Hacker News Reader

Comment by whafro | Hacker News Reader

Maybe, but that seems to assume effectively no genetic material from the parents.

What if the design starts with the parents' DNA, but makes one change to prevent a disease? Seems like that parent wouldn't be adopting a genetic orphan, and would have the right to take the newborn home. What about two changes? 50? It's one of those "where do we draw the line?" issues.

View on HN

I think the natural dividing line is "is the baby the unmodified result of combining sperm and egg?" People already have the right to do that without additional government interference -- anything past that should arguably be regulated.

Where would somehow selecting one of the billions of sperm and one of the millions(?) of eggs for ideal genetic material and then allowing them to combine "naturally" fall?

That'd probably get you 60% of the way to full on designer babies anyway, unless you're going for a trait that's not at all in your gene pool.

That ship has basically sailed, since we already do sperm selection for in-vitro fertilization.

For the record, we already do this on a surprisingly regular basis in the developed world. It's called preimplantation genetic diagnostics and is a relatively cheap addition to regular IVF since companies like Counsyl and Qwest have sub-$1000 genetic tests for thousands of genetic factors. Gender selection is already easily done and some Jewish communities have had great success eliminating Tay-Sachs this way. It's "only" a matter of identifying the genes responsible for the characteristics you desire but you may never be able to select 100% of the traits you want if you're trying to select for many of them at the same time. It's not useful for top to bottom designer babies since the probabilities of getting the right mutations and chromosomal combinations is nearly infinitesimal.

I have yet to hear any loud controversy regarding PDG IVF so I think it's one of those situations where genetic engineering will slowly creep up on society and by the time we have a public debate about the ethics it'll be way too late.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com