"Designer Babies?"

[dragon wench]

Here's a thorny question with all kinds of perspectives... A programme I saw recently on TV reminded me of it....

Thoughts?



Special Focus on Designer Babies - The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

The Problem

Is it ethical for doctors and parents to "design" a baby by selecting or altering an embryo they wish to bring to term? Should it be legal? Should there be limits to the practice?

Background
"Designer babies" is a term used by journalists and commentators - not by scientists - to describe several different reproductive technologies. These technologies have one thing in common: they give parents more control over what their offspring will be like.
Designer babies are made possible by progress in three fields:
ADVANCED REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY. In the two decades since the first "test tube baby" was born, reproductive medicine has helped countless women conceive and bear children. Today there are hundreds of thousands of humans who were conceived thanks to in vitro fertilization - the practice of mixing eggs and sperm outside the womb. Other advanced reproductive technologies include frozen embryos, egg and sperm donations, surrogate motherhood, pregnancies by older women, and the direct injection of a sperm cell into an egg.
CELL AND CHROMOSOME MANIPULATION. The past decade has seen astonishing breakthroughs in our knowledge of cell structure. Our ability to transfer chromosomes (the long threads of DNA in each cell) has led to major developments in cloning. Our knowledge of stem cells (generic "starter" cells that eventually differentiate into other types of cells) will make many new therapies possible. As we learn more about how reproduction works at the cellular level, we can have more control over the earliest stages of a baby's development.
GENETICS AND GENOMICS. With the mapping of the human genome in 2000, our understanding of how DNA affects human development is only just beginning. Someday, we might be able to switch bits of DNA on or off as we wish, or replace sections of DNA at will; research in that direction is already well underway.

Two Key Things to Remember
Human reproduction is a tricky business. There are many factors involved in producing a baby: the genetic constitution of the parents, the condition of the parents' egg and sperm, and the health and behavior of the impregnated mother. When you also consider the enormous complexity of the human genome, with its billions of DNA pairs, it becomes clear that reproduction will always have an element of unpredictability.
To a certain extent, we have always hoped to control our children's characteristics through our selection of mates. New technologies will give us more power to influence our children's "design" - but our control will still be far from total.

What are the Different Techniques for "Designing Babies"?
Unfortunately, since the term "designing babies" is so imprecise, it is difficult to untangle its various meanings in the public mind so as to make judgments about which techniques are acceptable. Below are several different procedures described by the term "designing babies"; please notice that some of these techniques do not yet exist.
SCREENING EMBRYOS FOR HIGH-RISK DISEASES. Some parents have a high likelihood of passing on the genes for a disease. Many inherited diseases, such as cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease, can be detected very early using a technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PDG). This procedure, first used in 1990, helps doctors detect severe genetic disorders very early in a pregnancy. If it is used to screen test tube babies, an embryo with an inherited condition need never be implanted in the womb.
SCREENING EMBRYOS FOR UNKNOWN DISEASES. The PDG technique could also be used to screen embryos even when there is no known risk of inheriting diseases. Also, doctors could screen for unpredictable disorders in the chromosomes - disorders which could result in miscarriage, birth defects, or diseases like Down's syndrome.
SELECTING THE SEX OF A BABY. There are legitimate medical reasons to prefer a male or a female child; for instance, many diseases can only be passed on through the male line or the female line of descendants. While there has been some recent progress in selecting the sex before fertilization (by dividing the sperm likely to produce males from those likely to produce females), the sex of an embryo can more easily be determined after fertilization through PDG. It can also be determined several weeks into pregnancy - at which point an abortion is required if the baby is not of the desired sex.
PICKING AN EMBRYO FOR ITS SPECIFIC TRAITS. This is not really possible today, but it is imaginable that as our understanding of the human genome improves, doctors might be able to develop a general genetic profile of several fertilized embryos. The parents could then choose an embryo based on its profile - although there would be no guarantees that the baby would grow to match its profile. This method has no therapeutic value.
GENETIC MANIPULATION FOR THERAPEUTIC REASONS. As our knowledge of the human genome increases - and as our ability to modify it improves - we will be able to fix diseased or defective embryos at the genetic level. This technique is called germ line therapy, which refers to the fact that it would be performed on an egg, a sperm or a small fertilized embryo. Defective sections of DNA could be replaced with healthy DNA. Although, to date, there is no practical way to do this for humans, there have been several recent breakthroughs.
GENETIC MANIPULATION FOR COSMETIC REASONS. It is conceivable that someday, the same technique used for genetic therapy could also be used for selecting other genetic characteristics. It is nowhere near possible today, but in the future, inherited characteristics like eye color, hair color or height could be selected with some rudimentary amount of control. Other characteristics, however, such as intelligence, athleticism and beauty are so greatly influenced by environmental factors (such as parenting and nutrition) that genetic manipulation is never likely to have more than a slight effect.

Arguments FOR Designing Babies

Basic Arguments For Designing Babies
Using these techniques can help prevent certain genetic diseases, saving the children from debilitation and reducing the financial and emotional strain on the parents. If we want the best for our children, why shouldn't we use technology?
As of today, these techniques are only used by parents who need the help of fertility clinics to have children. Since they are investing so much time, energy and money in their effort to have a baby, shouldn't they have a healthy one?
A great many naturally-conceived embryos are rejected from the womb for defects; by screening embryos, we are doing what nature would normally do on our behalf.
"Imagine the reaction there would be if organ transplantation were prohibited because it is 'unnatural' -- though that is what some people called for when transplantation was a medical novelty. It is hard to see how the replacement of a defective gene is any less 'natural' than the replacement of a defective organ. Indeed, the major difference is the entirely beneficial one that medical intervention need occur only once around the time of conception, and the benefits would be inherited by the child and its descendants." - Dr. Roger Gosden[1]

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[dragon wench]

Arguments AGAINST Designing Babies

Basic Arguments Against Designing Babies
"Even people who might welcome the growth of genetic knowledge and technology are worried about the power of geneticists, genetic engineers, and any governmental authority armed with genetic technology. Precisely because we have been taught by these very scientists that genes hold the secret of life, and that our genotype is our essence if not quite our destiny, we are made nervous by those whose expert knowledge and technique touches our very being." - Dr. Leon Kass
We could get carried away "correcting" perfectly healthy babies. Once we start down the slippery slope of eliminating embryos because they are diseased, what is to stop us from picking babies for their physical or their psychological traits?
There is always the looming shadow of eugenics - the practice of "improving" the human gene pool by eliminating undesirables. This was the motivation for some government policies in Europe and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century - including forced sterilizations, selective breeding and "racial hygiene." Eugenics is also practiced in China today, and the techniques for designing babies give us dangerous new powers to express our genetic stereotypes and preferences.
There are major social concerns. Will we breed a race of super-humans who look down on those without genetic enhancements? Will these new technologies only be available to the wealthy - resulting in a lower class which still suffers from inherited disabilities and diseases? Will discrimination against people already born with disabilities increase, if they are perceived as genetically inferior?
Economic pressures might come to play a role in making design choices regarding new babies. Insurance companies, for instance, may refuse to cover a newborn with a condition that could have been corrected before birth, thus forcing parents to design their child. There is a connected concern about transferring the process of procreation from the home to the lab, and turning it into a manufacturing process.
Tampering with the human genetic structure might actually have unintended (and unpredictable) consequences that could damage the gene pool.
Many of these baby-designing techniques can be considered unethical, because they treat each embryo as a means for someone else's happiness, instead of as an end in itself.
Many of the procedures related to designing babies involve terminating an embryo, either inside or outside the womb; this is anathema to those who disapprove of aborting fetuses on moral or religious grounds.

What Happens Next?

Because the term "designing babies" describes so many different procedures, there are many different laws affecting the practice. Some countries, such as the U.S., have placed relatively light regulation on these procedures, only limiting the amount of government money that can be spent on related research. Other nations, such as the UK, seem headed toward greater regulation of "designing babies," at least in part because a number of high-profile cases have captured the public imagination and provoked heated debates. In the EU, many of the procedures related to designing babies are outlawed.

As our technical abilities progress, citizens will have to cope with the ethical implications of designing babies, and governments will have to define a regulatory course. We will have to answer some fundamental questions: How much power should parents and doctors have over the design of their children? How much power should government have over parents and doctors? As always, our judgments should be based on the facts and on our social beliefs.

[C Elegans]

I am working so I can't expand much on this complex topic right now, but in summary: it has already started and there is not turn back. In the US, where it's legal to do it, people are already paying vast sums of money for donor sperm/eggs from people with high IQ, successful careers and specific looks. You can also choose gender of your baby with IVF:

In other Western countries, IVF and genotyping is used for medical reasons.

There will be no turn back whatever we think of it.

[Chimaera182]

Given the fact that I am facing several "defects" which have been making my life some kind of miserable lately, I'm not totally averse to the altering of genes to keep those same defects from plaguing my kids. I wouldn't wish my gaggle of breathing problems on anyone. I have a deviated septum--one viable nostril for breathing, the other one can inhale very little to no air--plus the asthma, plus the allergies which both excite my asthma as well as clog my nostrils, and on top of that the sleep apnea, which means i have more than usual tissue in my throat (and that means I stop breathing while I sleep, although lately I find myself having to force myself to breathe even while awake). If I had a kid, I wouldn't even wish half of those problems on him/her. To keep my children from inheriting a copious amount of bad things, I'm not entirely against that. But to alter babies so they'll be more intelligent, stronger, faster, aesthetically beautiful... That's a completely different matter. To be perfectly honest, I'm not even all too sure I am really for altering embryos to eliminate defects like I mentioned.