Ethicist foresees choosing your baby from dozens of embryos
So you want to have a baby.
Would you like a dark-haired girl with a high risk of someday getting colon cancer, but a good chance of above-average music ability?
Or would you prefer a girl with a good prospect for high SAT scores and a good shot at being athletic, but who also is likely to run an above-average risk of bipolar disorder and lupus as an adult?
How about a boy with a good shot at having musical ability and dodging asthma, but who also would be predisposed to cataracts and type 2 diabetes?
Confused? You’re just getting started. There are dozens more choices for which of your embryos should be placed in the womb to become your child.
That’s the future a biomedical ethics expert envisions for 20 to 40 years from now—soon enough that today’s children may face it when they start their own families.
“The majority of babies of people who have good health coverage will be conceived this way,” predicts Henry Greely, a Stanford University law professor who works in bioethics.
You’ve probably read about concerns over “designer babies,” whose DNA is shaped by gene editing. Greely is focused on a different technology that has gotten much less attention: In a startling bit of biological alchemy, scientists have shown that in mice, they can turn ordinary cells into sperm and eggs.
It’s too soon to know if it could be done in people. But if it can, it could become a powerful infertility treatment, permitting genetic parenthood for people who can’t make their own sperm or eggs.
It also would mean that a woman who wants to get pregnant could produce dozens more eggs per attempt than with the current procedure of harvesting some from her ovaries.
And that means a lot of choices.
Here’s what Greely envisions: A man and woman walk into a fertility clinic. The man drops off some sperm. The woman leaves some skin cells, which are turned into eggs and fertilized with the man’s sperm.
Unlike in vitro fertilization today, which typically yields around eight eggs per try, the new method could result in 100 embryos.
The embryos’ complete library of DNA would be decoded and analyzed to reveal genetic predispositions, both for disease and personal traits. The man and woman would get dossiers on the embryos that pass minimum tests for suitability.
Out of, say, 80 suitable embryos, the couple would then choose one or two to implant.
The possibilities don’t stop there. The technology might also help open the door to samesex couples having children genetically related to both of them, though the additional twist of making eggs from men or sperm from women would be a huge biological challenge.
More worrisome is the socalled Brad Pitt scenario: We all shed a bit of sloughed-off DNA every day, like on the lip of a coffee cup. Such discarded material could be secretly snatched up to turn an unwitting celebrity into a genetic parent.
It is a long way in the future, but real life is already creeping toward it. Some scientists are trying to make human eggs and sperm in the lab. They are working with “iPS cells,” which are ordinary body cells that have been morphed into a malleable state.
Greely, who lays out his ideas in a book called “The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction,” calls his vision “easy PGD,” or prenatal genetic diagnosis.
Lori B. Andrews, a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, summed up her views in a review of Greely’s book.
“The idea of easy PGD,” she wrote, “should make us uneasy indeed.”
Still, even some who doubt the idea’s feasibility say Greely is right to raise the issue.
“It’s certainly something we have to take seriously and think through now,” said Marcy Darnovsky, who writes on the politics of human biotechnology as executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley, California. “This is not just a technical or science question.”