(Don’t worry – I won’t subject you to the requisite pun about “designer genes.”)

The Fertility Institute of Los Angeles will begin offering parents the opportunity to select the physical characteristics of their children. Using a technique called Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis, or PGD, embryos conceived in vitro will be screened for specific genes that determine a child’s physical characteristics. The Fertility Institute’s own website boasts that prospective parents can choose “expanded testing that can greatly increase the odds of achieving a healthy pregnancy with a preselected choice of gender, eye color, hair color, and complexion.” You can expect denunciation from pundits and the blogosphere, just as there was in response to the Fertility Institute's previous work on gender selection – click here and here, for examples.

To my mind, such across-the-board denunciations make about as much sense as trying to hold back the wind with a fishnet. If the technology really exists to enable people to have children who are taller, stronger, healthier, more intelligent, more beautiful – and if it doesn’t, it will before we know it – then do you think any force on earth will be able to stop people from using it? I don’t have a problem with trait selection per se – but I think a little caution is in order here. After all, creating designer offspring didn’t work out so well for Frankenstein. Or, for an astounding real-life tale of medical cruelty, consider David Joseph Vetter, the Boy in the Plastic Bubble.

David was born with Severe Combined Immune Deficiency Disorder, a genetic disease which, at the time, was a virtual death sentence. David’s older brother (also named David Joseph), succumbed to the same illness at the age of six months. Three physicians from the Baylor College of Medicine -- John Montgomery, Mary South, and Raphael Wilson -- told David’s parents that if they chose to have another child, and he had the same illness, he could be placed in a special isolation chamber until a cure was found, which, they were sure, was right around the corner.

I remember when I was a boy, the media would occasionally do these little puff pieces on David, showing him attending school via closed-circuit television, or venturing outside in his isolation suit. (In fact, he wore the suit a total of only seven times. When he outgrew it, a replacement was provided for him, but he refused to wear it.) The fact that he spent his entire life in a tiny plastic bubble was presented as merely some sort of charming eccentricity. The reality was far uglier.

David’s life was lonely, miserable, and short. He was plagued by recurring nightmares in which he was attacked by hordes of spiders – clearly a projection of the pathological fear of germs instilled in him by his jailers. When no cure for his condition was forthcoming, David’s original doctors got bored and walked away. But David couldn’t walk away.

As David grew older, he began acting out, throwing temper tantrums and masturbating in front of his nurses. He was increasingly becoming an embarrassment to Baylor. Doctors decided to give him a bone marrow transplant to try to create an immune system for him, even though a matching donor could not be found. David’s sister provided the bone marrow for the procedure. Unfortunately, her bone marrow was contaminated by the Epstein-Barr virus. David got sick and died a few months later, at the age of 12, and an autopsy found his body was riddled with tumors.

But we really don’t need such esoteric examples as the foregoing to warn us of the perils of designer babies. The fact is, people are ornery critters and don’t usually respond well to efforts to control them. We’ve all known parents who are narcissistic monsters, who spend their lives trying to force their children to be something they’re not. That usually doesn’t end up too well, for anyone concerned. When parents can specify the characteristics of their offspring, will they fare any better than the hapless Victor Frankenstein?