. And now looking back on this whole experience, I can honestly say that the biggest thing I learned is to just write. Don’t let your mindset hold your writing back. Just open up your thoughts and let it all flow because that raw creativity doesn’t exist anywhere else. Use that to make your writing impactful.

From Professor Elisabeth Whitehead

Commentary:

I could have easily recommended any of Sophie’s WRI 111 essays for publication, but I specifically put forward this analysis, because it shows how a strong and engaged writer can express creativity, uniqueness in voice, curiosity, and vibrancy, even in a more standard academic assignment. Sophie never rests on formula. She engages and plays as a writer, from the first word.

In the introduction, Sophie lingers, understanding that it is important to allow an audience time to settle in. An audience is having to juggle a lot when approaching a new piece of writing: getting comfortable with an author’s style, understanding the context and an issue they may not be familiar with, understanding the argument and purpose of the essay. So, Sophie decides not to rush it, taking her time in the introduction and giving her readers the space to engage and be engaged. Also significant is the way that the style of the introduction mirrors some of the approaches that Bill McKibben himself utilizes in his essay and that Sophie analyzes later in the body of her own paper. Like McKibben, she creates a hypothetical scenario and uses the second-person point of view, so that the readers can put themselves in the scene and imagine, what if this was me. Later Sophie writes about the importance of McKibben providing an “immersive experience for the audience.” But I love the way she is doing the same throughout her analysis.

Another indication of Sophie’s vibrancy as a writer is the clarity in her structure and strong cohesion, seen through the movement of the argument, her transitions, and in the way she continues to circle back to repeating themes. She reminds us how McKibben’s varying approaches as a writer connect, and how he is always leading us to what is most important to him and his larger purpose in writing the essay, his final call to action.

Despite not using the first-person point of view, or writing about her own personal experiences, Sophie’s voice and personality as a writer come across so clearly in this essay. Pinpointing what makes a strong voice in a piece of writing can feel elusive. I wonder if here, it might be, in part, the approach. Throughout the semester, Sophie approached her writing with curiosity, care, and enthusiasm. She was open and authentic. She considered and cared for her audience. If a writer is simply going through the motions, writing from a template, or is disconnected from herself and her audience, the reader will easily and immediately feel this. As a writer, it is important never to lose yourself, even in a research or analysis paper. Sophie’s work shows the possibility and the results of a writer’s care and authenticity.

Assignment:

Essay 2: Rhetorical Analysis of a Text

Select one of the essays listed below, and write a paper examining one element of the author’s rhetoric in depth, explaining how the author employs rhetoric to support their argument and whether or not you find this use of rhetoric successful for its particular audience.

“Stanford Victim Letter” ~Chanel Miller

“Time and Distance Overcome” ~Eula Biss

“Designer Genes” ~Bill McKibben

You will want to first provide a brief summary of the text’s content to help familiarize your audience with the main ideas. But keep in mind that this will only be a very small portion of your paper. I want you to go beyond summary and be able to state and defend a claim about the text. You’ll want to pay attention not only to what a text says, but how and why it says it. Your task is to take a stance (how successful the rhetoric is for its particular audience) and back up your claim with solid support.

In this paper you will be demonstrating that you understand the rhetorical concepts we have been discussing in class. Use the following questions to help guide you in your exploration:

What is the issue at hand? What is the author’s purpose in writing this text?
Who is the intended audience? In your opinion, does the text successfully appeal to its target audience?
What is the context, or occasion, of the text?
How does the author establish their credibility/ character? Do you trust the author? Why or why not? Does the author’s rhetoric seem ethical?
Is this an argument driven by logic, by emotion, or by a mix of the two? What are the effects of these choices on you as a reader?
Does the type of evidence the author uses (statistics, observations, personal experience, second-hand accounts) seem sufficient to support their claims?
Does the author attempt to present counter arguments/ represent alternate viewpoints?
Can you imagine this essay written differently? For example, what if the author focused more on statistics instead of emotion? What if the author told a story in order to advocate their position rather than focusing on research? What if the author used humor instead of a serious tone? Would their advocacy be more or less successful?
Are there any suggestions you would give to the author to help improve the text? Is there anything the author could do, in your opinion, to make their work more successful?

Note that you will not be taking a position on the issue your text addresses. Your focus instead is analyzing the author’s use of rhetoric. Be careful that you do not judge the text’s level of rhetorical success based on how you feel about the issue itself. Be aware of your own biases. Investigate your own response as a reader (intellectual, emotional) to the text as part of your brainstorming process. This essay assignment is, in part, an exercise in seeing clearly. But to see clearly, you have to be aware of yourself, what you bring to the text, and why you are responding to it in this particular way. Maybe the author’s rhetoric made you reconsider your own views, or perhaps it made you angry. Why? If you disagree with the author’s position, what else could the author do to make you reconsider your own viewpoints? If you agree with the author’s position on the issue, be sure that you still investigate closely whether the argument is ethical and fair.

Editor Comments

1
As good as a science fiction story, Sophie brought us to the topic of genetic modifications with her relatable second-person voice and detailed imagination of an immaculate child.
2
With the clear comparison between the two kids being made, Sophie layered three critical questions in front of us. Are we going to choose? But how to choose? Thinking about these questions transits readers into the main essay.
3
Here is a good example of showing readers the setup of the essay. Besides, the clarification of McKibben’s intention to use those rhetorical techniques walks side by side with the listed structure.
4
As writers, we do not want to lose our audience, and a way of retaining them is to keep them thinking. In a clever way, Sophie pushed the situation further and made us, as “educated” readers, feel a sense of urgency.
5
If the technique of “[c]reating an immersive experience with hypothetical situations” is a common strategy in persuasion, Sophie’s analysis of McKibben’s persuasive piece hit the mark and offered valuable insights worth learning.
6
Analyzing others’ writings can be hard, but it becomes easier when our eyes become acute enough to seize opportunities and jump in. Sophie grabbed the chance when Mckibben shifted gears to another audience. She took advantage of this, internalized it, and came up with her own analysis.
7
Comparing children to chickens can be tricky, but in a funky and playful way, it works here, even bringing a satirical taste.
8
When working on long-form essays especially, transition sentences serve as essential, logical knots that cannot be missed. It is likely for the article to become loose if we do not have them.