A U.S. biomedical researcher believes most babies will be made in the lab instead of the bedroom within the next two to three decades -- a bold prediction that could halt genetic predisposition to certain diseases and introduce a new plane of biological inequality.
Hank Greely, the director of Stanford Law School鈥檚 Center for Law and the Biosciences, told attendees at the Aspen Ideas Festival earlier this week that replacing sex as the primary means of baby-making will save women from undergoing fertility treatments, reduce health care costs, and give non-traditional families more avenues to have children.
Greely predicts most prospective parents will soon opt to choose from a range of embryos created by taking female skin samples and using stem cells to create eggs, which are then fertilized with sperm.
The range of embryos would be audited for genetically transmitted diseases such as Huntington鈥檚, and perhaps even DNA indicators for breast cancer and Alzheimer鈥檚. The process could also allow for the selection of cosmetic features, like hair and eye colour, and even complex traits such as intelligence.
Some of this can already take place through costly pre-implantation genetic diagnostics and in vitro fertilization. But Greely imagines, in the future, such selection will become commonplace as the technology becomes cheaper and perhaps even subsidized due to the offset in other medical costs.
University of Toronto bioethicist Kerry Bowman warns that widespread adoption of multiple embryo selection would be 鈥渜uite a deviation鈥� from the status-quo, and would mark a shift that makes longstanding fears about genetic predetermination a reality.
鈥淚t could lead to inequality. Who could afford such a technique?鈥� he asked 麻豆传媒 Channel on Thursday. 鈥淲hen we have some people that are selected to the point of almost being enhanced, we鈥檝e got more inequality added on top of that.鈥�
Beyond the issue of cost and the ethical taboo of so-called 鈥渄esigner babies,鈥� Bowman points to the moral implications of creating additional embryos with the knowledge that some will be discarded.
鈥淲hat are you going to do with them? He (Greely) seems to be talking about a very large amount of embryos. That is one concern,鈥� Bowman said.
With that in mind, however, he expects many people will embrace the rise of scientific intervention in human reproduction for the mere possibility of diminishing the risk of disease.
鈥淚f you could prevent a child being born into a life of suffering, most people would be very supportive of that,鈥� Bowman said. 鈥淗istorically, we鈥檝e thrown the dice.鈥�
