Question of the week: Should science be separate from ethics?

Jansico Chu Man-fai, 17, Queen's College

This is the most controversial topic of the 21st century as it arouses lots of questions. Should we design our babies? Should we change someone's genetic information? After pondering it seriously, I believe science should be separate from ethics.

If science is not separated from ethics, development will be hindered to a large extent. For instance, if we had not accepted our ancestors were apes, we would not have been able to create the Theory of Evolution and this would have adversely affected science today. Therefore, ethics sometimes blind us to the truth.

Some may argue that if we do not consider ethics when developing science, life in the future will be totally beyond our imagination, full of horrific disasters - there will be monster babies, mutant diseases that we cannot control, cannibal mice that attack humans. It all sounds terrible.

But if we have to consider ethics before every step of scientific development, our scientific progress will be very slow and may even stop. For example, if we had to worry about the potential danger of explosives, they would never have been invented and today we would not even be able to build tunnels.

So the most important thing is how best to apply science in the real world. Undoubtedly, pure scientific development should not be hindered by anything. However, the application of that science should be supervised and regulated. I suggest a global regulation system should be set up to check the application of advanced science to avoid any nightmare scenarios.