Technology and policy are edging ever-closer to designer babies, writes Graham Phillips.
If you had a choice, would you make your firstborn child a boy or a girl? What about the later children? You could go girl, boy, girl, boy, like the seating at a dinner party. These are not moot questions.
Visit the Fertility Institutes' clinic in Los Angeles and you can choose the sex of your child-to-be. It's just a matter of using IVF - and handing over a large wad of money. The practice has been going on quietly for years.
Given a person's sex is perhaps their most significant trait, you could argue there are already designer people walking among us. But last week the Fertility Institutes announced they wanted to skid further down the slippery slope and offer parents a choice of eye, hair and even skin colour. The technique involves creating several embryos that are each genetically screened. The parents choose which one to implant.
You're likely to have heard the ethical concerns: the practice reeks of eugenics; children will be commodified; it's the same technology as for creating that infamous Aryan super race. But skip over the ethical issues to a different question: is the designer baby future likely to happen?
The answer is a definite yes, if you believe Princeton University biologist Lee Silver. He predicts the brave new parents of the future will swap nights of passionate baby-making for a bit of one-on-one time in front of a computer.
He imagines there might be 100 little icons on the screen, each representing a potential child for the couple. (These would be various combinations of mum and dad's genes.) Click on one and up pops an image. It's a dark-haired, brown-eyed boy, say, with his father's chin and his mother's high cheekbones. According to his data file, he will grow to between 170 and 180 centimetres tall and his temperament will be more Kevin Rudd than Russell Crowe. Listed will be his probabilities for developing various diseases, such as cancers and heart problems - and even addictive behaviours such as smoking or alcoholism.
There would be no guarantees, of course: genetics are only part of the story. You could pick thin genes for junior, but the ungrateful sod could ruin your good work with Twisties and Coke. Still, this is unlikely to deter many parents: plenty happily hand over more than $100,000 to a private school with no guarantees of success. And, of course, baby-making the old-fashioned way is even less predictable. Mums and dads are suckers for wanting to give their children the best possible start in life, and plenty would go as far as extending that to genetics.
People who use sperm donors are already designing their children in a way. Parents are usually given a choice of potential fathers, supposedly with the aim of finding a close match to the non-biological dad. But an extensive file on each man that is not too dissimilar to the profile on Silver's predicted computer screen can be provided. The candidate's qualifications and profession are listed, and pictures and genetic analyses are supplied. Even childhood photos may be available: you could guess whether a baby to this man might have adolescent acne or not. Of course, again, there are no guarantees.
Most of those working in the human biotechnology business invoke the cosmetic-medical barrier as the strongest wall protecting us from a designer baby destiny. That is, it's OK to design kids for medical reasons - such as using the Fertility Institutes' technology to choose a baby free of genetic diseases. But it's definitely not OK to choose kids to have cosmetic enhancements, such as tallness or good looks. But how robust is that wall?
A few years ago, the US Food and Drug Administration legalised giving growth hormones to children who were in the bottom 1per cent for height. There is nothing wrong with these kids, they're merely short. That surely seems like a medical treatment for "cosmetic" purposes. Would genetically selecting a baby for tallness be that different?
And could genes that would make a girl as skinny as a supermodel be selected? On the one hand, that's cosmetic; on the other, being overweight is a serious health risk these days.
And many parents who want to give their kids the best start in life may consider it their moral obligation to select genes associated with good looks. Beauty and handsomeness take you a long way in the world, and many scientific investigations have confirmed this. One study even found that improving the looks of criminals by giving them plastic surgery was more successful in keeping them from reoffending than social and job rehabilitation. Looks count.
Now, there's no doubt the Fertility Institutes' technology - and the state of knowledge of human genetics in general - are not up to delivering Silver's designer baby future just yet. But it's hard to rule it out in the coming decades.
Graham Phillips is the presenter of ABC TV's science program, Catalyst.
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