Designer Babies: Ethical? Inevitable?

[karyn]

from live science

By Robert Roy Britt, Editorial Director

A baby born in England recently was chosen in the embryonic stage to be free of a gene linked with certain types of cancer.

"This little girl will not face the specter of developing this genetic form of breast cancer or ovarian cancer in her adult life," said Paul Serhal, medical director of the assisted conception unit at University College hospital, London.

The case is not the first of its kind.

In the United States, a man with an 50 percent chance of passing on a gene for deadly colon cancer used the technique, too. He and his wife had embryos screened prior to implanting one in her womb, resulting in a daughter that won't get the disease.

The British woman, who has remained anonymous, made the decision in June to undergo screening of 11 embryos, each three days old, because her husband's female relatives suffered cancers, according to The Guardian. "We felt that, if there was a possibility of eliminating this for our children, then that was a route we had to go down," she said at the time.

The same genetic testing, called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), has been used to test for inherited disorders such as cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease, life-shortening diseases known to be certainly acquired by those carrying a single gene. What's new in this case is that the gene tested for, called BRCA1, does not inevitably lead to cancer in someone who carries it and if the cancers do develop they are potentially treatable.

Women who carry the BRCA1 gene have an 80 percent chance of developing breast cancer and a 60 per cent chance of developing ovarian cancer during their lifetime. They also have a 50 percent chance of passing the gene on to each of their children.

The events might presage other screenings designed to create designer babies based on gender, IQ or athletic ability, some ethicists fear.

"There are many complex issues to take into account and the decision will finally come down to an individual's personal ethics," said Kath McLachlan, a clinical nurse specialist at the charity Breast Cancer Care.

Some fear the worst if laws are not crafted to corral the burgeoning field of "reprogenetics," as it is called — combining reproductive technologies with genetic screening.

"If misapplied, [these technologies] would exacerbate existing inequalities and reinforce existing modes of discrimination ... the development and commercial marketing of human genetic modification would likely spark a techno-eugenic rat-race," Richard Hayes, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society. "Even parents opposed to manipulating their children's genes would feel compelled to participate in this race, lest their offspring be left behind."

The polar opposite argument is made by Dartmouth College ethics professor Ronald M. Green, who envisions a nearly disease-free future in which the information gleaned from reprogenetics allows genes to be tweaked, producing healthier humans without discarding embryos. "Why not improve our genome?" Green asks.

A report last year in the journal Nature predicted a host of changes to human fertility technology in 30 years time: Artificial wombs and experiments on human embryos grown in the lab will be commonplace, several scientists said. With embryos grown in labs, mutations could be corrected and improvements could be engineered. The same researcher said there would be no designer babies, however, because no single gene is that predictive of a perfect child.

Meanwhile, the British mother and daughter are said to be doing well.

[Ajax Knucklebones]

All I can say is "Gattaca".

[toxicat]

^ exactaca

[nathanmbailey]

Pft, those fucks are looking at the wrong thing to question. Instead, why not ask "how are we going to fix this overpopulation issue if they're genetically altering embryos to make the fucker live longer?" All this science is fucking up everything. Now, instead of survival of the fittest and weeding out the retards (I mean that in the insulting way, not the mentally handicapped way) who kill themselves in the stupidest of ways, we have these idiots outliving the people who are actually useful. Most likely because the useful people are dieing of stress related illnesses from having to deal with the idiots.

Does anyone else realize that this is just a new form of communism. If they can manipulate the genes to make everyone smart, athletic, good looking, and whatever then the playing field is completely even and everyone will suffer.

[Ajax Knucklebones]

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Soylent Green?

[nathanmbailey]

I'm not against communism itself. It looks great on paper, but it doesn't work in use. And that's what I meant by this, because if no one has to work for anything, nothing is going to get done. If they make everyone look like society's standard of "decent" or "beautiful" what do you think would happen? There'd be no more models, and no one will work as janitors because what beautiful person is going to clean up after someone else. No one will have to work for anything.

Yeah, the pretty people got lucky, but the ugly people who succeed appreciate what they have more because they had to actually work for it and they aren't as shallow as the pretty people that have everything given to them. It evens out.

[malcolm]

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Soylent Green?

hmmmm dunno how tasty people would be dahmer went on record as saying people taste like spam so......... holy crap! i think i just realised something!

[nathanmbailey]

S.P.A.M.

Some parts are meat. It never specifies what kind of meat...

[malcolm]

<-----never eating spam again.......
took me forever to eat it again after watching sleepless in seattle the first time.

[Dusk]

Hmmm I read about this kind of thing in the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld. But they had an operation to make them perfect, leading to people who where to young to have this operation feeling like crap, while there was massive government control conspiracy thing. It was awesome.

[TheDeathKnight]

It's probably inevitable, but I think the problem will be that people will end up all the same, which will make us less resistant to future diseases. Sometimes it's our differences or our "flaws", or "mutations", that let a species survive. But I can totally see parents eventually picking their child's eye color, body type, hair color, and all of that stuff. Which I don't think is quite as harmful as the fact that we may come up with some standardized healthy blueprint, that will have flaws that make those future generations vulnerable to some disease, etc. But of course it could go the other way, and people will have endless choices of how to create a child. With black skin and red eyes, or all kinds of other blends that don't usually happen in nature...

[malcolm]

they've got a hospital or clinic or whatever in new york that kinda works with this selective gene therapy concept but right now they're not a hundred percent accurate.
all they can do is say like if someone wants a kid with blue eyes that they can make it more likely the kid will have blue eyes etc.

i think the idea of screening for genes tha tmay cause cancer or something is a good idea in concept but it leads down a nasty little road of all kinds of crazy things.

wasnt hitler trying to do soemthing like perfecting the gene pool when he was in power?

[Dusk]

Yes, but the difference was that he only thought there was something wrong with the Jews/minorities/handicapped. It could be a good thing to get rid of genetic diseases but I dont like the idea of stopping fertilization just cos the baby might have something wrong with it. If they could repair the DNA to remove the defective gene it would probably be more widely accepted.

[LeilaHazlett]

OMG not communism!!

Do you think that people who are naturally ugly should have to be ugly just because pretty people get lucky?
I don't.

One person's ugly is another person's beautiful.

But to answer the original question...I'm not really comfortable with the whole idea of manipulating the genetics of an unborn child. Removing the risk for cancer or other diseases doesn't bother me too much...but where do you draw the line? Should parents be allowed to pick their child's eye color or even something like sexual preference? Cosmetic things seem like a bad idea to me because what one person finds attractive another person finds repulsive. I can easily see teenagers getting pissed at their parents for not choosing the "right" hair color, height, etc. Not that teenages don't already get pissed about stupid shit but I don't think I would feel comfortable making those choices as a parent, I would rather leave it to nature/god/random chance or whatever else you want to call it.

[Ajax Knucklebones]

One person's ugly is another person's beautiful.


I think one person's ugly is another person's compromise.

[nathanmbailey]

Remember, beauty is in the eyes of the beer holder. Sometimes it just takes a keg... or two.

[Nos]

I would like a baby girl with green eyes and pink hair. k ? thanks.

[toxicat]

I would like a baby girl with green eyes and pink hair. k ? thanks.

That would be awesome! Or how about adopting a kid who's already here? Then you can see what they look like "up front."

[TheDeathKnight]

The problem is that once you get the ability to repair or remove genes that cause cancer, or other diseases, science will also be able to do those "cosmetic" changes. So knowing how things work in our society, doctors will see the dollar signs, and clinics will pop up, offering "custom baby" services. And there is nothing inherently "wrong" with picking a specific eye color, or something like that. But I feel like once the floodgates are opened, things could get pretty weird, pretty fast!