Slashdot Mirror
Fertility Clinic Bows To Pressure, Nixes Eye- and Hair-Color Screening
destinyland writes "A fertility service in L.A. and New York screens embryos for breast cancer, cystic fibrosis, and 70 other diseases — and lets couples pick the sex of their babies. But when their pre-implantation diagnostic services began including the baby's eye and hair color, even the Pope objected — and the Great Designer Baby Controversy began. '[W]e cannot escape the fact that science is moving forward,' the fertility service explained — before capitulating to pressure to eliminate the eye and hair color screenings."
It's when fertility clinics start to offer to change the hair or eye color (or other traits) of a baby to be.
I guess I'm just old fashioned.
There seems to me to be a difference between "designing" a baby with genetic engineering or some such vs. simply screening a bunch of fertilized eggs and selecting the one you want. But of course, if the media called it "screening" rather than "designing," people wouldn't get nearly as worked up about it - and they know this, so they go with the more provocative language.
Kind of off-topic: but I think we're going down a slippery slope when we start screening DNA. It works against the process of evolution. What if there's a new fatal disease that only people with the breast cancer trait are equipped to fight?
Also Gattaca: society could expect a certain baseline of traits for what is "human". So people who don't meet that could be considered disabled, or worse.
I'd go even further and say any medical procedure, drug, etc. could be considered playing god. Sorry Timmy you got TB and are going to die, yes we could give you some pills to save you but that is playing god.
Personally I don't want some religion to tell me what medical procedures I can/cannot have because they think their holy book would approve/disapprove.
Except there is no god, so you can't play him. Once more, religion gets in the way of science.
Imagine all the advances in science and medicine if we could get religion out of the way.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Just screen out the religion gene while you are at it.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
What's wrong with trying to get the eye color or hair color you want? What is the difference with that and picking the sex?
I'm not sure I get it either. As a subsequent poster points out, it's screening, not "designing". Couples are choosing among existing embryos.
Screening has been going on for millions of years. Humans have always been able to choose their mates based on visible criteria like hair color, eye color, athletic ability, etc. Why is screening acceptable for invisible traits (like propensity for cancer and other genetic predispositions), but not for visible traits?
Oh please, "playing god" my ass. Screening for certain traits is as much "playing god" as having sex is "playing god." Artificial selection is not "playing god." This is completely within the bounds of the physical world, there is no magic here. Religious bullshit should be left in churches, and shouldn't interfere with scientific endeavours. And no it's not relevant even from a moral standpoint since religion has proved itself to be the utmost in immorality and perversion Humans have ever come up with. Or at least the things they do in the name of whatever mythical being they worship, religious fanaticism is more a mental disease than anything productive.
I think what you meant is that it works against the process of natural selection. Any selective process, including this type of artificial selection, furthers evolution, but in this case "fit to survive" means "able to pass the screening process." The example you chose, while still a very real concern, less to do with evolution than with genetic diversity, which, as you imply, is very important to the survival of the species should our environment change violently
You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later.
Yes, there may not be any holding back the tide, but genetic "screening", "designing", or whatever you want to call it has a real danger of helping create even more of a class-based society, this one even more difficult for individuals to breach.
Keep in mind this procedure will only available to those who can afford it.
Want to grow up to become an athlete? Sorry, your parents couldn't afford to select genes that predispose you to becoming tall / strong / better cardiovascular function.
Want to grow up to become a model? Sorry, your parents couldn't afford to give you a slender physique, blond, and blue eyes.
Want health insurance? Sure, but it's going to be more expensive because your parents couldn't afford to eliminate your risk of ALS.
The challenging part is that yeah, if I have the choice to prevent my future kids from developing life-shortening diseases, I've got to do it.
Tough ethical choices ahead of us, imho.
You stereotypers are all the same...
A particularly good film on the subject (which raises some interesting things to think about) is GATTACA. For those of you who haven't seen it, I would highly recommend it. (Kudos to OP for mentioning, too.)
The biggest issue I have with genetic modification is trying to change it without first fully comprehending it. As is oft-said by my research supervisor- "it's like trying to find out how a car works by using a sledgehammer to hit parts of the engine". If we don't understand more of it, then there's a fair chunk of damage that could result from unforeseen complications.
Then again, should something go wrong, we can feign ignorance and ask for a bailout!
Evolution - Est. 4500000000 B.C. Don't piss in the gene pool.
This really doesn't seem to be about religion to me.
I have 2 children. I love them dearly, and would never change anything about them. Part of the thrill of parenting, is the gamble about what kind of child you will end up with. To be able to choose the traits of your children, seems to make it all a bit superficial to me. Why not just grow them in a test tube?
Hell, why not just make baby farms as described in the Matrix? If we're going to take the gamble out of genetics, whats left for us?
As far as "Playing god" or whatever name you want to give it, "God" in this instance does not neccesarily refer to any given diety, but simply refers to the unknown force that normally determines the traits of your child.
I believe that there are forces in this world that we do not understand, that we should not understand, and that we should not meddle with because we don't understand them. Whether the decry came from the pope himself, or some guy living on the streets in new york, the message is still the same. By letting people choose their babies traits, we are taking away something that is profound.
When my first child was born, the first thing the nurse said to me was "Her eyes are brown... that never happens". I would not trade that moment for anything in the world.
Thomas A. Knight
Author of The Time Weaver
You misunderstand 'evolution' - it's not a process of engineering the optimal lifeform. It's a random chance thing, where you bung a load of mutations in a pot, and see which ones die. ... can you ever see humans being so conformist as to have identical children with a low biodiversity such that they're susceptible to something like that?
Engineering out or in particular traits are all well and good, but
Not that I particularly care - as far as I'm concerned for the vast majority of humanity breeding is a privilege, not a right.
I don't understand the Pope's objection. The body is nothing more than a meat machine that holds the soul. If we have the technology to improve the machine that houses the soul, what is the problem? Jesus Christ. The disciples fixed the broken machine all the time in the new testament, back then it was called a miracle. Now we have the technology to improve the lives of all future children it would be a crime not to remove genetic diseases. Why does the church insist on allowing unnecessary suffering just so that they can provide comfort to the person who is suffering? Wouldn't it be better to eradicate the suffering in the first place?
Once more, religion gets in the way of science. Imagine all the advances in science and medicine if we could get religion out of the way.
Historically speaking, the Church (Galileo notwithstanding!) and Islam during the medieval period played a very large part in encouraging the development of science, medicine, and the arts. It varied by time period and region, but the link can't be denied.
Second, one thing that confuses me about these sorts of statements is this - presumably, you think religion is just some nonsense that stupid people latch on to. But even if you get rid of religion, people are still going to be stupid. What makes you think that these stupid people won't find something else to latch on to that has the same sort of negative effects as religion? In fact, getting rid of religion might leave a vacuum that could be filled by something worse...
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
From what I understand, the principal objection of many people who are opposed to this sort of selection is that otherwise viable fertilized embryos, which do not meet the selection criteria, are discarded during the process. So, depending upon how one answers the "when does life begin?" question and the views one takes on the related issue of Abortion this sort of selection and discarding is either a choice like many others that parents make or murder; take your pick.
Part of the thrill of parenting, is the gamble about what kind of child you will end up with. To be able to choose the traits of your children, seems to make it all a bit superficial to me.
Hmm... I wonder if you would be as thrilled when the child pops out with Downs or some other genetic disease.
I'd go even further and say any medical procedure, drug, etc. could be considered playing god. Sorry Timmy you got TB and are going to die, yes we could give you some pills to save you but that is playing god.
Personally I don't want some religion to tell me what medical procedures I can/cannot have because they think their holy book would approve/disapprove.
Yawn, bringing up medical procedures and drugs is a straw man here. The issue the crazy religious folk have with this is one of life. When you administer the TB drug, you are not stopping life. When you fail to implant a fertilized egg, that is a life that was created that will never become a human being.
It's a slippery slope. If it's ok to determine whether the life lives or dies when it doesn't have a brain, then maybe it's ok to determine whether it lives or dies when it has a brain but isn't on the same level of consciousness as us (partial birth abortion, AKA murdering the baby before it's halfway out of the mother in the birthing process [-1 flamebait/troll/overrated for saying that right there!]), and so then maybe it's ok to determine whether a life lives or it dies if the majority say its future is not worth keeping it alive (forced euthanasia); and finally then it's ok for me to determine whether something lives or it dies simply because that is how I prefer it and after all I know what is better for it.
If you don't value life from the start, then you cannot somehow place more value on that life as it matures without being either inconsistent, or elitist, or both. The societal implications of not valuing the full life are drastic, and it is for our own conscience's good (and the future of our world) if we choose to value life through and through.
God, I hate that euphemism. Slippery slope. Get real people. Everyone already screens for DNA traits. Usually, though, people use secondary evidential characteristics rather than actual scientific DNA traits. I choose the DNA traits for my child. I choose someone who only had blond and red alleles for hair color and blue and green alleles for eye color. I chose the shape of the nose, the skeletal build, intelligence, etc. Ok so not all of my criteria were based on definable genes, but some were. I wound up with a blue-eyed, strawberry blonde, average height, above average intellect child. It's stupid to get upset over choosing eye and hair color.
All this means is that the new questionnaires will include questions like what color is your hair and that of your parents and siblings. Ditto on eye color.
Duh.
The people who want to choose eye color will still be able to, only not quite as foolproof, and the clinics get the DNAnazis off their back.
I totally get wanting to choose an eye and hair color that matches at least one of the parents.
He may not have flushed the point out all the way, but the fact of it is that educated people have smaller families generally than non-educated people. Look at the average family size in the ghetto, sub 20k a year earned income versus in a nice area, like Manhattan with 100k+ a year earned income.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
I don't think your sentiment was intended as insensitive, but the pain of not being able to bare one's own children is a deep and crushing pain. This pain is why people spend thousands of dollars to try to have their own? It's simplistic to write off the urge to procreate as a silly selfish thing (if it were we'd all not be here.) Adoption is NOT an easy process and can be much more expensive that in vitro fertilization. International adoptions can be even more heartbreakingly complex and expensive. Sure, if you're white you could adopt an equally deserving and precious minority kid who is less expensive (supply and demand works with human beings, too,) but then you have to consider the ramifications of how one's family will accept this child. Some families have the stomach to ignore racist Uncle Joe's comments about the "chocolate" baby, but some don't. I'm very thankful you were able to grow your own children, but it doesn't come easy to many, many people. My wife and I were facing that very issue, but were blessed to be able to have our own children with the help of some drugs. I'm not sure what we'd have done if we hadn't gotten pregnant. We're now growing our second child to be born soon and had to again use (drug) help to get pregnant. We were faced with the quesiton of (1) spend thousands on IVF (2) spends thousands on adopting a sibling for our child (3) spend else on a minority baby and face the prejudice of our families (4) put that money in our childs college fund (5) donate it to some needing 3rd world child care organization. Not an easy choice and I'm grateful we didn't have to answer that question now that we're pregnant. I agree that I don't like it either, but we started down that slippery slope when we started helping mother nature. The challenge is as a society deciding when enough is enough. I'm comfortable with stopping at weeding out the diseases, but not comfortable with the sex or "appearance" of kids. We're now in the age where there is no more "usual" way. Technology again provides too many choices for it to be simplistic any more.
"even the Pope objected"
Is it surprising that the Pope objected? He's very conservative, and doesn't even approve of contraception for people with HIV. Does he approve of IV fertilisation at all? If god wants you to have a disabled kid...
The Pope has referred to IVF as an "abomination", so no, he does not approve of IVF at all, designer eyes or no.
Someday I'll tell my daughter that she owes her existence, in part, to the fact that we aren't Catholic.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
You couldn't be more wrong or short sighted.
"Once our society begins selecting and/or rejecting offspring based on their genes, or we begin manipulating our genetic codes, evolution stops."
No it doesn't, go back and study it again.
"We won't have moved into another kind of evolution. "
That shows a serious lack of understanding of evolution.
It is not a ladder, or a tree or a chain, it's more of a bush.
Your whole premise is flawed becasue you do not understand what you are talking about and are applying cross field analogy.
Epic. Fail.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Your rant really makes no sense at all.
You see evolution is actually defined as "the change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next". The methods of change include random mutation, and natural selection but are not limited to it by any means. Because you are not using the proper definition of evolution, once we as (supposedly) intelligent beings begin modifying our own genetic code, evolution does not, in fact, stop. Rather human evolution changes from a random process to a directed process.
It is true that we could stop evolution, if we chose to do so. However, your assumption that the inevitable result is an end to change in the human genome suffers from some very large flaws. People actually have differing preferences, I'm sure there are many, many people who do not desire their children to be blue-eyed and blond Germans. If you were correct, we could reasonably expect every child to be called "Hans" or "Gretta" and frankly, even massively popular names never reach a level of ubiquity where everyone has the same name.
Furthermore, anyone with even the remotest trace of training in search algorithms can tell you that randomly selecting your results is a terrible search algorithm. It's slow, it's inefficient, and it's unbounded. Sure, eventually the correct result should be returned, but the heat death of the universe might occur first. That might be why it took about 3.7 billion years to produce us and we might represent a "lucky" search.
As far as rights go, it is an interesting question. However, you shouldn't confuse genetic tailoring with genetic cloning. At the current level parents are only able to choose between a selection of viable embryos. They are able to choose from a variety of outcomes they could have naturally produced. Even if we could rewrite the genetic code of an embryo it seems unlikely that we would change everything to the degree where we'd produce the human monoculture you dread so much.
Frankly, giving the current prevalence of capitalism, it seems unlikely that most people would be able to afford the wholesale genetic rewriting of their children for the sake of vanity. So given that our unequal distribution of wealth is a problem unlikely to disappear at any point in the foreseeable future and that companies will almost certainly charge for the service of changing your offspring's DNA, you will, most likely, find that distribution of wealth enough to create a heterogeneous genetic population before we consider religious differences, cultural differences, personal preferences, aesthetics, trends, and fashion. And let's not forget that are significant populations who would likely choose not to engage in genetic engineering.
The fact that the clinic in question offered such frivolities as eye and hair colour screening shows people are interested in how their children will look. It has nothing to do with any of your other points, at least not without some type of information on what the parents who were allowed to screen their embryos chose. If you have some evidence to show that they all chose Nordic features, please do provide it.
In closing, you keep using that word "heuristics", I do not think it means what you think it means. A "vapid heuristic" would, in all honestly, best describe random mutation, not human genetic engineering.
Fanatically anti-fanatical