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You may not know it, but gender selection based on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) has been available to paying couples since at least 2001. One of the world leaders in providing this service is the Fertility Institutes, with branches in Los Angeles, New York, and Guadalajara in Mexico. According to their website, they’ve had over 3,800 cases of gender selection with a 100% success rate. Besides offering gender selection, they screen embryos for genetic defects such as breast cancer, cystic fibrosis, and over 70 other diseases. The Institutes are directed by Dr. Jeff Steinberg, a pioneer of IVF (in vitro fertilization) in the 1970s, and a successful scientist-businessman today.

In early February, the Fertility Institutes created enormous controversy by announcing that they planned to offer PGD services allowing for the selection of eye and hair color for children. Steinberg was quoted by the BBC as saying, “I would not say this is a dangerous road. It’s an uncharted road.” As a scientist experienced in PGD/IVF techniques, Steinberg was aware that the technology to select physical traits in humans has been available for years, but no one would touch it. “It’s time for everyone to pull their heads out of the sand,” Steinberg said. Transhumanists and other fans of procreative freedom were excited by the news.

The backlash was widespread. Quoted in the New York Daily News on February 23, the Pope himself condemned the “obsessive search for the perfect child.” The pontiff complained, “A new mentality is creeping in that tends to justify a different consideration of life and personal dignity.” The roman Catholic Church objects to all applications of PGD because they invariably involve the destruction of blastocysts.

On his blog Secondhand Smoke, conservative bioethicist Wesley J. Smith, who has co-authored four books with Ralph Nader, wrote, “We are constantly told that the right of a woman to reproduce is absolute, including getting pregnant, aborting if the pregnancy is ever unwanted, and now, genetically engineering progeny to order. But no ‘right’ is absolute. The time has long since passed to put some regulatory controls over the wild, wild west of IVF.”

On February 28, Steinberg continued to defend his approach by telling the Sunday Telegraph, “I understand the trepidation and concerns, but we cannot escape the fact that science is moving forward. If I have to get smacked around by people who think it is inappropriate, then I’m willing to live with that.”

Then, all of a sudden, on March 2, Steinberg capitulated to widespread criticism. A press release on the Fertility Institutes web site read, “In response to feedback received related to our plans to introduce preimplantation genetic prediction of eye pigmentation, an internal, self regulatory decision has been made to proceed no further with this project.” Gattaca was averted.

The public debate about selecting traits like eye and hair color for newborns is a continuation of a debate that has gone on for at least two decades – the debate about PGD-based gender selection, a technique that is easier than trait selection and has already been done thousands of times. Back in 1990, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis of any type was banned in Germany by the Embryo Protection Act. In 2003, the UK banned using PGD for gender selection, following a year-long public consultation in which about 80% of those polled were against the procedure. India and China have banned the procedure, despite the widespread practice of infanticide when babies of an undesired gender, usually female, are born to disappointed parents. Gender selection still occurs, albeit violently.

More recently, a January 2009 study by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center found that an overwhelming 75% of parents would be in favor of trait selection using PGD – as long as that trait is the absence of mental retardation. A further 54% would screen their embryos for deafness, 56% for blindness, 52% for a propensity to heart disease, and 51% for a propensity to cancer. Only 10% would be willing to select embryos for better athletic ability, and 12.6% would select for greater intelligence. 52.2% of respondents said that there were no conditions for which genetic testing should never be offered, indicating widespread support for PGD – as long as it’s for averting disease and not engineering human enhancement.

Trait selection using PGD is too new – and unproven – for there to be regulatory laws in most developed countries. But many fighters in the battle for or against PGD for trait selection and genetic disease screening believe that today is the decision point that will set the precedent for future regulation (or lack thereof) in the area. On May 21, 2008, the US Congress passed the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act. According to the statement of Administration Policy associated with the Act, it “prohibit[s] group health plans and health insurers from denying coverage to a healthy individual or charging that person higher premiums based solely on a genetic predisposition to developing a disease in the future. The legislation also would bar employers from using individuals’ genetic information when making hiring, firing, job placement, or promotion decisions. The Administration appreciates that the House bill clarifies that the bill’s protections cover unborn children.”

In the oft-cited movie Gattaca, a non-genetically-selected man with a heart problem in a trait-selected world must hide his status through the course of his ambition to become an astronaut. Theoretically, the 2008 law would make this type of discrimination illegal, at least in the United States. But what about Gattaca? The film was invoked so frequently in negative responses to the Fertility Institutes’ announcement that it is hard to find a comments thread on the topic that doesn’t mention it. In his 2004 book Citizen Cyborg, Dr. James Hughes, a transhumanist bioethicist and director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, pointed out a few quibbles with the movie:

1. Astronaut-training programs are entirely justified in attempting to screen out people with heart problems for safety reasons;
    
2. In the United States, people are already discriminated against by insurance companies on the basis of their propensities to disease despite the fact that genetic enhancement is not yet available;
    
3. Rather than banning genetic testing or genetic enhancement, society needs genetic information privacy laws that allow justified forms of genetic testing and data aggregation, but forbid those that are judged to result in genetic discrimination (such as the previously mentioned U.S. Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act). Citizens should then be able to make a complaint to the appropriate authority if they believe they have been discriminated against because of their genotype.

Those on the other side of the divide are numerous. At a 2008 meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, William Kearns, a leading medical geneticist, when prompted about trait selection, said “I’m totally against this. My goal is to screen embryos to help couples have healthy babies free of genetic diseases. Traits are not diseases.” Mark Hughes, the head of the Genesis Genetics Institute in Detroit, has called the practice “ridiculous and irresponsible”. More bluntly, George Annas, a bioethicist with Boston University, has said “modern genetics is eugenics”, while on a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.

The falling costs of gene sequencing is enabling PGD trait selection and lowering the barrier to entry. In the last few years, the cost of sequencing a base pair has fallen so low that even the optimists have been surprised. The first human genome that was sequenced, by the federally financed Human Genome Project in 2003, cost a few hundred million dollars. In 2007, sequencing James Watson’s genome cost about $2 million. In March 2008, Applied Biosystems, based in California, sequenced a genome in two weeks for $50,000. In October 2008, Complete Genomics, another California-based company and a veritable who’s who of genomics expertise, announced that it would be offering $5,000 genomes in mid-2009, with the goal of sequencing 1,000 genomes by the end of the year. Some observers, such as George Church, a professor of genetics and director of the center for computational genetics at Harvard Medical School, predict a $1,000 genome by the end of this year.

The requisite technologies for trait selection are on the way, but the battle lines have not yet been entirely drawn. Prompted by a Wall Street Journal article on the Fertility Institutes and trait selection, Kathryn Hinsch of the Women’s Bioethics Project argued that thinking about the issue carefully is important, and refrained from taking a hard stance on either side. She said that trait selection should be considered because, “1) It’s a hive of ethical issues, 2) The technology isn’t here yet, 3) We all have a stake in the issue, and 4) Questions raised go beyond designer babies.” According to Hinsch, the key questions that need to be addressed are: “Should we ban it? Should we regulate the technology to allow only certain applications? Should we promote the widespread use of this technology?”

The advocates of trait selection using PGD, at least in the Western world, appear to be small in number. But as the NYU Langone Medical Center survey showed, there are at least a few. On his blog sentient Developments, George Dvorsky, a prominent transhumanist bioethicist, pointed out that “some demand is still demand”. Commenting on the survey, Dvorsky said, “An anti-enhancement bias is most certainly embedded in our society. It’s very likely that many of the respondents were answering the survey in accordance to their social conditioning and what they thought was expected of them from an ‘ethical’ perspective.” Supporting the idea of trait selection, Dvorsky wrote, “What we’re talking about here is endowing our children with all the tools we can give them so that they may live an enriched, open-ended and fulfilling life. By denying them these benefits we are closing doors and potentially reducing the quality of their lives.” Another advocate of cautious trait selection is Ramez Naam, author of the 2005 book More Than Human. In a chapter on genetic engineering, he writes, “A regulatory regime consistent with family choice would focus on safety, education, and equality rather than prohibition”. Looking past the immediate future, Naam also writes, “ultimately, whatever choices we make for our children will be subject to change, at their choice, when they reach adulthood. In the coming years, pharmaceuticals, adult gene therapy, and the integration of computers into the brain will give people far more control over their own minds and bodies than we enjoy today.”

In a March 9, 2009 WIRED online interview, James Hughes registered support for trait selection, and also railed against the “designer baby” terminology altogether. Responding to the future of trait selection, he said, “It’s inevitable, in the broad context of freedom and choice. And the term ‘designer babies’ is an insult to parents, because it basically says parents don’t have their kids’ best interests at heart.” He said, “If I’ve got a dozen embryos I could implant, and the ones I want to implant are the green-eyed ones, or the blond-haired ones, that’s an extension of choices we think are perfectly acceptable — and restricting them a violation of our procreative autonomy.”

PGD and other reproductive technologies are commonly rejected as “unnatural”. The transhumanists and technoprogressive response is summarized well in the Transhumanist FAQ, which says, “In many particular cases, of course, there are sound practical reasons for relying on “natural” processes. The point is that we cannot decide whether something is good or bad simply by asking whether it is natural or not. Some natural things are bad, such as starvation, polio, and being eaten alive by intestinal parasites. Some artificial things are bad, such as DDTpoisoning, car accidents, and nuclear war.”

The legal and ethical future of trait selection based on PGD is still unknown. What is known is that parents will always want the best for their children. When push comes to shove, they will probably take advantage of whatever technologies are available that will give them the best lives possible.

Michael Anissimov is a writer and futurist in San Francisco. He writes a blog, Accelerating Future, on artificial intelligence, transhumanism, extinction risk, and other areas.