# Designer babies: Gattaca is coming **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 3, 2009, 6:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172 "2009-03-03T18:25:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2009, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/41 "2009-03-04T16:52:55Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > But being a carrier for sickle cell anemia isn’t a problem. The problem is sickle cell anemia. [Actually, sickle cell trait can cause some health problems.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_trait#Symptoms) ---
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2009, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/42 "2009-03-04T17:24:05Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Why do we choose only the embryos that aren’t carriers? If malaria is a problem we could choose the carriers who have heightened resistance to malaria, and discard both those that are vulnerable to malaria and those that express sickle cell. We get the best of both, the advantage of heterozygosity without the costs of homozygosity. But you’re locking them into reproducing via this technology. If they don’t, and they marry another carrier, each of their children has a 1 in 4 chance of having sickle cell anemia. That’s a powerful incentive to keep reproducing by this method, even more so if the disease in question is, rather than sickle cell, something like Tay-Sachs that is fatal. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2009, 5:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/43 "2009-03-04T17:52:01Z")
But genetic counseling is going to be ubiquitous long before we start pumping out designer babies. Or to put it another way, anybody in the market for a designer baby is already going to have gone through genetic counseling. And so worrying that if the baby grows up and marries another carrier they’re going to have to worry about whether to have a designer baby seems odd. Unless you’re envisioning one round of designer babyhood that eliminates genetic disease everywhere across the planet, then total return to normal reproduction. But that won’t happen. We’ll have some people selecting this technology, and most people not bothering or not having access to the technology. Eliminating heterozygous embryos simply because they might have to make the choice to eliminate heterozygous embryos in the future seems like too much worrying about the future. And anyway, the only parents who have to worry about this are parents who already have the heterozygosity in the first place. Why not trust them to make decent decisions for their children? They’ve lived with the trait, they know the consequences, let them handle it. Anyway, if people decide they don’t want their child to be a carrier for Tay-Sachs or sickle cell or cystic fibrosis or hemophilia and so on, then it seems pretty churlish of us to decide that they can’t. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2009, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/44 "2009-03-04T22:41:22Z")
> [@Cisco](#): > > Part of the reason I want a girl next is because we’re only having 2 children, and part of the reason for that is the way we feel about humans’ impact on the planet. Too bad Frito Pendejo doesn’t care. ---
**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2009, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/45 "2009-03-04T22:47:49Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > Too bad Frito Pendejo doesn’t care. Yeah, shrug, the only person I can really control is myself. C’est la vie. ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2009, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/46 "2009-03-04T23:15:42Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Again, this procedure doesn’t introduce any novel genes, it is simply a way to discard potential children before they are implanted. It doesn’t create a superior baby, it merely removes ones that don’t match the parent’s goals. If you have 12 frozen embryos you could use this technique to get the pick of the litter, but that’s it. This is the part of the idea I have problems with. I don’t have any problems with trying to stack the deck in order to get the gender of baby you want. In fact, since I’d vastly prefer to have sons, I’m interested in the techiques that sort X and Y sperm to do just this. However, sorting out sperm to the “correct” gender pre-conception doesn’t create any embryos that will potentially be discarded - you’re just 75%-85% (so far) likely to get the baby gender you wanted. I don’t have any problems with screening embryos to make sure that they won’t have diseases, either, though I’d prefer more thorough genetic screening of parents before IVF is attempted in the first place. But I **do** have a problem with creating healthy embryos and not using them. This is the same issue I have when people talk about stem-cell research and defend it by saying that the embryos were left-over and would be discarded anyway: I believe it’s immoral to create more embryos than you ever intend to attempt to implant…unless you intend to [give the extras to another couple](http://www.embryodonation.org/), that is. Obviously pregnancy is a chancy thing even when IVF isn’t involved, and a lot of embryos will never implant even if they’re given the chance, but I don’t think it’s right to create them and never even give them a chance to develop. So this is my worried prediction: If this sort of baby designing process becomes common place, it’ll become yet another moral issue for a lot of people. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2009, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/47 "2009-03-04T23:36:07Z")
This isn’t baby designing. There are just as many embryos created as there are with traditional IVF. If you think discarding extra embryos created via IVF is wrong you shouldn’t be getting IVF in the first place. This kind of selection is not going to become commonplace. It will be chosen only by people who would have IVF anyway, or couples who are both carriers for a serious genetic disease and want to ensure that their children won’t have the disease. Nobody’s going to go through IVF just to make sure their baby doesn’t have brown hair. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2009, 12:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/48 "2009-03-05T00:41:39Z")
> [@Frodo](#): > > I concurr with \*\*CutterJohn \*\*in not understanding what was so wrong about the baby making in Gattaca, so, some babies are not genetically engineered (in the movie it was by choice IIRC), and they can not compete with the genetically engineered ones, whats the difference with people being educated in better universities, receiving better food as childs, etc?, if anything the fault was with the parents for not choosing to have their babies geneengineered. I didn’t get the impression the main character’s brother was genetically engineered. Rather, he’d be prenatally subjected to a series of genetic filtering to weed out undesirable traits. It was remotely conceivable (heh) that his parents would have had such a child naturally. They’d chosen not to do so for their first child and regretted it. The twelve-fingered pianist, though… ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2009, 2:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/49 "2009-03-05T02:03:51Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > You’d probably end up with a larger overall population, but yes, it wouldn’t lead to a huge explosion. Actually, wealth and lowered mortality rates have consistently led to lower population in the long run, as social norms shift toward putting more resources into fewer children. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2009, 11:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/50 "2009-03-05T11:39:44Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > The twelve-fingered pianist, though… Nah, I’d prefer 3 hands. One hand bass, one hand accompaniment and one hand melody. …or is “twelve-fingered pianist” actually meant to be a euphamism? ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2009, 12:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/51 "2009-03-05T12:14:17Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > …or is “twelve-fingered pianist” actually meant to be a euphamism? You’re thinking of “twelve-_inch_ pianist.” > [@Steve MB](#): > > Actually, wealth and lowered mortality rates have consistently led to lower population in the long run, as social norms shift toward putting more resources into fewer children. I think it just depends on how long the long run is: wealth has been going up in the West for decades, and so did population - only recently did birth rates fall below the replacement level, and even then I’m sure the populations are larger than they were decades ago. They’re just not as large as they once were. I’m not sure how long the decline is expected to continue. ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2009, 12:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/52 "2009-03-05T12:35:53Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Right, which is why when our children have serious communicable diseases we destroy them. There are treatments for Foot & Mouth which don’t involve destroying the herds. ---
**Author:** ![brazil84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/8491ac/32.png) [@brazil84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brazil84)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2009, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/53 "2009-03-05T13:36:38Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > The difference is that hundreds of millions of parents will be making these decisions, not three or four agricultural conglomerates. Unless you imagine that there will be three or four varieties of child available, and parents will have to choose between them. That won’t happen, parents will still want their own children in almost all cases, and uncontrolled matings will still take place. > > The analogy to food crops is poor because humans don’t reproduce in the same way plants do. Even an analogy to livestock is poor, because farmers don’t feel an attachment to their own particular breeds of sheep the way humans feel attachments to their own particular children. I agree 100%. Even today, it’s not too hard to find a sperm donor who probably has genes for height, intelligence, athleticism, etc. which are superior (in the sense of being more socialy desired) than perhaps 75% of men. Would any men make use of such a service? Besides folks who have fertility problems, I tend to doubt it. Most people like the idea that their kids are (biologically) their kids. ---
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2009, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/54 "2009-03-05T13:51:32Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Anyway, if people decide they don’t want their child to be a carrier for Tay-Sachs or sickle cell or cystic fibrosis or hemophilia and so on, then it seems pretty churlish of us to decide that they can’t. Do we draw a line anywhere? If so, where? Say a deaf parent wants a deaf child. Do we let them select an embryo with the gene for deafness and discard embryos that would become children with normal hearing? ---
**Author:** ![Chief\_Pedant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@Chief\_Pedant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chief_Pedant)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2009, 2:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/55 "2009-03-05T14:18:07Z")
> [@Anne\_Neville](#): > > Do we draw a line anywhere? If so, where? Say a deaf parent wants a deaf child. Do we let them select an embryo with the gene for deafness and discard embryos that would become children with normal hearing? By what mechanism would any proscription of trait selection be executed, particularly in a society comfortable with abortion-at-will for embryos and fetuses? All of the traits we care about–intelligence, looks, personality, athleticism, creativity…–are obviously mostly genetic. Peek into any large family and scope out the variation among offspring controlled for essentially identical environmental influences, and see for yourself. Should a set of parents decide they want a short, ugly, fat, retarded, deaf and blind kid prone to disease, it will not be possible to write laws prohibiting that. It’s unlikely such parents will find an agent willing to create such children on purpose since the ability to perform the actual science depends on intelligence, and it doesn’t seem like too bright an idea. But in principle it’s possible some agent somewhere thinks the world needs more epsilons to serve the alphas, and it would be hard to proscribe that, especially if it’s being done as a one-off versus a factory creating thousands. It’s not likely to be an extremely common decision, although I do agree the militant anti-cochlear implant crowd stands out as a nice example of some of the oddball choices. I suspect the pro-Retarded Culture and pro-Weakling Culture ranks will be thinner than the pro-Deaf Culture ranks, though. ---
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2009, 2:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/56 "2009-03-05T14:45:01Z")
> [@Chief\_Pedant](#): > > By what mechanism would any proscription of trait selection be executed, particularly in a society comfortable with abortion-at-will for embryos and fetuses? India tries to do it. Abortion is legal there, but abortion for sex selection is not. The laws against sex-selective abortion aren’t very effective, though. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2009, 2:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/57 "2009-03-05T14:48:48Z")
> [@Anne\_Neville](#): > > Do we draw a line anywhere? If so, where? Say a deaf parent wants a deaf child. Do we let them select an embryo with the gene for deafness and discard embryos that would become children with normal hearing? How do “we” stop them? The biggest obstacle for a parent who deliberately choses to select a disabled child is finding a clinic that will comply with their wishes. So they’ll have to shop around. And besides, as I said earlier you still have to go through IVF which isn’t all sunshine and puppydogs. Even if a deaf couple really wants a deaf child, are they really going to resort to IVF and embryo screening to accomplish it? The idea of implied consent should be our guideline in any discussion of human genetic engineering. That is, since the embryo can’t consent to any modifications, we have to put ourselves in their place and ask if a reasonable person would consent. If a bleeding and unconscious person is found on the sidewalk they’re going to be sent to the hospital and patched up, even though they are unconscious and can’t give consent because we recognize that a reasonable person would consent if only they could consent. Sure there are the occassional Christian Scientists who get medical treatment they would otherwise decline, but so what? And so we can easily imagine a person consenting to gene therapy to fix cystic fibrosis. We can imagine a person consenting to gene therapy to make them more athletic, smarter, even more attractive. But we can’t imagine someone consenting to be turned into a circus freak, or a natural slave. So doctors will refuse any requests to produce freaks or epsilon laborers, just as they refuse requests to amputate healthy limbs. And the other protection is that since we don’t allow slavery in this country, any child created will have all the rights of any other child. That is, they won’t be owned by a corporation. They will have parents, and if the parents are unfit their parental rights can be terminated and the child placed for adoption. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2009, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/58 "2009-03-05T20:24:06Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > …or is “twelve-fingered pianist” actually meant to be a euphamism? No, in the movie _Gattaca_, the main characters attend a recital by a pianist with twelve fingers, playing a piece of music specifically composed for someone like him. This is the only moment in the movie where the results of significant genetic engineering was shown, as far as I know. The impression I had was that (for the most part) the genetic elite were the product of weeding out undesirable traits, rather than adding new ones (and an newborn’s genetic profile and potential was read after birth, not before or at conception). We’re already doing this for major genetic disorders. ---
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2009, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/59 "2009-03-05T20:55:56Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > And so we can easily imagine a person consenting to gene therapy to fix cystic fibrosis. We can imagine a person consenting to gene therapy to make them more athletic, smarter, even more attractive. But we can’t imagine someone consenting to be turned into a circus freak, or a natural slave. So doctors will refuse any requests to produce freaks or epsilon laborers, just as they refuse requests to amputate healthy limbs. But there are less obvious cases, like the example of deafness I brought up earlier. What if the prospective parent is deaf and considers the benefits of Deaf culture to more than make up for the inability to hear, and wants their child to be deaf so they can be a part of that culture? Or what if a parent wants a gay child (assuming gayness turns out to be genetically controlled)? Being gay does put you at a huge disadvantage in some parts of the country, but a lot of gay people wouldn’t switch to being straight if they could. What if whoever is in charge of making these decisions at the clinic believes that being gay is morally wrong? Do we let them impose that judgment and refuse to implant an embryo with the “gay gene”? [The California Supreme Court has already ruled that fertility clinics in California can’t refuse to serve a gay patient on moral grounds.](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/19/BA2212D6H4.DTL) Do we extend that to not letting them refuse to create a gay designer baby? If we do, though, that probably (IANAL) means you have to let a parent deliberately create a handicapped designer baby- discrimination against the handicapped is illegal, too. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2009, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172/60 "2009-03-05T21:46:45Z")
Yes, discrimination against the handicapped is illegal. That doesn’t make it legal for me to snap someone’s spine and turn them into a paraplegic, does it? It’s not discrimination against the handicapped to refuse to allow a parent to handicap their child. We can allow parents to deliberately create a black child, a gay child, or a female child without allow allowing them to deliberately create a child with some horrible disease. I’m sure that this technology will occasionally be used for dubious means, or even outright morally wrong means. But what’s the point in getting all worked up over it? We have parents inflicting horrible pain on their children right now today, and it’s bad, but we somehow endure. We try to stop child abuse and minimize the damage of child abuse and we get on with our lives. If someone at the fertillity clinic believes homosexuality is morally wrong and refuses to implant an otherwise healthy embryo that has genes associated with homosexuality, then parents of that embryo can fire him and take their embryo across the street to someone whose moral values are similar to theirs. The clinic can’t impose that judgement because there won’t be just one clinic. The caveat is that almost all clinics will be staffed by people who are answerable to professional ethics boards, and if they violate the ethical standards of their profession they can have their license to practice revoked. All that means is that clinics will be staffed by people who’s ethical views are broadly shared by the larger society. If society changes to the point where creating circus freaks and slave laborers seems fine to them, well then I guess the clinics are going to go along. But this doesn’t strike me as very likely, and anyway if society changes to the point where we allow slavery the fact that we allow the slavery of designer babies isn’t the problem, the problem is that we allow slavery. Technology has nothing to do with it. And so if a few people have moral qualms about creating gay babies it won’t matter because most people won’t. And the worry about Deaf parents wanting deaf children is likely going to be moot anyway, because most deafness isn’t hereditary. And the deaf parents want deaf kids thing is waaay overblown. We could start another thread about it–wait, here’s a multi-page thread from last summer about deaf stuff: [Fuck you, Deaf "Community" - The BBQ Pit - Straight Dope Message Board](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=473973). I don’t know if anyone seriously wants to hash over this issue, but believe me it’s pretty much a non-issue and as time goes on it will become even more of a non-issue. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/designer-babies-gattaca-is-coming/488172.md?page=2)