Not Ready for the ‘Gattaca” Yet

A while back, the Fertility Institute—with offices in Los Angeles, New York, and Mexico--began to offer prospective parents the option to predetermine their baby’s gender, hair color, eye color, and other physical traits through in vitro fertilization (IVF). Because of great public outrage, the clinic decided to shut the program down on Mar. 2.

Dr. Jeff Steinberg, director of Fertility Institute said, referring to designer babies, “I think it’s very important that we not bury our head in the sand and pretend these advances are not happening.”

Beginning in the 1990s, we were able to test embryos for certain diseases such as Tay-Sachs and Down’s syndrome through a technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD).

In 1997, PGD was able to predetermine the baby’s sex with 97% accuracy. According to Time magazine, the first couple to utilize this technique was looking to escape from the deadly disease known as X-linked hydrocephalus, or water in the brains, which almost always affect boys. Using PGD, another couple gave birth to a long-wished-for daughter.

To select gender, PGD utilizes the fact that the father provides the Y chromosome that is used to produce a boy, whereas, the mother can only provide the X chromosome. By staining the Y chromosome with a light-sensitive dye, sperms can be sorted out.

In Oct. 2007, Dr. William Kearns, a medical geneticist of the Shady Grove Center for Preimplantation Genetics in Rockville, MD, said that he had enough data to identify genes that relate to northern European skin, hair, and eye pigmentation in 80% of the samples.

"I'm not going to do designer babies," says Dr. Kearns. "I won't sell my soul for a dollar."

The main concern with designing your baby is how that would affect the gene pool, or genetic diversity, and the child’s identity and development.

Putting the issue into perspective, PGD is a good thing in terms of widening the genetic diversity. Unlike genetically modified corns, which are essentially clones, the human species will not be wiped out when disaster occurs.

The human being has 22 pairs of autosomal, non-sex chromosomes, and each chromosome contains hundreds of genes. If you do the math, there are a near infinite number of gene combinations.

As for the “test-tube baby”, he/she may suffer from identity crisis during their childhood. We are known to characterize a person’s race by their physical features, such as hair color, eye color, skin color, and complexion. A blonde hair, blue-eyed baby born through IVF with genetic pre-screening may categorize him/herself as Asian but may be treated as a Caucasian because of his/her features.

Each generation descending from the “test-tube baby” will inherit the same identity crisis. On the bright side, as PGD becomes more widely used, the issue of race is disbanded because of the lack of ability to characterize race from facial features.

Dr. Arthur Caplan, Ph.D, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, is concerned about the child’s development. “This can lead to false expectations on children,” Dr. Caplan explains. “The parents may pick a child to be smart, and he or she doesn’t succeed, then they become upset because they invested money and didn’t get what they want.”

In the long term, being able to mix and match genes is a great discovery. It would save the human species from being wiped out and the world from racial conflicts.

The greatest problem that lies in the capability of mixing and matching traits is that the technology is expanding too fast for the general population to grasp. The transition from IVF in the 1980s to being able to pre-screen for diseases and being able to choose the sex of the baby, to choosing physical traits took only 20 years.

Just like other technology that are available like the computer and cell phones, there is no turning back. However, I did write this with paper and pen before I typed it onto Microsoft Words.