Imagine it’s 2045. You start hearing rumors from your wealthy friends about a mysterious business based on an unknown island that offers an unprecedented service: the ability to genetically design your baby.
The baby will have some of your genetics and some genetics from a sperm or egg donor of your choice. But the rest of your child’s genetic profile will be designed by science. These changes make it impossible for your child to develop genetic diseases. It also allows you to customize your child for dozens of traits, including intelligence level, emotional disposition, sexual orientation, height, skin color, hair color and eye color, to name a few.
This raises troubling philosophical questions among some customers. “When does my child stop being my child?” they ask the corporate representatives. These cautious customers are reminded of how risky it is to reproduce the old-fashioned way. The motto of the Better Genetics Corporation sums it up: “Only God plays dice – humans do not have to.”
This is the world described in a new science fiction series by Eugene Clark entitled “Genetic Pressure”, which explores the moral and scientific implications of a future in which designer babies become an important industry. The first book begins with the story of Rachel, a well-known horse breeder who befriends a billionaire client, and soon gets the funding to visit the tropical island on which the Better Genetics Corporation is headquartered.
There, drivers guide her through the process of designing a baby – an experience that feels like a strange mix between a doctor and a luxury car. The series is told from various perspectives and serves as a deep dive into an intricate moral web that today’s scientists can weave.
[T]The introduction of designer babies would create a labyrinth of philosophical dilemmas that society had first begun to explore.
Example: In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced that he had helped create the world’s first genetically engineered babies. With the gene processing tool CRISPR on embryos, He Jiankui adapted a gene called CCR5, which enables HIV to enter and infect the immune system. Its purpose was to design children who are immune to the virus.
It is unclear whether he succeeded. But what is certain is that the experiment shocked the international scientific community, who generally agree that it is unethical to perform no-till procedures on humans, as scientists do not yet fully understand the consequences.
“This experiment is monstrous,” said Julian Savulescu, a professor of practical ethics at Oxford University. The guardian. “The embryos were healthy. No known diseases. Gene processing is experimental and is still associated with off-target mutations, which can cause genetic problems early in life, including the development of cancer.”
It is important that He Jiankui did not treat a disease, but rather genetic manipulation of babies to prevent the future shrinkage of a virus. These types of changes are hereditary, meaning the experiment could have major downstream effects on future generations. So does a designer baby industry, even if scientists can do it safely.
With the huge implications on inequality, discrimination, sexuality and our perceptions of life, the introduction of designer babies would create a labyrinth of philosophical dilemmas that society would first begin to explore.
Tribalism and discrimination
One question exploring the “Genetic Pressure” series: What will tribalism and discrimination look like in a world of designer babies? As designer babies grow up, they can differ markedly from other people, who may be smarter, more attractive, and healthier. This can lead to resentment between the groups – as in the series.
“[Designer babies] author Eugene Clark slowly finds that ‘everyone else’, and even their own parents, are becoming less and less tolerant. “Meanwhile, everyone else is slowly feeling threatened by the designers.”
One character in the series, born as a baby of the designers, is confronted, for example, by discrimination and harassment of “normal people” – they call her “soulless” and say she was “made in a factory”, ‘ ‘a consumer product’.
Would such division arise in the real world? The answer may depend on who can afford the design of baby services. If it’s just the ultra-rich, then it’s easy to imagine how a design baby can be seen by society as a kind of hyper-privilege that designer babies have to take into account.
Even though people with all socio-economic backgrounds can afford designer babies, people born as designer babies can struggle with difficult existential questions: can they ever earn full credit for things they achieve, or were they born with an unfair advantage? To what extent should they spend their lives helping underprivileged people?
Sexuality dilemmas
Sexuality raises a number of other thorny questions. If one day a design industry allows people to optimize people for attractiveness, designer babies can grow up and be surrounded by extremely attractive people. This may not sound like a big deal.
But think that, if designer babies one day become the standard way to have children, there will inevitably be a long gap in which only some people get babies. Meanwhile, the rest of society would have children in the old-fashioned way. In terms of attractiveness, society can increasingly see differences in physical appearance between the two groups. ‘Normal people’ can look uglier and uglier.
But ultra-attractive people born as designers can also run into problems. One can be the loss of body image.
When designers grow babies in the “Genetic Pressure” series, men look like all the other men, and women look like all the other women. This homogeneity of physical appearance occurs as parents of designer babies begin to follow trends, and everyone chooses similar characteristics for their children: tall, athletic build, olive skin, etc.
Of course, facial features remain relatively unique, but all are more or less attractive. And it causes strange changes in sexual preferences.
“In a society of sexual equals, they start looking for other distinctions,” he said, pointing out that violet-colored eyes are becoming a rare trait that genetically engineered people find particularly attractive in the series.
But what about sexual relationships between genetically engineered people and ‘normal’ people? In the “Genetic pressure” series, many “normal” people want to have children with (or at least have sex with) genetically engineered people. But a minority of manipulated people are against breeding with “normal” people, and this leads to an ideology that engineers regard as racial ruler.
Regulatory Designer Babies
At the policy level, there are many open questions about how governments can legalize a world with designer babies. But this is not entirely a new field, given the Western dark history of eugenics experiments.
In the 20th century, the U.S. implemented several eugenics programs, including immigration restrictions based on genetic inferiority and forced sterilizations. In 1927, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that disturbing the mentally handicapped by force did not violate the Constitution. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes wrote: “… three generations of imbies are enough.”
After the Holocaust, eugenics programs became increasingly taboo and regulated in the US (although some states continued forced sterilizations in the 1970s). In recent years, some policymakers and scientists have expressed concern about the way in which gene-editing technologies could relive the nightmares of 20th-century eugenics.
Currently, the US does not prohibit explicit genetic editing of human germ lines at the federal level, but a combination of laws effectively makes it illegal to implant a genetically modified embryo. Part of the reason for this is that scientists are still unsure of the unintended consequences of new gene editing technologies.
But there are also concerns that these technologies could usher in a new era of eugenics. After all, the function of a designer baby industry, such as that in the “Genetic Pressure” series, would not necessarily be limited to the elimination of genetic diseases; it can also help increase the appearance of “desirable” traits.
If the industry does this, it would effectively indicate that the opposite of these characteristics are undesirable. As the International Bioethics Committee wrote, it would “jeopardize the inherent and thus equal dignity of all people and renew eugenics, disguised as the fulfillment of the desire for a better, improved life.”
“Genetic pressure Part I: baby steps” by Eugene Clark is now available.
