{"id":12230,"date":"2013-12-05T08:58:23","date_gmt":"2013-12-05T08:58:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=12230"},"modified":"2013-12-05T08:59:51","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T08:59:51","slug":"custom-made-offspring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=12230","title":{"rendered":"Custom made offspring"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"designerbabies\"<\/a>People already choose to custom-make their offspring. At the most basic biological, or even subconscious level, we choose our mates based on who will serve up the strongest\/cutest\/smartest kid. Parents that go the in-vitro route can do so at an even higher degree by shopping egg donors or sperm banks for preferred personality or physical characteristics. There are even some nutty sites peddling superior offspring via “Nobel Prize” or “celebrity” sperm.<\/p>\n

Now with each new scientific breakthrough or technological innovation we’re getting further from “natural” selection and closer to commercial eugenics, and a frightening future of humanity in which Gattaca is science fiction no more. The latest advancement comes from the UK, where researchers from the Royal Veterinary College have successfully engineered “designer sperm” that can be passed down to future generations.<\/p>\n

Researchers generated transgenic animals by altering the genes in the sperm of mice and inserting the custom genes into an embryo. The baby mice were born with the new genetic material in tact, and it was passed on through three generations. The study was published last week in the FASEB journal.<\/p>\n

This idea of gene therapy\u2014manipulating DNA as a medical treatment\u2014has long held the promise of preventing inherited disease, and researchers say the new sperm-centric approach, if it works in humans, could be a breakthrough for the health industry.<\/p>\n

“Transgenic technology is a most important tool for researching all kinds of disease in humans and animals,\u201d said study author Anil Chandrashekran. \u201cFor years we have chased effective gene therapies and have hit numbers speed bumps and dead ends. If we are able to alter sperm to improve the health of future generations, it would completely change our notions of ‘preventative medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n

True enough, but it would also be the equivalent of a gateway drug to a whole new level of customizing humans. At this point, the path toward designer babies is tangled up in a \u201cnew genetics\u201d infatuation with analyzing and screening DNA. The same modern methods that make it possible to spot genetic risks and prevent disease can also be used for more cosmetic electives. Case in point: PGD (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis) tests embryos for genetic medical conditions and won’t implant them in the womb if they\u2019re found to carry a disease gene. But it also can\u2014and has\u2014be used to select a baby’s gender, and hair and eye color.<\/p>\n

That’s done by testing a bunch of embryos and implanting the one you like best. Going in and customizing sperm DNA is a somewhat different beast. After all, there’s a difference between exercising some control over how a baby turns out by selecting the mom and dad\u2014be it in a petri dish or in the bedroom\u2014and engineering a future human by messing with the cells themselves.<\/p>\n

Like it or not, the latter is inevitable. A new and potentially revolutionary gene-editing technique using CRISPR genes\u2014Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats\u2014has exploded in popularity over the last year, and is now raising millions from the VC world. It’s a form of ultra-precise editing or \u201cgenetic surgery\u201d to remove harmful mutated genes and splice in healthy DNA. Again, it’s marked for disease prevention, but what’s to stop it from opening the genetic enhancement Pandora’s Box? First illness, then “negative” traits like allergies or baldness, then eventually folks are writing lists of desired traits for their dream child and handing them over the to doc.<\/p>\n

A recent patent filed by the currently embattled genetic testing company 23andMe shows the firm slipping down this very slope. The patent describes a method for what’s essentially genetic shopping: Couples stipulate the characteristics they’re looking for\u2014there are actual checkboxes\u2014and the system computes which matches of sperm and egg from a marketplace of donors would produce the desired outcome.<\/p>\n

In more ways than one we’re creeping toward a future where humanity’s engineered at the genetic level\u2014but how far will it go? There’s a common argument that just because the technology for so-called designer babies exists doesn’t mean we\u2019ll abuse it. But that doesn’t seem realistic to me. How many people, if given the option of imbuing their progeny with a leg up on society right out the gate, would turn it down? – motherboard.vice.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People already choose to custom-make their offspring. At the most basic biological, or even subconscious level, we choose our mates based on who will serve up the strongest\/cutest\/smartest kid. Parents that go the in-vitro route can do so at an even higher degree by shopping egg donors or sperm banks for preferred personality or physical … Continue reading “Custom made offspring”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12231,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[492],"tags":[7752,7751,7753,7748,7750,7749],"class_list":["post-12230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-commercial-eugenics","tag-designer-babies","tag-designer-sperm","tag-egg-donors","tag-in-vitro","tag-sperm-banks"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/designerbabies.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12230"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12233,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12230\/revisions\/12233"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}