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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."
Although there certainly is a lot of "fashion" and "tradition" in choosing names, it's hardly the nightmare of uniformity that is predicted by those who oppose genetic choice. Sometimes it might appear that everyone is named Steve, but alas, it is not so.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I remember people predicting this, mostly the fundies. They were laughed at. The gist of the flameage was "That won't ever happen, you guys need to STFU and let us scientists get on with the science."
Ok, now it's happened. And as a society we lack the moral fiber to even say it is a bad idea. Forget making an actual judgemental moral decision and declaring it "immoral" or "wrong". We can't even agree it is a bad idea and will almost certainly have bad consequences.
We are so doomed.
Democrat delenda est
Remember when antibiotics were developed and they were hailed as the great solution for bacterial infections? Now look what has happened - yes, we've solved some problems (many, even), but we've made others much worse.
So let's take a minute to think of the can of worms that we're opening. 1.) How are we supposed to determine whether something is a disease and whether it should be screened for? 2.) What if there's some genetic/evolutionary advantage to many of the "diseases" we hope to prevent? Obviously, no one wants to stand up and say that there's an advantage to -insert horrible disease here- but it's impossible to predict the future and what may be advantageous. 3.) We're also bound to get idiots that want their kids screened for stupid things like being short or stupid. There's probably a potential danger in this as well, not to mention that it's stupid.
Anyways, as far as treating diseases go, we should be mindful that if we don't want to mess with the gene pool (as many believe that we shouldn't), we should consider non-genetic alternatives to treating problems. Furthermore, we should be excited with the advent of new technology, but we should be very careful in how we employ it (in particular, how much). These aren't necessarily my opinions, but it's important to at least play Devil's Advocate.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
One of my younger brothers has severe autism. My other brother and our sister wear dentures. We all wear glasses. My parents wear glasses. My father's side of the family is all alcoholics, except for my grandfather, who is dead of a heart attack in his late 40s. My grandmother has had a triple bypass for her heart attack. On my mother's side of the family, my grandmother has survived breast cancer, and my grandfather is deep in Alzheimer's.
To hell with the crapshoot that is conception. I've long since decided that any kids I raise will be adopted. Then again, maybe this sort of technology will get cheap enough for me to pass on whatever portion of my genetic code that isn't crap.
All you "moral guardian" types are still stuck up on the crazy idea that condoms promote evil, bad sex, and think that the AIDS pandemic deserves nothing more than a crate of bibles shipped to Africa every few months. You haven't got a leg to stand on. Don't tell me the proper way to pass on genetic information.
What are the odds that some horrible genetic condition like, oh, sickle cell could, say, give immunity to malaria for example?
The trend of not having/keeping girls is doing wonders (i.e. horrors) for their population balance. Every family wants a son, until they realise they cannot find them a wife.
There are already 30 million more men than women in the 15-65 age bracket, add another 20 million extra males from the accelerating difference in the under 14 bracket over the next 5 years. 50 million disgruntled males who cannot find a partner are going to be a significant, dangerous and destabilising force for the whole region (including the effects of drawing females out of other nearby populations).
Just wait until they patent the genes for intelligence. If your kid reproduces without the assistance of the medical company they'll be spreading patented genes or something and they'll demand the DNA information of the offspring. Sorta like Monsanto does with crops... Just imagine if these companies only give you sterile kids and require you to go through them to have future kids.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
So, what happens when they find the genetic marker that indicates homosexuality?
Will it be okay for parents to not select an embryo because he/she might grow up to be gay?
Whenever you see a young lady with a good body...but has thick ankles, you know that in a few years, she will put on the pounds. Maybe it is the same gene for being overweight and the thick ankles.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Well what might happen before that is some of the female babies might start looking so cute (and behaving soooo adorably) that the parents decide to keep them anyway.
You might also end up with female babies that tend to not cry and wake up their parents in the middle of the night.
putting aside how horrible an idea that is for a moment, let's face that that's certainly what is happening.
In india, their are more boys than girls now, which is something of an oddity, and in some communities the new generation are so predominantly male than they're having to do reverse-dowries. As my brother put it, "sooner or later they're going to run out of girls to subjugate, and they'll have to stop treating girls like dirt. either that or the guys will all go gay, but oh wait, that's against crummy traditional values too."
There are 3 things I might select for, health, high intelligence, and physical fitness.
I had a palaentology professor who described the interesting puzzle of a type of ocean bacteria which uses a tiny magnetic crystal to determine which way is up (the Earth's magnetic field having a vertical component). What the biologists could not figure out is why a small fraction of each generation would be born with the crystal the wrong way around and then swim down, instead of up, and perish. Surely evolution would have corrected this error?
What the palaentologists did was use the crystals that fell from the bacteria when they died to measure the direction of the magnetic field - this in part lead to the discovery of the flipping of the field every 100k years and suddenly things became clear. What was a bad genetic mutation 99.99% of the time suddenly became essential to the survival of the species after the field flip. The few percent with the wrong crystal then became the survivors.
So convince me that in selecting the "perfect" health gene and high intelligence gene we are not also potentially removing other genetic traits that might appear to be useless at the moment but which may offer resistance to some future virus or similar threat? Not to mention the social problems of trying to find a road sweeper or janitor when we are all giving birth to baby Einsteins.
It may not happen this time, but a surplus of unhappy males always creates a volatile situation. Partially the problem is solved by Chinese importing women from neighboring poor countries (like Vietnam), but while that may help in China it obviously creates a problem elsewhere.
I am the father of a 4 months old baby daughter. We had planned on getting children and prior to this we have had 2 abortions because the embryo did not develop properly. And by that I mean that they did not develop with a cranium. "Children" like this can develop until birth, whereupon they die after a couple of hours due to the fact that they do not have a brain. A "natural" miscarriage had not happened, hence the abortions. A messy business all around.
During this process I learned a few things by listening to doctors, going to genetic consultations and by reading up on the subject. Most of the human embryos (more than half) that are started, dies in some way inside the womb. Usually so early that the woman never realizes she is pregnant. The reasons are as varied as the embryos, and quite immaterial to this topic. The point is that "natural" pregnancies are a chancy and tricky business with less than 50/50 chances for each pregnancy to have what you may call a child that is able to live outside a womb (some would argue that this would make children even more "precious").
Why are pregnancies tricky and chancy? Because it has developed over millions of years through a process called evolution. A process that is far from perfect, but that works. If anything the trickiness of having children is a (another) strong argument against the creationists (if we ever needed any more) who are determined to believe that we are "perfectly" created by some kind of supreme being. If so this proves he made a hash of it. But this is again a sidetrack to this topic.
The "holy grail" of a "designer baby" is that you are able to take what is the "best" genes in each parent, prune away dangerous recessives and damaged genes and then hope that it works. It is with the current technology quite impossible to do this. For this the variables are just too great.
As a person born with near-sightedness and a couple of other issues (which we all have), I would not mind having my genes a bit altered. And I would definitely consider it with any future children if the technology is actually viable (which it is not). Alterations that don't work at all, will for the most part be terminated in the womb. Other will die afterwards (just like it is now. No difference). And maybe some will grow up and be able to have children of their own. It is evolution.
I have known someone who's day job was to work in a residence for old people where half the occupants had it, and from the stories he told me I take it that you, were you to work for a few months at such a residence, would quickly abondon the notion that such a patient really is a full person. Or a person at all, if the decease has progressed far enough.
That doesn't mean that I'm advocating killing them. However, if I ever discover that I've got Alzheimer's I'll kill myself before I become mentally incapable of doing so. Because I have to take the feelings of my friends and family into account, and the cost of society, and I think it would be the right thing to do.
1. Not really. There's a massive difference between:
A) the chance of you and your wife doing it, by repeatedly getting her pregnant and screening the embryo to see if it matches your expectations
B) the chance of some mutation happening across billions of individuals and millions of years
To illustrate the difference: a 1 in a million chance per pregnancy is unfeasible for case A. Even if you got her pregnant on every ovulation, you'd need an average if 4 million weeks. The same 1 in a million case is peanuts for the world's population. There are about 4 people born per second world-wide, so 1-in-a-million chances will happen on the average every 250,000 seconds = approx 70 hours = more than once per 3 days.
Simply put, what's feasible for _one_ family is entirely different from what's possible for the whole species.
2. Here we're talking about the chance of getting a very specific mutation, wanted in advance by the parents. Evolution does't have such predestined outcomes. It can yield literally billions of different mutations which are just as ok, if they pass the natural selection test.
To illustrate the difference: think of getting a mutation that gives one green eyes. For "designer babies", well, if the parents really wanted blue eyes, it's the wrong one and the foetus will be discarded. For evolution it's a non-issue. The baby will be born anyway, and since it gives no other disadvantage, the mutation will survive just fine.
Or in the words of Richard Feynman: "You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!"
That's exactly the difference we're talkig about here:
I. Creationists come all the time with ideas like "what are the chances of exactly us being created by accident?" But that's like the license plate here. We're just one of the billions of different species, and billions of different mutations each. It didn't _have_ to be us, and it didn't have to be any particular mutation. We're just a random thing that worked.
We're not even the best thing imaginable. E.g., birds' lungs are much more efficient than mammalian lungs. We would have had an advantage if we had that other type of lung but we didn't, because that random chance didn't happen.
Evolution doesn't call it in advance "it's going to have to be blond with blue eyes." It just tosses the dice and see what works better out of the random results. Maybe it'll be green hair and yellow eyes instead. If it works, it works.
II. Whereas here the proposition is precisely that the parent say in advance what they want to get. They want blond with blue eyes, for example. Now the aim isn't just to have anything that works, but a given combination required in advance. A lot of otherwise viable combinations for the evolution scenario just became "wrong" for what a given mom and dad want. That makes the chances a lot shittier.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.