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Designer Babies, Version 1.0
Stickerboy writes: "A 30 year-old woman in Chicago gave birth to a pre-pregnancy genetically screened and selected baby 17 months ago, which is being reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association today. Doctors at the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago took 23 eggs from her, screened the eggs for a gene that causes an early form of Alzheimer's, and then fertilized and implanted the eggs back in her womb. Shades of the movie Gattaca - this is a good specific development, but the start of a very controversial trend. Read more about it in the Washington Post or read the abstract in JAMA."
Okay, two immediate thoughts come to mind with relation to this.
/smart/ and /strong/ and /useful/. Not pretty.
First off, with the way that human mating works nowadays, there really isn't much evolutionary motivation. You date people who you find attractive for whatever damn fool reason you have rather than for the purpose of creating healthy offspring. I, for instance, tend to prefer dating women who find fat, bearded computer geeks attractive. That's not an evolutionarily sound move on my part, but that's not going to make me dump my lovely girlfriend. So this development makes it possible for Humans to actually take control of evolution and start breeding out diseases and infirmaties.
However, the problem that immediately comes to mind is something that dog breeders have found over the years. People started breeding for certain traits such as soft coat, ears that are floppy in exactly the right way, short tails, etc. While this makes for very pretty dogs, it leads to the problem that the average Dalmation, far from rescuing its brethren from Cruella DeVille, could just barely rescue itself from a small, wet paper sack. And that's only if it had 100 other dogs helping it. And the wet paper sack also had food in it that they wanted to get to. And maybe was perforated. Which is why sheepdog owners are, last I heard (which was, admittedly, years ago), fighting tooth and nail to keep their breed out of competition. They raise sheepdogs to be
The point I'm trying to make is that genetically manipulating which kids we have to screen for diseases is fine by me, but I'd hate to live in a future where people start screening their reproductive cells so that they only have pretty babies. They'll probably be able to play games with Dalmations on the same intellectual level.
--AC