Designer babies.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: NATIONAL - Genetic research on human embryos - Report

Science may soon allow parents to assemble a more perfect baby. Is that a good idea?

What if parents could select the traits their children will be endowed with, picking from a catalog of options like "tall," "high IQ," "athletic," or "musical"?

Scientists say that day may not be far off, and the possibility is raising a host of ethical questions about whether and how much we should tamper with the way humans reproduce.

The Food and Drug Administration is considering its first request to approve a fertility procedure that combines genetic material from three different people; the procedure would be used to create a baby free from birth defects. Increasingly sophisticated genetic testing already allows doctors to screen embryos for defects, but this would be the first procedure in which genes are altered to remove unwanted conditions.

"Every time we get a little closer to genetic tinkering to promote health--that's exciting and scary," says Dr. Alan Copperman, director of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. "People are afraid it will turn into a dystopian brave new world."

There's good reason to be excited about scientific advances in genetics: Diseases that result from genetic defects--including cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, and hemophilia--affect 12 million people in the United States alone. Scientists have already isolated the defective genes that cause many of these disorders, so the idea of replacing them with healthy genes holds out the possibility that some horrible diseases could become a thing of the past.

"The most exciting part, scientifically," Copperman says, "is to be able to prevent or fix an error in the genetic machinery."

Complex Traits

But others are sounding alarm bells. Jeremy Gruber, president of the Council for Responsible Genetics, a bioethics advocacy group, says we need to be extra cautious about any procedure that changes an embryo's genes. He fears such procedures could unintentionally cause new, unforeseen genetic abnormalities or accidentally eliminate positive traits.

"You are conducting an activity that permanently alters the genome of the individual," he says. "If you get it wrong, you're not only getting it wrong for that individual; it becomes inheritable. That's why it's so crucial to make sure it's safe before it's allowed to move forward."

Some countries--including Canada, Australia, France, and Denmark--have passed laws prohibiting scientists...