Design-a-kid: does humanity need an upgrade?

Christian Century, May 17, 2003 by Bill McKibben

PEOPLE WILL BE inclined to give their children those skills and traits that align with their own temperaments and lifestyles," writes Gregory Stock, an apostle of human genetic engineering who heads the program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA. "A devout individual may want his child to be even more religious and resistant to temptation."

Well, that constitutes a vision. Indeed it constitutes a likely vision. Just as we now routinely shuffle the genes of plants and animals to produce a variety of outcomes (smarter, bigger, leaner), so we stand on the very edge of attempting the same thing with human beings. Plenty of scientists anticipate attempts in the near future at "germ-line engineering" of human embryos in an attempt to add or subtract particular traits. James Watson, the eminence grise of gene work whose discovery of the double helix 50 years ago we are celebrating this spring, has called on his fellow researchers to show some "guts" and "try germ-line therapy without knowing if it's going to work." He has proposed that they try to prevent "ugly babies" and "stupid people" and to reduce the odds that anyone will be shy or a "cold fish." "If we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we do it?" he asked recently.

Confronted with new technologies, we tend to take refuge in old frameworks. Hence, when we consider "designer babies," we're most likely to start talking about "playing God," or try to connect the issue to the politics of abortion and reproductive choice, or decide that we should give scientists free rein in the hope that they might remedy some illness or another. But sometimes the issues raised by novel technologies are so fresh that they resist being herded into the old corrals. Rifles, for instance, were on some level a deadly extension of bows and arrows, and you could think about them in some of the same ways. But nuclear weapons weren't an extension of guns; they raised entirely new questions. Questions about the end of the world, for instance. They refused to fit neatly into the older categories of "just war" thinking; we still struggle to make some kind of sense of them.

So it is with these new techniques. They raise entirely new questions about human beings, ones that we've never faced before. Most basically, they force us to ask if human life will have any meaning once they have come into common use. What I mean is, imagine you are the child whose parents have engineered you for piety and devotion, as Stock proposes. (Do not allow yourself the out of believing such a thing is necessarily impossible. We've pinpointed those regions of the brain that "light up" in moments of prayer and meditation; we've changed the sociability patterns of many animals. It is by no means uncertain that, sooner not later, we'll know how to tweak the stretches of the genome that produce the proteins that make us tend toward devotion.) Now, you live your life of obedient faith--but obedient to what? To the proteins coursing through your cortex? What possible meaning would such faith have? A kind of literal brainwashing would have taken place, and the free will that makes you real would have been, if not eliminated, then perhaps overpowered.

And the same with a thousand other traits. Stock imagines musical parents turning their children into prodigies, and a parent who "feels so good about his optimism and energy that he may want more of it for his child." Others have isolated stretches of DNA that seem connected to thrill-seeking, to aggressiveness, to happiness. The latter seems connected to a "dopamine D4 receptor, which contains a hypervariable coding in its third exon." An Israeli research group found that certain variations of the gene made people much more likely to affirm such statements as "I bubble with happiness" and "I am a cheerful optimist."

Dean Hamer, the chief of gene structure and regulation at the National Cancer Institute's Laboratory of Biochemistry, wrote recently in Scientific American about his vision of a not-too-distant future in which an imaginary couple, Syd and Kayla, got to tweak the emotional makeup of their fetus. "They pondered the choices before them, which ranged from the altruism level of Mother Teresa to the most cutthroat CEO. In the end, they chose a level midway between, hoping for the perfect mix of benevolence and competitive edge.... Syd and Kayla, however, did not want to set their child's happiness rheostat too high. They wanted her to be able to feel real emotions. If there was a death, they wanted her to mourn the loss. If there was a birth, she should rejoice."

In one sense, of course, this is no different from what parents already do--try to mold their children into their vision of the good or successful person. But the story of growing up is at the moment mostly the story of rebelling against that vision, or taking parts of it and molding them with your own aspirations. In the future, in the words of Princeton geneticist Lee Silver, "Parents can gain complete control over their destiny, with the ability to guide and enhance the characteristics of their children, and their children's children as well." It's hard to rebel against the proteins pumping forever from your cells. In some ways it's as if your parents drugged you from birth. Some do that now--and for some children it's a blessing. But part of the blessing of Prozac is that you can stop taking it.