March 4, 2009

  • Make Way for Designer Babies

    Want a baby with brown hair and green eyes? No problem.

    Dr. Jeff Steinberg says his Fertility Institutes, based in Manhattan and Los Angeles, already let parents choose a baby's gender and that within six months he'll use pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to customize hair and eye color. [1]

    This fertility clinic is also offering a new service that would allow couples to choose their baby's physical traits, including eye and hair color.

    Trait-selection will be based on a technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD. The process has long been used for medical purposes, but never for cosmetic purposes. Steinberg expects the first "trait selection" baby to be born next year. The cost for the process will be about US$18,000. [3]

    However, this idea of a Build-A-Bear style baby was slammed Monday by bioethicists and right-to-life groups - and Pope Benedict has warned against it for years. [2]

    Reference:
    [1] RONI CARYN RABIN Customized Embryos, Struggling Hospitals and Questions on Health Reform nytimes.com March 3, 2009.
    [2] Gina Salamone Custom-made babies delivered: Fertility clinic doctor's design-a-kid offer creates uproar nydailynews.com March 3, 2009.
    [3] PhilipSherwell Fertility clinic offers US designer babies The Standard March 3, 2009.

Comments (2)

  • Hm. While I have no moral stance against trait selection, I do see concerns:

    1. Parents should have limited control over a child's life, if nothing else because their offspring won't be children forever.

    2. It's a relatively recent development, this messing with genetics thing... I confess that I don't know much about genetics, but I worry that by moving around the building blocks of a human's makeup, they might make mistakes. Like when you add new code to a computer program and accidently cause a glitch.

  • @ModernBunny - I agree with you. This technique should be mainly for treatment of a disease or for a preventive measure of certain diseases.

    I remember one episode at Star Trek, Voyager, talks about alteration of the DNA sequence of an embryo to adjust the feature of the corresponding the feature when the embryo grew into an adult. The embryo is a hybrid between a human and a Klingon. This technique comes out much earlier than I thought. By the way, thanks for your comment.

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