A Brave New World

I don't know how many of you are familiar with Huxley's A Brave New World but I read an article today that reminded me of it. If you saw Gattica then you'll also know where this is going...

Where do we cross the line when we're dealing with eugenics?

eu‧gen‧ics: The study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding.

Eugenics was an idea spawned by the Social Darwinists of the late-19th century, who felt that the social order of man was a product of natural selection: if you were poor you had been selected to be poor due to the genes and ambitions of your ancestors. So why not help natural selection along? Eugenics came to a crescendo under the Nazis: who actually attempted to implement it through selective breeding and extermination.

So, suffice it to say, eugenics got a bad rap in the 20th century.

But there is a more subtle form of eugenics that has wormed its way back into the picture through artificial fertilization and genotyping.

Fertility clinics are making inroads at screening for diseases. You can look at a dish full of viable embryos and tell a parent, "This one is more likely to develop cancer," or "this one has Down Syndrome"... and then they can only implant those embryos predisposed to have healthier lives. We're not talking manipulating genes here or designing a child. We're just talking about increasing the odds of having healthy children.

But it's only a matter of time before we will be able to map out the human genome to the point that we can choose what baby we want to have: a boy or a girl, brown eyes or blue, athletic or brainy... And we don't have any policies in place against that.

An example. The article mentions a woman who has three children--two boys and a girl--and would like another daughter. Most fertility clinics don't have a policy against nonmedical sex selection and (in fact) of the clinics that offer "preimplantation genetic diagnosis" (PGD), 42% have done it. Like the author says: "It's a slippery slope." Do I think it's unethical to choose your baby's sex? No. Do I think it's unethical to screen your baby for potential diseases? No. But that's the problem: Any one of these types of questions, within reason, is difficult to say no to.

It's when you put them all together that it becomes painfully obvious that these decisions could have a large impact on the social order. Eugenics could create a society where social order is not built on a monetary scale but on a biological one: where the wealthy are even more firmly entrenched because they'll be the only ones who will be able to afford the treatment.