Re: Will designer babies be the evolutionary future of mankind?

Well Kate, I am a Research Assistant Professor of Neurology and I would 
define a 'designer baby' as the concept of parents having the ability to 
choose the phenotype of their offspring.  Phenotype is defined as the 
appearance or other characteristics of an organism as a function of its 
genome and to an extent the interaction of its genome with the environment. 
 The question of if we will have designer babies in the future is difficult 
to answer because of the broad definition.  Through in vitro fertilization, 
parents already have the ability to determine the sex of their child and 
this fits a loose definition of 'designer baby'.  I suspect in the near 
future, parents who opt for in vitro fertilization will also be able to 
scan the embryos genome (perhaps at the four or eight cell stage) for 
potential genetic diseases and decide if they want to go ahead with 
implantation into the womb or, if a genetic aberration is detected, discard 
the embryo and start over.  Of course when most people think of designer 
babies, they think of the ability of the parents to pick their babies eye 
color, height, intelligence, and other such traits.  With the rapid 
progress of genetics research, it is not inconceivable that this could 
become a reality in the next century, but we have a long way to go.  While 
we have sequenced the human genome, we haven't deciphered it.  Finding and 
identifying all the individual genes, how their expression is regulated, 
and how different gene alleles result in different phenotypes are just a 
few of things that remains to be done, and this will probably take at least 
10 times longer to do this than it took to sequence the genome.
   While technologically we may be able to have fully designed babies in 
the future, the ethics of should we do it, is and will remain hotly 
debated.  My guess is that most governments will curtail research that 
directly pertains to making designer babies, much like they have made 
moratoriums on human cloning.  But this will do little other than delay 
what is probably inevitable.  We will continue to study the genome and how 
genes are regulated and what they do and how they affect an individual 
because that research has implications for a variety of issues that have 
nothing to do with designing babies; nevertheless, that knowledge will be 
able to be used to do just that. 
  In my opinion, the idea of designing babies will be met with disapproval 
by most people and considered ethically wrong, for a time.  However, 
eventually, more and more people will opt for some type of control over 
their baby's phenotype and this social more will lessen.  In the future, at 
least some baby designing is inevitable.