• Question: will designer babies be a thing of the future

    Asked by anon-10710 to Ed, Katie, Sam, Steve, Vera on 13 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Katie Marriott

      Katie Marriott answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I think this is really not too far in the distant future. There are a lot of moral and ethical issues that come into the “designer baby” area – for example, should we play God and decide what colour our children’s eyes should be?

      I do not know a lot about this area but I know some couples have a “designer” baby if a previous child has a desease that can be cured by a relative, for example if bone marrow is required and neither of the parents are match that is required.

      I think it is a shame that people feel the need to make sure their children look a certain way. Surely that is part of the excitement about having a baby!

    • Photo: Sam Tazzyman

      Sam Tazzyman answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I agree that it probably isn’t too far away, and that a lot of moral and ethical issues need to be thought through. Many peoplewould say it is ok to “design” a baby to not have a genetic disease, but how far is it moral to use the technology? What if people want a girl, or a boy? Would that be ok to “design”? What about hair colour and eye colour? There are lots of things that need to be discussed by society in general.

      I personally feel that if it is a case of a life-threatening or -altering disease then perhaps using genetic technology is ok, but not for superficial things. But that’s just my opinion – being a scientist does not mean my opinion is worth any more than anyone else’s on subject like this. These are things that society has to decide as a whole through debate.

    • Photo: Ed Morrison

      Ed Morrison answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      This is a very interesting but controversial area. But I would argue that designer babies are here already. As soon as children are born, and even before, we try to mould them in a certain way – teach them how to behave, change how to look (e.g. not feeding them too much so they become fat), trying to turn them into geniuses by playing Mozart to them. These are all ways of trying to shape or design them. Changing genes is another way but is it fundamentally any different? One important way in which it is is that changing someone’s genes means they will be passed on to the next generation.

      I think the most important thing is that we should avoid harming children by designing them.

    • Photo: Steven Daly

      Steven Daly answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      We probably are almost at the level of technology to start doing some basic things in terms of ‘designing’ babies. However, just what level you could take this designing too is not very clear. Although true in some cases, in general it is not the case that you have one gene for one trait. There is an interaction between different genes, and it is not always obvious what this interaction is going to be, and this will make it very difficult to control everything.

      I think that being able to choose, say, eye colour may happen quite soon, especially for IVF babies, but for other things like height, intelligence, ear size, it could be a lot longer.

    • Photo: Vera Weisbecker

      Vera Weisbecker answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I agree with Sam on a personal basis (as he points out, this is our opinion and not an expert advice) – it is definitely possible to design babies at least to some degree, but in my view this technology should only be used to avoid the suffering of children from a terrible genetic illness. You probably noticed how cagey we all are regarding this topic- there are a lot of people with very strong opinions on this issue!

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