Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
Procreation without sex, smarter babies and the right to choose the sexual orientation of your kids -- it's all good, says scientist Gregory Stock.
May 28, 2002 | Get those dystopic nightmares about genetically enhanced clone armies out of your sci-fi addled brain. Wipe the chilling phrase "designer baby" out of your short-term memory bank, and at least entertain the possibility that tinkering with our genes might make life longer, healthier, happier and better.
Gregory Stock, the director of the UCLA Program on Medicine, Science and Technology, considers genetic engineering to be just as natural for humans as other technologies we've created: just another part of our evolution as a species.
His new book, "Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future," responds to critics who have called for heavy regulation of biotechnology, among them political theorist Francis Fukuyama.
While skeptics worry that "playing God" can only lead to big trouble, Stock argues that trying to prevent beneficial technologies from being developed is much more pernicious.
Stock talked to Salon by phone about why he thinks genetic engineering will (and should) radically change life in the near future, including taking sex out of reproduction for many couples.
Suppose many parents start making choices about the kinds of children they have, based on their genes. Won't there be weird societal side effects? For instance, one critic wonders what would happen if millions of individual parents could choose whether their child would have a genetic predilection to be gay. Could that lead to the elimination of gay people from the population?
You can project all sorts of fears about the choices that people will make in the future using technologies that we really don't understand in any depth at this point. And of course, you can come up with all sorts of scary scenarios.
I look at that example and say: Actually, just the opposite is beginning to occur. Gay couples are beginning to have children, through the use of various assisted reproductive measures. And if offered a choice, they're probably going to choose to have gay children, right?
My view is that we don't have the wisdom to understand these technologies yet.
So what do you think the appropriate approach to them should be?
You wait to see how people actually use them. You keep an eye on them, and you don't outlaw them and drive them underground or overseas, which just has the effect of reserving them for the wealthy.
If you begin to find that parents are choosing to eliminate certain traits, then you decide whether that really is a problem that we need to address.
I think an excellent example is sex selection. I don't see who is injured by allowing a couple that has a very strong feeling about not wanting a child of one sex or the other to avoid having a child of that sex.
Sex selection is legal in the United States. There are ways of doing it now where you don't even have to discard an embryo. You can sort sperm. There's a slight difference between sperm that have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome. The one with the X chromosome is very, very slightly heavier. It has about 3 percent more DNA so you can stain it, and you can identify it.
So, you can sort those sperm and with a reasonably high likelihood of success -- it's not perfect -- you can create an embryo that is going to be a boy or a girl, through in vitro fertilization.
I don't see how it's that different when you adopt a child; you choose a boy or a girl. There's no outcry about that.
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