(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 Vetter, the Boy in the Plastic Bubble.
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?
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
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john blumenthal
ManhattanWhiteGirl
kenneth houck
Andrea Higbie
Stim
Robin Robinson
Salon.com
Comments
If you have a high risk of some dread genetic disease, it may be worth it. For blue eyes and a few extra inches of height? Nope.
Let's not forget that a single egg harvest produces not more than 10 eggs, on average, sometimes 3 or 5. Higher numbers of eggs harvested tends to result in lower quality eggs.
If the couple has a generous quantity of blue-eyed genes and tall genes, then there should be some tall, blue-eyed embryos in the petrie dish. But then, their chances of having a tall, blue-eyed kid would be good anyway.
If their chances in nature of having a tall blue-eyed kid are not so high, then there's no guarantee that there'd be one in the petrie dish and any fertility clinic has to know this.
So my take is that this will be used to help families with bad genetic diseases pre-screen (instead of aborting the defective embryo), but not for designer babies.
I can't help thinking the whole thing is being overhyped. An organism is an integrated whole. What makes a human being attractive is not the color of the hair or the eyes or the skin -- it's the total package.
Having said that, I still believe that anyone who wishes to bring a child into the world ought to engage in some honest self-examination as to why they are doing so, whether they use genetic engineering techniques or not.