Got up and going today earlier than usual. Happy Wife said, “I have to get to breast conference this morning.” Naturally, I thought, “Honey, you stay in bed, I’ll go in your stead.” nyuk nyuk. Didn’t say it out loud, the humor having long since run dry from overuse.
And so here I sit, in the kitchen, tapping away, awaiting inspiration. It’s dark outside and astronomers I’m told know why. Stinkin’ warm too — feels like an early day in May. Certain people claim they know why this is, too.
I was arguing on the internet again, this time about something I think know something about, what a rarity, right! Often I argue about things I know less about and I make mistakes but they say you aren’t learning unless you make mistakes so I’m not one to shy away from an exchange only because I’m less than optimally armed. Knowing I was intellectually well-armed this time around doesn’t mean learning was absent, it was just asymmetrical — I found myself in the role of teacher, or at least it felt that way to me.
The “discussion” was about the future, and revolved around a blogger’s contention that before too much longer, by extending a known current technology to guide a yet-to-be-demonstrated reproductive technology, parents of the future would be able to “pick ‘n choose” specific heritable traits they themselves express which they want their child to express — for example, say the wife is musically gifted and the husband is a good writer of fiction. Of course, like all people, our would-be parents have many other “traits” too — for the sake of example let’s say dad has a weak heart and mom suffers from a mild form of prospagnosia, she has some difficulty recognizing faces. Now, our would-be parents desperately want a little girl, and they want her to grow up to be a good musician like mom with an ear for good prose like dad, but at the same time, of course, they don’t want to endow the child any cardiac or neurological deficits.
Okay, so that’s the goal.
Now, to achieve this, the blogger described an approach he read about in a science fiction book. His idea was that if you have enough information of the kind that comes from modern-day genetic screens, a method that detects changes (“variants”) in a person’s genome that significantly associate with some trait, say musical ability in our example, why then we could use a future reproductive technology (see below) to make sure that good genetic variants make their way it into the child’s genome, and at the same time avoid any known bad variants from getting in, the ones that associate with bad traits, like a bad heart or face blindness. In this way, the blogger argued, the “Designer Child” grows up predisposed to becoming an harmonic flutist, say, and/or the next T.C. Boyle, possibly, with a sturdy heart and an un-compromised faculty for recognizing friends and family.
Now to the future reproductive technology, this is the hard part so stay with me here, I’ll be brief. The technology would involve using the list of genetic variants screened for above, those that are significant for both good and bad traits, and use them to guide a selective screen of DNA in dad’s sperm and mom’s eggs, depending on who has which good/bad trait. The idea being to isolate into one sperm and one egg as many good DNA variants as possible and as few bad DNA variants as possible. Then take that one sperm and egg, let them fertilize, implant the zygote in mom’s uterus (I suppose), stand back and let nature take it from there leaving our would-be parents ample time to prepare for the baby shower.
What’s the problem you ask? Here are the problems. Note especially comments signed by yours truly (“RKN”).
Enjoy your day!