Design your baby!

*Phone Rings*

*Man picks up*

“Hello Sir, you called yesterday requesting for a customized skin color for your new baby?”

“Yes. Does the lab offer blue skin for a type XOR baby?”

“Um… we still have some blue genes in stock, but only of a lighter shade. It’s more baby blue.”

“That’s fine, I take some baby baby blue genes then”.

“Thank you sir, would you like stripes with that?”

For my humanities class today, we created 3 designer babies: one male, one female, and one sexless. Given the option of choosing from any and every trait to ‘gift’ to the baby, The students were given the option of choosing from any and every trait as ‘gifts’ to the baby. Naturally, the class gushed with creative suggestions. Besides the expected traits (like IQ 1000 and immortality), a few interesting propositions included ‘wall scaling abilities’, ‘hairless below the waist’, and ‘cultural sensitivity for the Armenian race’. In particular, the female students were quick to endow this super baby with ‘brad pitt’s looks’, ‘horny with a plus’, and ‘endurance 6 hours’. My professor responded to such a combination by stating that we were essentially ‘designing a super smart porn star’. What did he expect from a room of college students?

For all the messing around, our ‘design-a-baby’ exercise was actually predicated on some serious implications. Some examples include natural selection versus artificial selection (taken to the extreme), the battle between intrinsic and extrinsic value, and the social politics of genetic modification. After making our babies, the teacher asked, “What if each trait costs $100,000 and mom and dad had to take out loans to create the super toddler? After all, no company is going to pass up such an opportunity to make a few quick bucks. Wouldn’t the parents expect their super babies to make that money back later on–with interest? Would Democracy still exist in a society in which the rich can buy traits for their babies and the poor can’t? Wouldn’t Racism, or Genism, become rampant?” The future from a genes-eye view sure looks pretty dour. After all, as Syndrome from The Incredibles said, “When everyone is super, no one is.”

There is no doubt that biological engineering has a future market. However, as each new discovery takes us a step closer to dreams of greatness, we must return to a fundamental question: should we open this Pandora’s box? Besides unpredictable biological consequences, what social ramifications could result from opening the floodgates to genetic modification? Natural selection used to be the rule of the game; however, with artificial selection playing an increasingly greater role, the game is being taken into an entirely different level, one that directly challenges the essence of what it means to be “Homo Sapien”.

Life can get complicated.