Designer kids - smart, healthy, athletic - are about to knock on our doors. Are we ready for them? Bioethics specialist Thomas Murray from the non-profit research center of Hastings (USA) tries to answer this question in the journal Science.
What is the use of such offspring? What restrictions should be placed on parents and doctors? The topic is not out of thin air: in February, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) met to consider conducting clinical trials of genetic manipulation methods that prevent mitochondrial diseases.
The layman has been scared by designer children since the 1990s, when talk began about human cloning and the creation of people endowed with superpowers. At that time, the proposed methods were mostly purely speculative, but now genetic selection has gone so far that such rumors no longer seem like fantasy. For example, today parents can order pre-implantation genetic diagnostics, that is, checking the embryos created using IVF for a predisposition to diseases, as well as gender.
Such a diagnosis is possible even after ordinary conception, because fragments of fetal DNA circulate in the bloodstream of a pregnant woman. In addition, recently it became known about the successful extraction of defective mitochondria from an egg, replacing it with healthy ones from a donor one.
It is not yet possible to test future children for genes that determine intelligence, hair color or athletic ability, but, according to some, this is temporary. 23andMe recently applied for a patent relating to such tests. True, it is not very clear how she is going to implement this idea, because intelligence or, say, growth is determined by the complex interaction of dozens of genes, as well as the environment. More likely, it seems, screening the entire genome of the fetus for predisposition to diseases in the long term - to Alzheimer's disease or diabetes, for example.
Medical organizations view these perspectives differently. Thus, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine takes into account the wishes of clients regarding the sex of the unborn child, while the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists prohibits gender selection in order to avoid gender discrimination. The FDA only cares about the safety and effectiveness of the proposed methods, leaving ethical issues aside.
But it is to them that Mr. Murray devotes his material. Is it good or not to be a designer kid? The Thinker suggests starting from this question. If parents get the opportunity to determine the traits of their future child, will it not become a habit for them to guide their child in everything, depriving him of the right to choose?
And what will they say when it turns out that gene manipulation did not lead to the birth of the person they wanted? “You can order an individual with the characteristics of Michael Jordan, who will hate basketball and become an accountant,” writes Mr. Murray.
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But not everyone agrees that the issue of designer kids raises new and important ethical issues. For example, philosopher Bonnie Steinbock from the University of Albany (USA) does not see anything fundamentally new here in comparison with traditional methods of parental influence on a child through sports sections, music lessons and the most ordinary upbringing. “If it seems to us that the desire of parents to raise an intelligent and kind person is wrong, then let's refuse to be parents altogether and leave the children to themselves, throwing them out on the street,” she says.
John Robertson, professor of law and bioethics at the University of Texas at Austin (USA), also does not consider it necessary to introduce any special rules. If, for example, musicality is highly valued in a family, then there is no reason to forbid parents to choose an embryo with perfect hearing genes. If a child wants to play football, and he is forced to master the trombone, this may not be very good from a certain point of view, but at the state level such things are not yet regulated, and thank God.