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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."
I'm sick and tired of these designer babies and their fancy jeans and handbags and watches. Enough with the materialism. They should learn early not to value such things so highly.
I like how the summary says that the "designer baby" era is here despite the fact that, hey, we can't actually customize babies yet.
Who gives a shit what you or "society" thinks. I think it is retarded to allow people to call their children "Apple" or "Montana" but, thankfully, I don't have the right to control other people's choices. Freedom means putting up with shit you don't like.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
Nice straw man you got there.
The truth is that names hardly matter that much compared to your child's physiology and anatomy. 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.
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as couples from across the globe are flocking in droves to pay the company their life's savings for a custom baby
It saddens me to think that so many people are that shallow. It no longer surprises me that people would risk their financial stability to have a baby with a particular hair color. But it does still depress me.
Developers: We can use your help.
They'll have a huge market in China and perhaps India. China has that history of euthanizing baby girls, so why waste the nine months if you can't get exactly what you want?
Sorry, but this really freaks me. Now we're making a true commodity out of babies. In a way that actually cheapens them; they'll become mass-market items akin to cellphones, when we can pick and choose exactly what color, what "skin", we want them to have, what shape and size, what sort of CPU and accessories.
Can you hear Darwin howling?
Within reason. I don't have to put up with being raped. Society as a whole doesn't have to put up with embryos being aborted over hair/eye color if it deems it to be immoral. You really think this is going to fly?
Why not? We allow abortions based on sex. And you clearly don't understand the technology here. It's not embryos being aborted, it's embryos not being implanted, much like current IVF technology that already exists.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
I'm betting she'd be very popular.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
The problem with "genetic choice" is that we haven't been around long enough to know the purpose of all of our traits. If enough people were to, for example, not pass on the sicle cell trait who's to say that humanity won't be wiped out by a malaria epidemic? Of course, that's an outlandish scenario, but it's meant to raise a point not prove one. We just don't know why humanity comes in all of our different variations. It's a dangerous game to start removing traits artificially.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Sorry, but I'm 100% in favor of non-cosmetic Eugenics. Maybe you'd feel the same if you knew someone with cancer, diabetes or countless other horrible conditions.
I /had/ cancer, and I"m still not sure that I'm in favor of it. The thought of the current relatively minor money-based class separation eventually becoming codified genetically (this service ain't gonna be cheap) is more than a little disturbing.
You eventually end up with the descendants of the wealthy and middle class (yay consumer finance) who are guaranteed no major health problems, and the descendants of the poor who remain prone to the many diseases. These people are already at a disadvantage financially, now they become a heavy burden on a society since the only ones who actually get seriously ill.
How many generations until the healthy class stops paying for them?
People already screen your embryos and sperm for certain genetic markers. It's not eugenics, it's called "dating."
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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Or are you for allowing school choice... even when it means fundies can skip teaching evolution and condoms?
Or are you against using the power of the State to seize the resources of the successful to give to those who couldn't give enough of a shit to get an education?
And you are of course against crap like the Fairness Doctrine, right?
And are you against all gun control. at least anything less than crew served weapons or WMD, right?
Hate Speech? That doesn't exist in your "Freedom is flying yer freak flag" world, right?
Funnily enough, I'm in favor of school choice, against the Fairness Doctrine, against most gun control, and against hate speech control laws. I don't favor arbitrary property seizure, though. I note that the wording of your questions is highly loaded, attempting to resolve any debate through the framing of the questions. I choose not to address that issue further.
I'm really not sure why you picked a handful of controversial topics to try to prove that many issues of freedom are simple and obvious. Merely because you feel strongly about these topics doesn't mean that all thoughtful, intelligent people agree.
I don't have a problem with "designer babies", as this article calls 'em. While this company currently is talking about superficial choices like hair and eye color, perfecting the technology could well lead to generations of smarter, stronger, disease-resistant, congenital-defect free children.
Further, I'm afraid that taking legislative control of children's genetics is more dangerous to the preservation of diversity than allowing free choice. Once the finger of legislation is in the pie, there's no taking it out again, and most long-standing governments have made eugenic policies at various points. I have no reason to believe that it will never happen again in nations which have rescinded such stances.
I don't deny there's plenty of arguments on both sides - I was exposed to this debate many years ago in a biomedical ethics course in college. The actual practical application is bound to raise a bit of hubbub and maybe some new insight, but unless someone has a compelling new argument I'm unlikely to see this as a Bad Thing.
Shit, that kinda sounds like names are really important.
This has to be Slashdot at it's finest.
Pretending not to understand the difference between family name and given name to avoid acknowledging the point?
Yes, that is /. at it's finest.
The enemies of Democracy are
Go watch the movie GATTACA http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/ The basic premise is in the not too distant future a company has come up with a way for parents to determine all of the genetic qualities of the baby so that when the baby is born it is already determined what it will become/do in it's life based upon it's DNA. Prior to birth they know if you'll be a physician or a garbage man. "Natural" babies, those with no genetic selection are unheard of. The plot is a "natural" born character tries to fool the system into thinking he's got the DNA to be an astronaut...
Interesting concept.
Fun fact, most people wind up with jobs that are neither terribly glamorous nor pay 6 figures. Police sergeant is actually pretty respectable to those who don't blindly hate cops.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
One only has to look at what breeders have done to pure breed dogs over the years to know this is a horrendously bad idea.
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.
What was once true, is no longer so
Nope. It just avoids the deeper, more serious issue of a culture that is alright with killing people because they're female. The problem isn't that females are being born to these people, the problem is that they are willing to kill them because of that.
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.