BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Monday, June 02, 2003
Designer babies or not? MIT
scientist Steven Pinker has a fascinating essay on so-called
designer
babies in the Ideas section
of yesterday's Globe. Pinker's bottom line: the prediction
that embryos will be genetically engineered so that children will be
smarter, taller, better-natured, or whatever is little more than
futuristic hype. Genetics, he writes, is a whole lot more complicated
than is popularly believed.
Yet Pinker places an oddly
artificial limit on his own predictive abilities when he writes: "Not
only is genetic enhancement not inevitable, it is not particularly
likely in our lifetimes." In our lifetimes? Is that what we're really
talking about? What about 100 years from now, or 500, or
1000?
Last year, University of California
scientist Gregory Stock offered a very different view in his book
Redesigning
Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic
Future. Stock concedes
the difficulty and, ultimately, the futility of direct manipulation
of genes -- although he doesn't rule it out entirely.
Instead, he focuses much of his
attention on a truly mind-bending concept: artificial chromosomes
that could hold genes that fight disease, enhance intelligence, and
the like. Such an approach, he argues, would be both easier and safer
than "germline" engineering, the term for manipulating genes so that
the changes will be passed on from generation to
generation.
By contrast, the Stockian approach
would limit any changes to the individual on which they are
made.
In one particularly fanciful
section, Stock writes:
Human conception is
shifting from chance to conscious design.... Imagine that a future
father gives his baby daughter chromosome 47, version 2.0, a
top-of-the-line model with a dozen therapeutic gene modules. By
the time she grows up and has a child of her own, she finds 2.0
downright primitive. Her three-gene anticancer module pales beside
the eight-gene cluster of the new version 5.9, which better
regulates gene expression, targets additional cancers, and has
fewer side effects. The anti-obesity module is pretty much the
same in both versions, but 5.9 features a whopping nineteen
antivirus modules instead of the four she has and an anti-aging
module that can maintain juvenile hormone levels for an extra
decade and retain immune function longer too. The daughter may be
too sensible to opt for some of the more experimental modules for
her son, but she cannot imagine giving him her antique chromosome
and forcing him to take the drugs she uses to compensate for its
shortcomings. As far as reverting to the pre-therapy, natural
state of 23 chromosomes pairs, well, only Luddites would do that
to their kids.
Is this where we're going? Is it a
good idea? Who knows? But I do know this: although I would certainly
not presume to argue with Professor Pinker, the changes that may lie
ahead in generations to come are bound to be far more formidable than
anything we can imagine happening "in our lifetimes."
posted at 7:45 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
