Green Eyed, Blonde, and an Einstein

One of those controversies from last summer that somehow passed me by while I was teaching in Italy was the mash up over the Fertility Institutes decision first to offer a service allowing parents to choose basic traits for their children (hair and  eye color, etc.) and then its subsequent retreat in the face of an ethical uproar.

The Institute did and still does provide screening for many diseases as well pre-selection options for sex (it has a 100% success rate on pre-selecting sex of the child). But the uproar over hair and eye color was too much to bear.

One question raised by this is why we allow screening for sex preference and disease, but not hair color? Consider that discrimination is much more prevalent in the areas of disability and sex than it is around eye color. So we permit the erasure or compensation for those traits and conditions that society deems meaningful, but prohibit the choice around less impactful traits.

In a March 9, 2009 WIRED online interview, James Hughes--who will be speaking at the Arendt Center's October conference Human Being in an Inhuman Age--defends the rights of parents to make such choices. And he rejects the term "designer babies." As he said in the H+ interview:

“It’s inevitable, in the broad context of freedom and choice. And the term ‘designer babies’ is an insult to parents, because it basically says parents don’t have their kids’ best interests at heart.” He said, “If I’ve got a dozen embryos I could implant, and the ones I want to implant are the green-eyed ones, or the blond-haired ones, that’s an extension of choices we think are perfectly acceptable — and restricting them a violation of our procreative autonomy.

In a poll cited by H+, the majority of respondents supported pre-genetic implantation in questions of health, but most drew the line somewhere around selecting for athletic ability or intelligence.

More recently, a January 2009 study by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center found that an overwhelming 75% of parents would be in favor of trait selection using PGD – as long as that trait is the absence of mental retardation. A further 54% would screen their embryos for deafness, 56% for blindness, 52% for a propensity to heart disease, and 51% for a propensity to cancer. Only 10% would be willing to select embryos for better athletic ability, and 12.6% would select for greater intelligence. 52.2% of respondents said that there were no conditions for which genetic testing should never be offered, indicating widespread support for PGD – as long as it’s for averting disease and not engineering human enhancement.

It seems that there are at least two worries that need to be thought through. One is socio-economic. To allow for-profit companies to genetically implant desired traits means that those who can pay for it and want to will ensure their progeny genetic advantage. Now, genetic advantage does not mean one will succeed, but it is an advantage--at least a perceived advantage even if not always a real one.

The second question is broader. If Hannah Arendt and others are right that one part of our humanity is that we are subject to chance and to fate, then the opportunity to control all decisions in life--including the decision of life itself--raises questions about our humanity. As the mystery is taken from childbirth, one of the great human experiences begins to approximate the experience of ordering from a catalogue. Of course, this is not yet the case. But with surrogacy pregnancies and genetic implants, it is now possible to go on vacation, order a boy with green eyes, blonde hair, and high intelligence, and come home to pick him up. Is this a human way to have children? Is it human to eradicate disease? What about creating such healthy people that they live to be 700 years old, as Ray Kurzweil imagines will soon be the case?

One needs to think: What it means to be Human in a World of Super-Human Technologies.

Read More in the original H+ Magazine Story

And read about the latest clone mammal, Got, the Spanish fighting Bull.

RB