Imagine that your grandchildren can pick exactly how their babies will look, think, and act. Your family curse of breast cancer or cystic fibrosis or early heart attack—not to mention dyslexia, fat thighs, shyness, or male-pattern baldness—will be vanquished in a single stroke. Your great-grandchildren will be as lean, literate, loquacious, and long-lived as their parents want them to be. How does that grab you?
If you think that sounds good, you have plenty of company. More than 40 percent of Americans, according to a March of Dimes survey, think it would be okay to use gene therapy to make their children either more attractive or more intelligent than they were otherwise destined to be. A Gallup poll of British parents found many of them also willing to consider such genetic enhancement, and for some surprising and rather disconcerting reasons: 18 percent to change a child’s aggression level or remove a predisposition to alcoholism, 10 percent to keep a child from becoming homosexual, and 5 percent to make a child more physically attractive.
At the moment, this genetic equivalent of nip-and-tuck cosmetic surgery exists only in the imagination. After nearly a decade of experimentally transferring genes into human beings with serious disease, the practitioners of gene therapy have yet to cure a single person. Moreover, it is still far from certain that the behavioral traits described above will ever be shown to be genetically caused. Still, the controversy surrounding the appearance of a cloned sheep in 1997 highlights how fast the field of genetic engineering can move, and how far we are from a public consensus on how such technology should be used. Gene transfer techniques, once perfected, could treat more than just genetic diseases. They could also offer the ultimate form of preventive medicine—or the ultimate form of intrusive, Brave New World eugenics, depending on your point of view.
Few people question the value of correcting a gene for sickle-cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, or, should the relevant genes be found, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, or cancer. Once the technology is perfected, people will probably also not question making that correction at the earliest embryonic stage, or, more likely, even before conception, to be certain that the healthy gene will find its way into every cell in the body as the baby develops.
But altering genes for the sake of appearance or personality is something else again. Is it fair for parents to make such decisions on behalf of their unborn children? If so, which genes should they be allowed to manipulate? Are the risks of genetic manipulation worth taking just to ensure that a child will have curly hair, blue eyes, tall stature, or a slim physique? What about inserting new genes for high iq? For heterosexuality? For conformity? For optimism? For skin color? Should gene therapy become the vehicle of choice for creating a whole new class of genetically engineered children, custom-made to carry the good versions of genes that are thought to influence the way we look or behave?
