Genetic Manufacturing of Babies Raises Variety of Ethical Questions
Science is on the brink of handing us the key to our own creation, of giving us the power to redesign ourselves.
There is enormous potential for good. Diseases could be eradicated, death forestalled, human potential extended. But behind that promise lurks a long, cold shadow of doubt.
What becomes of parenthood, of individuality, of the notion of fate in a world in which human beings are not just born but engineered? What will life be like in a world in which we have the power, as developmental biologist Stuart Newman puts it, to turn “human beings into manufactured objects”?
The new science that is raising these questions is called “germline engineering.” What it means is designing our babies to our own specifications. We would choose the genes that determine human potential--height, hair color, intelligence, longevity, even many personality traits--instead of leaving it up to the messy, unpredictable process of natural procreation.
Experts disagree on when this will be possible. Perhaps in 10 years. Perhaps not for many decades. But they do agree it is coming.
“We live in a huge supermarket,” says Leslie Fiedler, an essayist and cultural critic at the University of Buffalo. “And one of the things that’s going to be offered for sale in the future is making yourself a better human being. Living longer, growing taller, jumping higher.”
Some applications, such as eradicating fatal defects including cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sachs disease, unquestionably would be a boon to humankind.
But would a germline intervention that prevented obesity be the greatest public health advance of the 21st century or the pathological vice of a vain society obsessed with thinness?
People endowed with the power to shape their genetic legacy would have to decide what is normal. Are people who are mentally retarded, blind or manic depressive defective or mere variations from the norm?
Where is the line of acceptability between preventing severe birth defects, on the one hand, and genetically engineering a homogeneous race of “perfect” humans, on the other?
“The knee-jerk reaction is that I don’t want a child that has something wrong with it,” says Anne Boyle Cross, a PhD candidate at Yale University who is expecting her first child later this year. “But there are worse things than having a blind child or a mentally retarded child.”
Some parents would almost certainly demand enhancements to give their offspring advantages they themselves never had.
Ambitious parents might want to give their children genes for memory and intelligence.
Music lovers might want children with perfect pitch.
Frustrated high school heroes might want genes that would improve their kids’ chances of becoming world-class athletes.
“The question is, ‘So what?’ ” says Erik Parens, a fellow at the Hastings Center for Bioethics in Garrison, N.Y. “Don’t parents seek all the advantages they can for their children? Piano lessons, ballet lessons and the like?”
But what do you do with a kid who is genetically engineered to play football but would rather play violin?
With natural procreation, no one is to blame for our genetic makeups. They are simply the luck of the draw. But in a world where parents select their children’s genes, they would bear responsibility for every choice.
What if your parents decided against a particular genetic improvement and you felt you should have had it? Conversely, what if your parents chose a trait for you that you wish you didn’t have?
Would you be resentful? Could you sue?
This sort of thing could create incomparable anguish, especially since recent research suggests that some of the same genes that confer desirable characteristics also contribute to undesirable ones. For example, the same genes that contribute to manic depressive illness also seem to confer artistic creativity.
Disable the mental illness genes, the argument goes, and you could deprive the world of future van Goghs, Hemingways and Poes.
Yet “Starry Night,” “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Telltale Heart” were paid for with turbulent lives and violent, early deaths. Vincent van Gogh and Ernest Hemingway both committed suicide. Edgar Allan Poe drank himself to death in a Baltimore tavern.
Furthermore, genetic tinkering that would unquestionably be good for the individual could be a mixed blessing for society.
Why not bless our babies with the genes that contribute to the remarkably long lives of a small percentage of the population? But what if everyone lived to be 100? Or 120? The world would become an increasingly crowded place. How would we find room for the next generation?
Another complication: Germline engineering will not be free; not everyone will be able to afford it. Will this create a new, genetic gap between rich and poor? Will it lead to a world in which babies of the rich will be guaranteed genes for intelligence, longevity and other desirable traits while the babies of the poor will have to take their chances?
And what of the nature of parenthood itself?
Today, babies born to us are truly ours. Half of their inherited traits come from the father and half from the mother. Genetically designed babies would have genes that would come from neither side of the family. They would be the product not of blessed union but of a biotechnological revolution.
Will parents and children sense that genetic disconnection?
“I want half of those genes to be mine,” says Cross, the expectant mother. “I don’t want even 1% to be an outside party’s.”
On the verge of his 83rd birthday, essayist Fiedler has witnessed an era of great strides in medicine: the extension of life expectancy by decades, the conquest of infectious disease, the eradication of smallpox. But to what end?
“Certain diseases have disappeared from the world. And people do live longer and run faster and jump higher. But they don’t seem to be any happier,” Fiedler says. “I grew up thinking when I got old enough I would be finding some answers. And all I find is more questions.”
No one knows where germline engineering will lead, but history makes one thing clear. From the harnessing of fire to the splitting of the atom, mankind has never made a scientific discovery and then failed to use it.
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* DESIGNER BABIES
Science plays catch-up with science fiction as critics warn of consequences. A12
