Designer Babies

Singularity Hub writes "The Fertility Institutes recently stunned the fertility community by being the first company to boldly offer couples the opportunity to screen their embryos not only for diseases and gender, but also for completely benign characteristics such as eye color, hair color, and complexion. The Fertility Institutes proudly claims this is just the tip of the iceberg, and plans to offer almost any conceivable customization as science makes them available. Even as couples from across the globe are flocking in droves to pay the company their life's savings for a custom baby, opponents are vilifying the company for shattering moral and ethical boundaries. Like it or not, the era of designer babies is officially here and there is no going back."

Comments

Re:Parents choose their baby's name

[Brickwall]

Not that I'm claiming you said anything to do with first name/last names, Chris, but the real idiocy is the GPP's. The reason girl babies are being aborted/drowned/abandoned across Asia is families have to give other families money to marry their daughters. So a daughter is a financial liability to 1) raise, and 2) marry, and then after that, 3) the woman is then considered part of her husband's family, not her own. It has nothing to do with carrying on the family name.

BTW, I'm married to an Asian woman, who told me precisely this, and we have two spectacular daughters that I wouldn't trade for anything. She told me she would never have married a Chinese guy because of the way she'd expect him to treat her.

Lack of choices, though

[Moraelin]

You seem to assume that you can just produce all combinations there. You can't.

E.g., out of two black haired Japanese parents you can't feasibly produce a redhead, because (A) neither of them has the gene, and (B) it's recessive, so the baby would need TWO such genes, one from each parent, to actually get red hair. The probability that _both_ the egg _and_ the sperm have that mutation out of nowhere, is pretty much nil.

It might work if both parents had the gene as recessive, but that's not a given. And then you can't want your second child to be a blonde.

The same problem hapens if you want, say, blue eyes for the kid. There is exactly one version of that gene that actually produces blue eyes. If the parents don't have it, that's that.

Of course, I suppose the wife could get some help from the milkman or whatnot ;)