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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."
From Freakonomics (Levitt): "...in 1958, a New York City man named Robert Lane decided to call his baby son Winner. The Lanes, who lived in a housing project in Harlem, already had several children, each with a fairly typical name. But this boyâ"well, Robert Lane apparently had a special feeling about this one. Winner Lane: how could he fail with a name like that?
Three years later, the Lanes had another baby boy, their seventh and last child. For reasons that no one can quite pin down today, Robert decided to name this boy Loser. It doesnâ(TM)t appear that Robert was unhappy about the new baby; he just seemed to get a kick out of the nameâ(TM)s bookend effect. First a Winner, now a Loser. But if Winner Lane could hardly be expected to fail, could Loser Lane possibly succeed?
Loser Lane did in fact succeed. He went to prep school on a scholarship, graduated from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and joined the New York Police Department (this was his motherâ(TM)s longtime wish), where he made detective and, eventually, sergeant. Although he never hid his name, many people were uncomfortable using it. âoeSo I have a bunch of names,â he says today, âoefrom Jimmy to James to whatever they want to call you. Timmy. But they rarely call you Loser.â Once in a while, he said, âoethey throw a French twist on it: âLosier.â(TM)â To his police colleagues, he is known as Lou.
And what of his brother with the canâ(TM)t-miss name? The most noteworthy achievement of Winner Lane, now in his midforties, is the sheer length of his criminal record: nearly three dozen arrests for burglary, domestic violence, trespassing, resisting arrest, and other mayhem."
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
In some countries, it's not uncommon for parents to kill girls that are born to them because they cannot carry on the family name, so to speak.
Nice straw man YOU got there.
There's a difference between infanticide (i.e. killing someone) vs. designer babies (i.e. preventing a hypothetical person from existing). By your logic it's also abhorrent for people carrying genetically transmission illnesses to abstain from having children.
I'm heavily pro-choice, but that made even me cringe.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
A lot of people saw gattaca, and pulled out the message that we should abandon all genetic research before it destroys us all.
In the beginning of gattaca, the narrator even mentions that "genoism" laws were passed, but in the movie we see blatant discrimination.
The message that I got out of that movie is less about genetic engineering, and more about discrimination in general. If we as a society just flatly ignore certain discrimination laws, then of course society is going to go to hell in a short amount of time.
It seems like there is this whole branch of scifi designed to terrorize people about the horrors of technology. The creators seem to think that we would all be better off if we abandoned technology and all went back to live in caves.
If I had the opportunity to have children who were smarter, faster, stronger, and with laser eyes, I would do it in a heartbeat. What is the point of life in general without progression of evolution?
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."
> I guess if a culture wants to go that way, then it is their own fault when they don't
> have enough chicks for all the guys to marry....and they slowly go extinct...
That is one option. But what if they decide to wage The War For Poontang? Think about it. You get a bunch of your excess male population killed off along with a good proportion of the male population of the victim country leaving it with an excess of females to carry off as prizes. And there is that nice territorial expansion bit for essentially free.
It is a related problem to the Muslim problem. Muslims are permitted up to four wives. Wealthy ones max out leaving lots of poor horny males with almost no prospect of getting any poon. And we wonder why they sign up as suicide bombers on the promise of those heavenly virgins? Those mating practices are a win if you are losing lots of your male population to war or other things, a recipe for disaster otherwise.
Democrat delenda est
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.
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.