Run for the hills, the designer babies are coming!
Britian is only a "hop, skip, and a jump" away from the nightmare vision of social engineering portrayed in Aldous Huxley's science fiction classic "Brave New World", according to the chairman of the British Medical Association Welsh Council.
As the UK government considers whether to lift the ban on gender selection for family balancing, Dr. Tony Calland warns that allowing parents to use sex selection on non-medical grounds puts us on the dreaded "slippery slope" toward Huxley's science fiction dystopia, where the inhabitants are standardized, laboratory-grown clones, pre-programmed to be members of the upper class or desgined to be worker drones.
"There are a lot of people who will see any loosening of this Act as a further step on the slippery slope - the end point being where you decide that you want a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl who is bright and good at tennis. That takes us down a road which, to my mind, is Brave New World territory. ... We are now a hop, skip and a jump away from it and that makes me very uncomfortable."
Although I'm quite a science fiction fan myself, just for the heck of it let's check out the science facts.
- Scientists do not know which gene combinations are responsible for complex traits like intelligence, athletic ability, leadership, beauty, and so on.
- Scientists cannot alter an embryo's genetic makeup to produce a desired trait, such as eye color, or even to correct a defect, such as having a disease gene. So far, this has been accomplished only in laboratory animals, and not entirely successfully. Many attempts at genetic modifications introduce unwanted mutations with extreme developmental consequences, even death. We are not a "hop, skip, and a jump" away from using this on humans experimentally, much less on a widespread basis.
- Parents cannot design a baby with many desired traits by genetic screening. Although you have seen dozens of news stories about so-called "designer babies" like Jamie Whitaker, the term design is actually incorrect. It's only used because the media knows it's an attention-grabber.
In fact, scientists can merely select an embryo which already has a desired trait. The embryo is still the natural, unaltered offspring of the parents. Genetic screening can do no more than simply identify whether an embryo has a desired trait or not.
So what would stop parents from writing a laundry list of desirable traits for their baby, and selecting only embryos that match?
Parents are limited simply by the number of their embryos available to choose from. As anyone who has been through IVF knows, during each IVF attempt, only a very limited number of viable, healthy embryos can be produced. It just isn't feasible to screen for several "designer" characteristics. Dr. Robert Jansen explains it very well:
First, no gene (unless both parents have it) is going to appear in more than, on average, half the embryos.
Second, how the different genes (all 32,000 or more of them) assort with each other is totally out of our hands, even in an IVF lab. In a restricted number of embryos, as is always the case after egg retrieval and IVF, probably much less than half will even be normal (in terms of having the normal number of chromosomes); of these, on average no more than half will have one wanted gene, no more than a quarter will have two wanted ones, an eighth will have three ... and so on. If you want to get too picky, you quickly run out of embryos.
As for the "slippery slope" -- although gender selection using MicroSort and PGD has been available in the US for a number of years (I used MicroSort 5 years ago), I certainly haven't noticed any tendency for Americans to give up procreating the good old fashioned way.
(Note to Dr. Calland: War of the Worlds isn't real, either; please do not be alarmed.)